There was some ground planted with cabbages and artichokes, some place where maize would be planted later in the season, but the chief of the land was orchard; and in the midst of it stood a long, low whitewashed house, with pink shutters and a tiled roof.
'Now look!' she said, with a little pride in her voice as she stretched her hand out to the northward view.
Everywhere far below them, stretching out to infinite indefinite horizons, was the blue sea studded with various sails; and the beautiful coast stretched likewise away into endless realms of sparkling light; the range of the mountains rose blue and snow-crowned behind that fairy shore; and this enchanted paradise was always there to call men's thoughts to nature, and they in it only thought of the hell of the punters, the caress of the cocotte, the shining gold rolling in under the croupier's rake!
Familiar as he was with this sea and land, he could not restrain an exclamation of wondering admiration.
'No wonder you have become the beautiful thing you are, looking on all that beauty from your birth!' he said in an impulse of frank admiration, mingled with his habitual language of flattery.
The girl laughed.
'Do you think I am beautiful? Everybody always says that. But grandfather grumbles; he says it is the devil's gift. Myself, I do not know; the flowers are beautiful, but I do not think that human beings are so.'
'And you have grown up like a flower——'
'How did you know about me?' she interrupted him. 'Did Monsignor Melville speak so much of me? He was with my uncle in his last illness, you know, and whenever he is on this coast he comes to us. You like the view?' she continued with satisfaction and a sense of possession of it. 'Yes; it is good to see, is it not? But I am happier when I am down on the shore.'
'Indeed! Why?'
'Because there one only wants to swim, and here one wants to fly. Now, one does swim; one cannot fly.'
'To covet the impossible is the only divine thing in man,' said he with a smile. 'It is just because we have that longing to fly that we may hope we are made to do something more than walk.'
'Do you mean that discontent is good?' she said with surprise.
'In a certain measure, perhaps.'
'Content is better,' she said sturdily.
'I hope you will always be blessed with it. It is like a swallow, it brings peace where it rests,' said her guest with a little sigh; and he thought: 'My lady yonder is never content; it is the penalty of culture. Will this child be so always in her ignorance? Will she marry the skipper of a merchant-ship or the owner of an olive-yard, and live happily ever afterwards, with a tribe of little brown-eyed children that will run out into the road with flowers for the carriages? I suppose so; why not? Melville said in her little way she was an heiress. Of course, all the louts that own a fishing-coble or an acre of orange-trees will be eager to annex her and her island.'
She was walking by his side under the gnarled olives which had been stripped a month before of their black berries. She was looking at him frankly, curiously, with doubtful glances.
'I am afraid you are of the noblesse,' she said, abruptly stopping short within a yard of the house.
'What makes you think that?' he said, aware that he received the prettiest of indirect compliments which a much flattered life had ever given him.
'You look like it,' she answered. 'You have an air about you, and your linen is so fine, and your voice is soft and slow. It is only the noble people who have that kind of music in their voices.'
'I wish I were a peasant if it would please you better,' he said gallantly.
She answered very literally:
'That is nonsense. You cannot wish such a thing; no one ever wishes to go down. And, for myself, I do not mind; it is my grandfather who hates the aristocrats.'
'So I have heard,' said Loswa. 'But he is out to-day, you say. Will you not let me sketch this superb view?'
'Yes, if you like. I never saw anyone paint, as I told you; I shall be glad to see it. But will you not come in and eat and drink something first? I have heard that the nobles, when they are not dressing and dancing, are always eating and drinking.'
'Nothing more cruel was ever said of them by all their satirists,' answered Loswa. 'It will be very kind indeed if you will give me a glass of water; I need nothing else.'
'You shall have some of Catherine's cakes,' said the girl, 'and some coffee and a fresh egg. Catherine—she is our servant—makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are people who are old so often cross? Is it the trouble of living so long that makes them so? If it be that, I would rather die young. I think one ought to be like the olive-trees; the older they are the better fruit they bear.'
Then she called aloud, 'Catherine! Catherine! here is a stranger who wants some breakfast,' and ran across the bit of rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the fine morning together in harmony.
An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared.
'She is gone to get it,' said Damaris. 'She is very cross, as I tell you, but she is very good for all that. I have known her all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but when it is swarming time she says a paternoster over each hive, and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine; its taste is like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my terrace; you shall have your breakfast there.'
He followed her through the house, an ugly whitewashed place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner than most such dwellings are upon the mainland; it smelt sweetly, too, from the flood of fragrant, orange-scented air which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from the bales of packed oranges which were stored in its passages and lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the guest-chamber there was some old oaken furniture of which he recognised the age and value, and some chairs of repoussé leather, which would have fetched a high price; but it was all dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of the girl, with her brilliant, luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar.
'Come out here,' she said to him, and led him out on to a little terrace.
It was whitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian vine still red; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did that side of the island slope downward beneath it; it had some cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning was stretched above it.
'This is all mine,' she said, with pride. 'You shall eat here. Take that long chair: it came off one of the great ships that go the voyages to India; the mate of the ship gave it me. I made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here and read. Sometimes I sit here half the night instead of going to bed—that is, when the nightingales are singing in the orange-trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut and bolted by eight o'clock, even in summer. So I come here; it seems such folly to go to bed in the short nights, they are as bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.'
He caught her hand as she was about to go away.
'Pray, stay,' he murmured. 'It is to hear you talk that I care; I want nothing else, not even that glass of water; I only made it an excuse to come into your house.'
She