'Why should you make an excuse? If you had said you wished to come I would have let you; if you do not want to eat there is nothing to come for; I am never indoors except to eat, or if it rain very heavily.'
Then she went, and he dared not detain her lest he should alarm her. She seemed to him like a bird which alights near a stranger so long as there is no movement, but at a single sound takes flight. Left alone he sat still in the chair she had assigned to him, and gazed over the sea; there was nothing except sea visible from this little terrace.
CHAPTER VIII.
In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an old silver tray, with coffee, cream, and sugar in old silver pots.
The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious, carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table.
'We have a few things like this,' she said, touching the old silver. 'We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they say; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe it. It may be nonsense, but one likes to fancy that ever, ever so long ago one's forefathers were fighting men, not labourers; it seems to make one ready to fight too. It must make a difference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves. Not, you know,' she added, after a moment's pause, 'that I do not think la petite culture the happiest life in the world; but the labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very rough to his women, and I suppose the poor were still worse in that distant time.'
She poured him out his coffee as she spoke, and filled up the cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes, the honey. The china was the heavy earthenware which rustic people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the vessels; but Loswa, for once, was not critical; he thought he had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island fare.
Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the reddened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break bread with a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled her sleeves down and put on shoes and stockings. She had thrown aside her woollen cap; her silky, golden curls shone in the sun; her eyes looked at him with honest inquisitiveness and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud:
'Ah! I remember now! It was you who were with that lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the wall.'
Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget his friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt with which his present position on this terrace would be regarded by her did she ever know of it.
'Did she take me for a beggar?' said Damaris, with anger glistening under her long lashes.
'Oh no, she only wished to please you—to surprise you. You see, she could not tell who you were.'
The girl's cheeks grew a deeper rose.
'That is true,' she said, with her first touch of embarrassment; 'I was rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes. Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass——'
'If she saw you now!' said he, with a glance of meaning thrown away upon her. 'Remember, she hardly saw you at all; only an old boat, a pile of oranges, a ragged sail——'
'My sail is very shabby,' said Damaris with shame. 'I took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was angry and would not let me have another. Who is that lady? She looked very pretty. Is she your wife?'
'She is the Countess Othmar.'
'The Countess Othmar!' she repeated in a little awe. Even she in her solitude had heard that name of power. The narrative was very vague to her; she had never known more than the bare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was a child sitting amongst the daffodils and plucking them on the grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael:
'Holy Virgin, what think you? The petiote of Nicole, the wife of Othmar, is dead!'
And the child, pausing with the daffodils lying in tumbled gold upon her lap, had listened and heard all that was known of that early death, which only the swallows had witnessed and the blind house-dog had mourned. She had always remembered it, and often, when she had seen the daffodils yellow in the grass of March, had thought of it again, and her imagination had been busy with it, creating bodily forms for the people of whom she knew naught but the names. Therefore, when the word 'Othmar' fell now upon her ear, it moved her with a certain thrill, almost as of personal pain.
'You have heard of her?' said Loswa.
'Not of her,' said Damaris gravely; 'of the one who died—who killed herself, they say, because he loved another woman.'
'Bah!' said Loswa, with the light contempt for all such tragic follies which the boulevardier always affects, even when he does not feel it.
'They said so,' repeated Damaris, with her eyes very large and serious.
'Do you like this lady very much?' she asked, after a pause.
'She is a charming person; yes.'
'Is she a very great lady? Does she reign over anything?'
'Over everyone she approaches, if she can,' said he with some impatience; 'and nearly always she can, for she is a person of very strong will, and influences others more than she knows or they know.'
'And what does she do when she has influenced them? Monsignor says that to possess influence is to have the ten talents, and that we shall have to account for the use of every one of them.'
'That is just the chief mischief,' said Loswa, gloomily thinking of himself, not of his auditor. 'It is the getting the influence that amuses her; that she cares about. When once she has got it you are nothing at all to her; no more than a glove she has worn.'
'She must be a very cruel woman,' said Damaris.
'Oh no,' he protested, with a sudden sense of his disloyalty, 'she is not cruel at all, she is only indifferent.'
'Indifferent? That is to neither like nor dislike? I do not understand how one can be like that. One must either have good weather or bad; one must either love or hate.'
'She does neither,' said he with a sigh; then, with a sense that it was altogether wrong to blame a great lady and a countrywoman of his own to a little country girl whom he had never seen before, he changed the subject abruptly.
'Are you not very dull on your island? It is a long way off the mainland.'
'Dull? Oh, people must be very stupid who are ever dull. There is always so much to do out among the fruit-trees or down by the beach. The days are always too short for me.'
'That is the charm of being fifteen. Are you always on this island? Do you never go to Nice?'
'I have never seen Nice. I did want to see the Carnival last year, but my grandfather would not hear of it. It was Raphael told me about it. It must have been very fine; but, of course, we have nothing to do with the mainland, that is only for the rich idle people. I hear they sleep all the day and buzz about all the night, like moths or like bats. What a strange life it must be!'
Loswa thought of the great gaslit glittering Salle des Jeux which was not more than a dozen leagues off this primitive orange-island.
'You are happier here, in the middle of your blue water, putting out your oil lamps as the moon rises,' he replied. 'Chateaubriand might have lived on Bonaventure. Who would have believed there was anything so solitary and so innocent as this within a few hours' sail of the Blanc paradise?'
'What is that?' said Damaris, who, although she could see afar off the palms and domes of Monte Carlo gleaming in the sun on the northward horizon every time she sailed that way,