OTHMAR

BY

OUIDA

'I fear Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness'
Lytton

A NEW EDITION

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1886

PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

LONDON

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.

1

CHAPTER II.

13

CHAPTER III.

19

CHAPTER IV.

29

CHAPTER V.

32

CHAPTER VI.

36

CHAPTER VII.

51

CHAPTER VIII.

59

CHAPTER IX.

70

CHAPTER X.

77

CHAPTER XI.

86

CHAPTER XII.

96

CHAPTER XIII.

105

CHAPTER XIV.

108

CHAPTER XV.

111

CHAPTER XVI.

117

CHAPTER XVII.

119

CHAPTER XVIII.

131

CHAPTER XIX.

142

CHAPTER XX.

148

CHAPTER XXI.

156

CHAPTER XXII.

160

CHAPTER XXIII.

168

CHAPTER XXIV.

172

CHAPTER XXV.

183

CHAPTER XXVI.

193

CHAPTER XXVII.

202

CHAPTER XXVIII.

207

CHAPTER XXIX.

215

CHAPTER XXX.

223

CHAPTER XXXI.

230

CHAPTER XXXII.

238

CHAPTER XXXIII.

249

CHAPTER XXXIV.

253

CHAPTER XXXV.

261

CHAPTER XXXVI.

274

CHAPTER XXXVII.

285

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

285

CHAPTER XXXIX.

300

CHAPTER XL.

302

CHAPTER XLI.

306

CHAPTER XLII.

312

CHAPTER XLIII.

321

CHAPTER XLIV.

335

CHAPTER XLV.

337

CHAPTER XLVI.

339

CHAPTER XLVII.

341

CHAPTER XLVIII.

346

CHAPTER XLIX.

354

CHAPTER L.

362

CHAPTER LI.

367

CHAPTER LII.

377

CHAPTER LIII.

382

CHAPTER LIV.

391

OTHMAR.

CHAPTER I.

Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.

It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around those forests, in 'le pays de rire et de ne rien faire,' from many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.

It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open; the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphitheatre; an open space where the forest joined the gardens, with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage, around it; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same oak-boughs.

'Why should we not hold one also? If we have advanced in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. They laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both; but we do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.'

So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o'clock dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of late summer in

The hush of old warm woods that lie

Low in the lap of evening, bright

And bathed in vast tranquillity.

She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of peacock's plumes.

'They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown at the fans, 'but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not know anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.'

But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty, so she had let them stay.

'We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in our discussions,' she had said, 'that one note the more in decoration does not matter;' and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. 'Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?' she had objected; and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples, that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on to that gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head and his crimson sash, and his blue eyes full of their and keen witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his knee.

In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were ranged the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the house party of the château; great people all; all the women young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them, dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people, handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious picture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both Marguerites:

Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit!'

'To return to our original demand—what is the definition of Love?' asked their queen and president, turning her lovely eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming gravity:

'Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the theme?'

She smiled a little. 'You know as much as Bembo knew,' she made answer.

'Ah no, Madame! The times are changed.'

'The times, perhaps; not human nature. However, this is the question which must be first decided by the Court at large: How is the nature of Love to be defined?'

A gentleman on her left murmured:

'No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn the poor butterfly in pieces so often sans merci.'

'You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign, with severity. 'The discussion is to be kept wholly free from all personalities.'

'A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.'

'If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid's "Ars Amatoria." Once more, I inquire, how are we to define Love?'

'It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.'

'That is merely begging the question,' said their Queen. 'One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a noble sonnet; but all these things are nevertheless capable of analysis and of reduction to known laws. So is Love. I ask once more: How is it to be defined? Does no one seem to know? What curious ignorance!'

'In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexation; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of personal property in the creature loved.'

'That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general enough. You must not separate the love of man and the love of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.'

'With all deference I would observe that, if we did not separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition at all, for Love differs according to sex as much as the physiognomy or the costume.'

'Real Love is devotion!' said a beautiful blonde with blue eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.

'Euh! euh!' murmured one impertinent.

'Oh, oh!' murmured another.

'Ouiche!' said a third under his breath.

The sovereign smiled ironically:

'Ah, my dear Duchesse! all that died out with the poets of 1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, looked at the moon, and played the harp.'

'If I might venture on a definition in the langue verte,' suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, 'though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room——'

'We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on the contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word—Illusion.'

'That is a cruel statement!'

'It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remember the hackneyed saying of the philosopher about the real John—the John as he thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him: it is never the real John that is loved; always an imaginary one built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.'

'That is fancy, your Majesty; it is not love.'

'And what is love but fancy?—the fancy of attraction, the fancy of selection; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to the brightest plumaged mate?'

'I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and contented, it does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the passions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supplement of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect, there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight should ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the prose of life entails.'

'You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré's ideal of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.'

'Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with her irons would have become very tiresome to him.'

'What an argument in favour of ignorance!'

'Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.'

'Is this a discussion on Love?'

'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois ideal from their earliest times of wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.'

The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.

'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are its characteristics and its results.'

'The first is exigence and the second is ennui.'

'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'

'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'

'And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'

'We are coming to the Italian coltellate! You both only mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even become malignity if it take a very severe form.'

'You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love?'

'It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is so.'

'You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.'

'It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'

'No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape or dismiss.'

'My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'you wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.'

'For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one given just now—sympathy.'

'The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.'

'No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors, and self-absorbed.'

'We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of Ronsard and Petrarca.'

'And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfection, the sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delightful and precious to us, we cannot probably say why, and is to us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'

'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But——'

'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'

'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'

'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'

'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'

'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'

'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'

'"La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre meublée, or at most for the saison aux eaux.'

'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice. 'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'

'That is only because all human life is a game of cross purposes; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse the gods or make them weep.'

'That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory analysis. Besides, the world has been wondering about that ever since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer to its queries.'

'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the Prince de Ligne's "Dans l'amour il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants." In the middle of the romance I see you all yawn, at the end you usually quarrel. Some wise man—I forget who—has said that it requires much more talent and much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably than to begin it.'

'Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is easy to be so.'

'Admit also that there are very few characters which will stand the test of intimacy; very few minds of sufficient charm and originality to be able to bear the strain of long and familiar intercourse.'

'What has the mind to do with it?'

'That question is flippant and even coarse. The mind has something to do with it, even in animals; or why should the lion prefer one lioness to another? When d'Aubiac went to the gallows kissing a tiny velvet muff of Margaret de Valois, or when young Calixte de Montmorin knelt on the scaffold pressing to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon which had belonged to Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the senses.'

'It was a sentiment.'

'A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all fear of death or personal regret. The muff, the ribbon, were symbols of an imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles, like Psyche's butterfly, were representative of an immortal element in mortal life and mortal feeling.'

'M. de Béthune would go to the scaffold like that himself,' said the sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indulgent derision.

'And our lady,' hinted the Duc de Béthune, 'forgets her own rule, that all personalities are forbidden.'

'It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have not also the power to transgress them. Well, if immortality is to enter into love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded every day, but every day one is liable to be bored. J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit. Every intellectual person must exact that. To worship my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue my patience and my ear. The majority of people divorce love and wit. They are very wrong. It is only wit which can tell love when he has gone too far, or is losing ground, has repeated himself ad nauseam, or requires absence to restore his charm.'

'Ah, Majesté! by the time he has become such a philosopher has he not ceased to be love at all?'

'Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court expressly for the truth it contains. Why does most love end so drearily in a sudden death by quarrelling or in a lingering death by tedium? Because it has had no wit, no judgment, no reserve, no skill. By way of showing itself to be eternal, it has hammered itself into pieces on the rock of repetition. Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit! What a world of endured ennui sighs forth in that appeal!'

'No woman upon earth has had so much love given her as the châtelaine of Amyôt, and no woman on earth ever viewed love with such unkind and airy contempt.'

She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusation.

'She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks down on the weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by them,' said the Duc de Béthune.

She replied again, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.'

'It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon amusement than upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what may have the good fortune to be considered "esprit" by her? I fear she finds us all very dull to-day.'

'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.'

'Your heaviest word of censure!'

'To return to our theme: do you not punish inconstancy?'

'Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second, if any one be so stupid that he or she cannot keep the affections they have once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim no pity.'

'Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited fate?'

'Unmerited—no. They have not known how to keep what they had got. Probably they have worried it till it escaped in desperation, as a child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes itself through the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself on the road to the certainty of being strangled in prison.'

'Who would not prefer it?'

'The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales of proportion are weighted unevenly: there is generally one lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great nature; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice; say it is a profound temperament and a shallow one; in some way or other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When they are quite even—which happens once out of a million times—then there is a great and felicitous love; an exquisite and imperishable sympathy.'

'But who holds these magical scales? It is the holder who is responsible.'

'The holder is Fate.'

'Chance.'

'Opportunity.'

'Destiny.'

'Predestination.'

'Circumstance.'

'Affinity.'

'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect love is the result.'

'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an earthly paradise.'

'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'

'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'

'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'

'Nay, Majesté; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'

'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'

'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'

'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's conscience.'

'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'

'Whoever loves most loves longest.'

'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'

'How is that to be explained?'

'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain everything.'

'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'

'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'

'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'

'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.'

'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than Dante?'

'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed—the difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'

'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another passion newly come thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of April in its sunny hair.'

'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case? Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'

'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame passion grow.'

'And the newly-come one?'

'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his flowers are dead.'

'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'

'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of itself, before it dies.'

'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.'

'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal forms?'

'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insignificance; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can be gouailleur, but we cannot be gay if we would.'

'There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devotion, death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philosophy.'

'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the shades of Brantôme.'

'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this: that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.'

'A cruel sentence, Madame!'

'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'

When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.

'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the smooth turf. 'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'

'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.

She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the network of green leaves:

'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'

'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'

'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past him.'

She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.

'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with contrition and mortification.

'That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.

As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland was a herd of cows and calves already passing away in the distance, going to their byres; far behind them, lingering willingly, were the herdsman and his love; he a comely lad in a blue blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a 'Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.'

'Lubin and Lisette,' said Béthune with a smile, 'practically illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-drawing of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer than we to the story-tellers of the Heptameron.'

The châtelaine of Amyôt looked at the two rustic lovers with a little wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.

They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the rose-glow of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they followed their cows.

'"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted. 'I suppose that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to think that love as a sentiment is the product of education. The cows know almost as much of it as your Lubin and Lisette.'

'Brandès says,' observed one of her party, 'that love as a sentiment was always unknown in a state of nature, and was only created with the first petticoat. Petticoats have invariably been responsible for a great deal. They ruined France, according to the Great Frederic; but if they have raised us from the level of the cattle they have redeemed their repute.'

'Poor cattle! They have as much poetry in their eyes as there is in the Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are Naturkinder; but when both a cow and Lisette become the property of Lubin, he will assign the higher place to the first, both in life and in death.'

'Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so apropos an instant,' she answered with, a little smile. 'Perhaps the only word of truth that has been said in the whole discussion was the quotation: "Il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants!"'

The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke opened into an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the branches meeting and interlacing overhead until the opening at the farther end looked like an arched doorway closing a cathedral aisle. The archway was filled with dim golden suffused light, and within that archway of twilight and golden haze there rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain; it was the first of the grandes eaux of the garden of Amyôt. And the sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the Princess Napraxine.

CHAPTER II.

As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and approached them.

'Is the Court over? At what decision has it arrived?' said the master of Amyôt as he saluted the party and kissed the hand of his wife with a graceful formality of greeting.

'It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to come to any,' returned the châtelaine. 'We have said many pretty things about love, Béthune in especial; but we met Lubin with Lisette loitering behind their cows, and I fear the living commentary was truer to nature than all our doctrines.'

'The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away a cow and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Béthune. 'He crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us: we were all sadly in want of one.'

'Could you not agree then? Surely you chose a very simple subject?'

'It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It is sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent d'Aubiac to the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his lips, the same thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the femelle de l'homme sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry? You will admit that a vast field of the most various emotions separates the two kinds of passion?'

'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell and Sir John Suckling's verses.'

'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not know why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not absurd.'

'What a cruel sentiment!'

'A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in tradition are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose Romeo had been happy; or Stradella; what do you think the poets could have made of them? Love must end somehow: if it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like Cæsar's.'

'But why need it end? You, at least, have seen that through all disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who had cited the love of d'Aubiac for Marguerite.

She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.

'Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its perihelion, increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, little by little, the glory departs, the sovereign of the skies grows less and less, until at last there is no more sign of it anywhere, and all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone; it has only gone—elsewhere.'

Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melancholy which it would otherwise have possessed.

'My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.

She looked at him with her mysterious smile:

'I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the kindness of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing themselves. What a pity you did not come home a little sooner. You would have been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists headed by Béthune. He was eloquent, but his cause was weak.'

'My cause was strong,' said the Duc de Béthune; 'it was my tongue which lacked persuasiveness.'

'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried to revive; we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to end everything with a laugh en gouailleur, yet with tears in our eyes. We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that, ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'

'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as the boom of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep waves of sound.

It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to be called in the Valois Amyôt arrière-grand-souper, and was now called 'dinner,' awaited them.

There were some twenty-five guests then staying there; she did not approve of immense house parties, and she restricted her house list to the very choicest of her favourites and associates; she always asked double the number of men to that of women, but she was proportionately careful that the latter should be those whom men most liked and admired; she was wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her sex. Her vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no rivals.

As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated in the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large square cases of white porcelain; the white columns were garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without; at either end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and water-lilies; through the columns the whole enchanting view of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-risen moon.

'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented her upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse question; nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as we dine.'

And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with any incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it; but the marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.

'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after dinner.

She smiled.

'In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and the forests black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All places have their season, like all lives.'

'There are some places, like some lives, which can never lose their beauty.'

'Do you think so? I have never found them. When one knows every leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the place fades for us as it does when one knows every impulse, every prejudice, every fault, and every virtue of the life.'

'A melancholy truth—if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only half a one. There are people who love their homes.'

'There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amyôt is delightful in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in it than a swallow has in the eaves it builds under for one summer. You must go to the vinedresser's wife in the cliff cabin on the river for that.'

'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great châtelaine's crown is without?'

'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is much to be said in favour of the restlessness of our world, it saves us from rust and reflection; it makes us unprejudiced and cosmopolitan; it annihilates nationalities and antipathies. I imagine, if Horace had lived now, he would never have been still; he would have seen the farm in its pleasantest season, and that only. He would have carried with him the undying lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been happy anywhere.'

'But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home?'

'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a few months here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the Riviera, a few weeks in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is impossible to carry about the sense of home peripatetically with you as the snail carries his shell. The sparrow feels it, the swallow does not. I have always had a number of houses in which I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I like each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to have copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe, of Molière, of Horace makes one feel chez soi. That is as near "home" as I approach. I imagine all happiness is much more a matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance.'

'I do not believe you are happy even now!'

It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justified even by intimate and privileged friendship. But she was moved to it by that ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which made her as severe a critic of herself as of others.

'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who on earth should be happy if I am not? I have all the vulgar attributes of happiness in profusion and all the more delicate ones too. If I am not so, it can only be because my temperament is the very opposite of a porte-bonheur like Horace's. I have always expected too much of everything and of everybody, and yet I am not at all what you would call an imaginative person. I ought to be prosaically contented with the world as it is. But I am not.'

It was a sultry and lovely August night. The sky was radiant and the white lustre of the full moon shone over all the scene, making the gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the parterres of flowers light as day, and leaving the masses of the great forest which surrounded them in deepest shadow. It was haunted ground, this stately and royal place where both Marguerites had passed in turn summers dead three centuries ago; where the one, witty, wise and faithful, had read the tales of her Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks; and the other, lovely, perilous and faithless, had gathered its roses and ruffled them, murmuring the 'un peu—beaucoup—passionnément,' as one passion hotly chased another from her fickle breast, each scarce living the life of the gathered rose.

The present châtelaine of Amyôt, leaning against one of the marble columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the words of a friend who dared tell her truths, looked out into the wide white moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf smooth as velvet, bordered with ground ivy; the marble statues standing against the high walls of close-clipped evergreens; the deep and sombre forests which held the heart of so many secrets, the story of so many lives and of so many deaths, safe shut away for ever, dumb and dead in the eternal mystery of its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy who should be?

But happiness—what an immense word!—or what a little one! A poet's dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment in the chimney-corner and the pot of soup! Which you will—but never both at once.

She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature can possibly be, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction looked in over the flowers and through the golden air. She was pursued by her old consciousness that the human race was after all exceedingly limited in its capabilities, and the lives of men on the whole very wearisome. There was with her that vague disappointment and dissatisfaction which come to most of us when we have done what we wished to do. There is a monotony even in what is most agreeable, which makes all happiness dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this unpleasant weariness is intended to detach us from the joys of earth, and philosophers are content to find its solution in the physiology of the senses. But whether explained sentimentally or scientifically, the result is the same: that expectation makes up so large a component part of pleasure that, when there is nothing new to expect, pleasure becomes so attenuated as to be scarcely visible.

All loves which have been constant and become famous have been those to which immense difficulties arose, where perils supplied the element of an unending interest. It is when they can only behold each other in the stolen hours of the moonlight, that Romeo and Giulietta are to each other divinely fair. Were they condemned to face each other at dinner every night for ten years, what divinity would be left for either in the eyes of the other?

Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose to flower beneath a slab of stone.

'Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little dreamy lingering smile. 'Is not that what your brethren are always telling us?'

Melville answered with a sigh:

'May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some other?'

'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 'I think with you; the strongest argument (if any are strong) in favour of the future development of the soul, is the absolute impossibility for anybody with any average mind to be content with what he or she finds in human existence. Life is a pretty enough picture for people like ourselves; it is sometimes a pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but it is all wonderfully unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few hours of passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and insufficiency of it all. We have ideals which may be only remembrance, but if not must surely be prevision; ideals which, at any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything which belongs to earth.'

Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of wistful regret. It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the ennuyée which moved her. She had had her own way in life, and the success of it had become monotonous.

'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very gay; 'I suppose it must be the soul in us; that odd, unquiet, dissatisfied, nameless thing inside us, which is always crying, "Give, give, give!" and never gets what it wants. Our discontent must be the proof of something in us meant for better things, just as the eternal revolutions of Paris are the proof of its people's genius. What a night it is! It wants Lorenzo and Jessica, but they are not here. There are flirtations and intrigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are not of our world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'

Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her guests, who were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, as the sounds of music, in the ever-youthful 'Invitation à la Valse,' called them, with midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase Melville strayed away by himself through the moonlit aisles of roses.

'Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of pleasure,' he thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly balanced than the wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will ever believe. Perhaps in life, as they said to-day that it is in love, hunger is a happier state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo had never married Jessica, he would have written sonnets to her all his life, as Petrarca wrote them to Laura! The Lady of Amyôt is the most interesting woman I have ever known, but she is the one person on earth capable of making me doubt the faith that I have lived and hope to die for; when I am amongst the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa, I can still believe in the human soul; but when I am with her I doubt—I doubt—I doubt! She is as exquisitely organised as this gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams; but she believes that she will have only her one brief passage on earth like the gloxinia—the glory of a day—and alas! who shall prove that she is wrong? When she holds my creed in the hollow of her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a daisy that is dead!'

CHAPTER III.

'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on her thirty-second birthday.

Her husband chivalrously replied, 'Any one who lives beside you will preserve them until he is a hundred.'

She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile which was a little cynical and a little pensive.

'I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a little regretfully. 'I do not know why you should have found me so favourable to yours—if you have found me favourable,' she added, after a pause.

As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could give, he kissed her hands.

She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly thirty-two years old on this last day of February. She did not like it; no woman likes it. The way is not actually longer because the traveller reads on a milestone the cipher which tells him how many thousands of yards he has traversed and has still to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and distastefully testifies to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue which the road has given.

'If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 'when they reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would be for the world. On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought to be put to death; mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the "Faute de l'Abbé Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put to death.'

'The world,' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid of its most perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.'

'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, and how much effort and heartburning would be spared, if every woman died before she began to "make up!" Do you know last night, in the mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot all about them. I only looked at my own face; it seemed to me that there was a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which has been some years done; not age exactly, but the shadow of age which was coming up behind me as the men were coming, and was looking over my shoulder as they looked. Why do you laugh? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when the voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, "Ah, Madame, is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite forgotten where I was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age only meant to say to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any more!"'

'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said her companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you to-day?'

'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'

'Surely that depends on one's mood?'

'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall be agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased. There are five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is allotted threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health; she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the romance.'

He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when you are in a pessimistic humour.'

'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'

'What do you see when they flash upon me?'

'Not very much that I would have changed except your sentimentalities.'

'I am grateful.'

She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'

He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as yours one never knows.'

'Is not that the charm of my character?'

'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of your immense thoughts.'

'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than he; but I have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it tends to make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age looked into the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear; after ten years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I am sure you are sincere when you make them.'

She smiled and rose.

This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young enough, and had potent charm enough, of which she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns.

Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.

Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike voices, 'Bonne fête, maman.'

'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make no difference in their worship of you.'

She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.

But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a sommation respectueuse, because he wants to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are fond of me now, certainly.'

'They will as certainly love you always.'

'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never could help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very grim prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part them. Why does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her immediate heir? Why is the crown prince always arrayed against the crown?'

'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his young son to him.

'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the separation begins and the antagonism rises.'

'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'

'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the time should come which will make me twice that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It will not console me in the least that my grandchildren may wish me bonne fête.'

'I wonder if you are serious?'

'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence is nothing but a dégringolade for her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'

'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'

'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de Grignan rewarded her? Myself, je n'ai pas cette bosse là. You know it very well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I do not think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'

'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'

She smiled.

'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer white shoulders. And——'

'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self?'

'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.

'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those men——'

'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's love is always so made up of pride and prejudice that if no one envy him what he has he soon ceases to value it. On the whole, men go much more by the opinion of the world than women do. A woman, if she take a fancy to a cripple, or a hunchback, or a crétin, makes herself ridiculous over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at; but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion of the galerie.'

'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.

'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous. A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half the world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in history for his exploit.'

'Then he is no true lover.'

'Are there any true lovers?'

'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'

'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough; but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'

'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal; the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sensitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consolation because it is a sedative.'

'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the primæval woods, the fons sylvæ, the mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over him undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is made to laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'

'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great preoccupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'

'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'

'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'

'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I hope you will let me be carried by young children clad in white to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough for that? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and the Russian popes? I should have courage to execute your last wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to execute mine——Men are so much more timid than women!'

'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.

'Did I not say that men are cowards?'

'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'

She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.

'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "Fis anus, et tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the perruquiers let nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming—more charming than the girls who are just out.'

'I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you will always be charming, and you will never be old.'

'One would think you were my lover!'

'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'

'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.'

'Or some exceptional reward.'

'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile. 'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly expenditure. "Ah—ouiche, Madame!" said one of the peasants at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two spoons in one soup-pot?—you only quarrel about the onions." That is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not make the least difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the spoons.'

Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'

'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh, 'when men do not admire me any longer then you will not admire me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as it is—you see so much of me!'

'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most hopeless of her lovers.

'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what you will you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old!'

She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.

'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,' she thought, with a little pang.

'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:

I fear

Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'

There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage or compliment.

Othmar kissed her hand with almost the same emotion as when he had declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore for the time changeless; and he remained mute.

'The same poet says:

Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,'

she added, with a smile. 'Well, I will believe you——as yet.'

She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion afforded her by, what in a lesser person would have been called endless flirtation. She amused herself constantly with the follies of men and their subjugation.

'If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man to whom you care to be attractive will soon not find you so,' she was wont to say. 'Those women who make themselves a statue of fidelity, like the Queen in the "Winter's Tale," will soon be left alone on their pedestals. Be as faithful as you please, but show him that you have every temptation and opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.'

It was on those lines that she had traced her conduct, and whilst her world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if coquetry her languid charm and domination could be called, it also saw that she was equally unaltered in profound and universal indifference to all those whom she subjugated. Othmar, as he said, would have preferred that she should subjugate none. But she frankly told him that it was of no use to wish for subversion of the laws of nature. 'I am as nature made me,' she said once to him. 'If you did not like the way I was made, why did you not leave me alone? You had plenty of time to study me. I am like Disraeli, I like power. Now the only power possible to a woman is that which she possesses over men. If men were more interesting, the power would be more interesting too. But then it is not our fault. It is perhaps the fault of the millions of stupid women who swallow up the occasional originality of men as sand swallows up the bits of agate and cornelian on the shore. It is the fashion to say that it is the wicked, clever women who hurt men. That is not the case; it is the good silly ones who make of life the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which it is. Talent will at least always understand; blameless stupidity understands nothing.'

She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a charmeuse than she had been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives of men that she could have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease to use her power over them. There were times when Othmar grew irritated and jealous, but she was unmoved by his anger.

'It is a much greater compliment to you that men should admire me,' she said to him, 'and it would look supremely absurd if I lapsed into a bonne bourgeoise, and always went everywhere arm-in-arm with you. I should not know myself. You would not know me. Be content. You are aware that I think very little about any one of them; they are none of them so interesting as you used to be. But I must have them about me. They are like my fans; I never scarcely use a fan or look at one, but still a fan is indispensable; it is a part of one's toilette.'

Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and perfervid passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself with a bad grace to her arguments. Something of the old tyrannical feeling with which he would once have liked to bear her out of sight and hearing of the world for ever still moved in him at times, though he had grown diffident of displaying it, having grown afraid of her delicate ironies.

'It is so good for him,' she said to herself; 'that sort of irritation and jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations alive: they are not allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack of going to sleep in marriage. Anything is less dangerous than stagnant water. If a man be not made jealous he must drift imperceptibly into indifference. Monotony is like a calm at sea; everyone yawns, and in time even a shark would be welcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid sameness is the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love me as much as he did nine years ago—and I think he does—it is only because at the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely sure of me. He has always a faint unacknowledged sense that I may any day do something entirely unexpected by him; may even fly away, as a bird does, off a bough which it has tired of. I am like a book of alchemy to him, of which he has mastered all the secrets save just one or two lines, but in which those lines always remain in unintelligible abracadabra to perplex and interest him. He will never tire of the book till he thinks he can decipher those lines. It is a mistake to suppose that men are only allured by their senses; there is an intellectual mystery which fascinates them, and which is not so easily exhausted. All men are amused by me, all men are more or less attracted by me. I should not wish my husband, alone of all men, to become tired of me. Of course it is very difficult to prevent it when he is so used to me, but I think it is possible.'

A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self-complacency which goes with stupidity, would not have allowed so much even in her own thoughts; but she, who was deemed the vainest of her kind, had no such vanity wherewith to deceive herself. Her high intelligence and her unerring penetration were glasses forever turned upon herself no less than upon others. Othmar was at times surprised and almost irritated that she left him so often to go on her own visits or travels, or sent him alone upon his. But she knew very well what she did.

'Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music which in French we call silences, and in German Pausen,' she said to herself. 'They make us care for the music more than we should do if it were always on our ear. Monotony is the most terrible enemy that affection or enjoyment ever has. Unfortunately, most women are so eternally monotonous that they can never understand why men are not as pleased with the defect as they are themselves. Lord Beaconsfield was not an apostle of love, but he was a shrewd observer of mankind, and I always think that he suggested the most admirable phase of modern love possible, when he depicted two people who were fond of one another as going their different ways every evening to different houses, and meeting again to talk it all over with champagne and chicken at dawn. If people are always together in the same places, what have they left to tell one another in their own house? Myself, I don't like either champagne or chicken, but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say, Rhine wine and green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian cigarettes. It is, no doubt, only another form of vanity; but I wish our lives not to break down and drift away in little bits of wreck wood, as most peoples' lives do. It is not goodness in me; it is only amour propre.'

She had more sympathy for him than she would in other years have supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her regard for him there was mingled that habit of analysis which was so inveterate in her, and that indulgence to his weaknesses which arose from her condescending comprehension of them. She, as yet, made the preservation of his admiration her study, but in her study there was blended the sense of amusement and disdain, which always came to her before the inconsistencies and the unwisdom of men. She loved him perhaps; but she never failed to weigh him accurately. To Yseulte, he had been as a lord and a god; to her he was dearer than other men, but not more imposing. Even when the first winelike fumes of awakened passion had touched her, she had been clear of judgment and unerring in vision. She had said to herself: 'He looked larger than others once, through the mists of my preference, but he is not so really.'

CHAPTER IV.

When he saw the beauty of her children, Friedrich Othmar relented in that unsparing bitterness which he felt against her. As a woman he still hated her intensely, unspeakably, unchangeably, but as their mother he had respect for her, and almost pardon.

'He will be childless all his days,' he had said with certainty and scorn. 'That bloodless mondaine, that ethereal coquette will leave the name barren; she is all brain and nerve; she will never give birth to anything save an epigram.'

When his words had been disproved, he had rendered her a sullen honour. He would take no joy in the children as he would have taken joy in Yseulte's; but they were there to bear the name he thought so precious, and he was forced to confess that no lovelier or stronger or healthier creatures than the young Otho and his sister Xenia ever could have played beneath the oak-boughs of Amyôt.

But the old man was faithful to the one innocent affection which had ever lived in his selfish breast; with an aching heart he would often turn from watching these children tumble amongst the daisies in the sunshine, and find his way to a solitary tomb made in white marble in the mausoleum of Amyôt, in memory of her whose slender crushed body lay buried amongst the violets by the sea of the southern shore.

'All that weight of marble!' he thought, 'and not one little sigh of regret!'

Not one; unless he gave it.

'I hate this Russian woman, but I am bound to say that the children are beautiful,' he said once to Melville. 'I am bound to say, too, that she has made a change for the better in Otho. Since he has discovered (doubtless) that every grande passion has its perihelion and its decline, he has become more like other men. He has interested himself in the welfare of the House. He has condescended to be conscious that Europe exists. He has lived the natural life of the world, and has, I think, ceased to wish himself a wandering Wilhelm Meister, a François Villon without a rag to his back. My poor dead child only loved him, and could do nothing to attach him to life or to detach him from his fantastic preoccupations and morbid demands for the impossible. This woman has made him so in love with the actual, with the real, that he has ceased to dream of the ideal. He has even grown aware that his own fate is an enviable one, which for thirty years of his life he obstinately denied.'

'It is a questionable benefit to make a man abandon the ideal,' said Melville. 'I think, however, that Othmar's feeling was always rather impatience of existing facts than thirst of any impalpable perfection. You believe that a discontented man is necessarily an imaginative man. It does not follow. Imagination may perhaps create discontent; but then, on the other hand, it may console it. If he had had imagination enough, he would have found out a thousand idealised ways of using his great wealth.'

'Thank heaven, then, that he has so little,' said Friedrich Othmar. 'Myself, I always considered that he had a great deal too much. I do not underrate imagination in its proper place. None of the great events of the world would have taken place without it: every great revolutionist, every great conqueror, every great statesman, even, must possess it; but it is a perilous quality, singularly similar to nitro-glycerine; you can never be certain of the hour and the sphere of its action; it may pierce a new road for humanity to use after it, or it may wreck nations and send humanity backward by a thousand years.'

'I should not mind going back a thousand years,' murmured Melville. 'Basil was living, and Augustine.'

Since the death of Yseulte these two men, so dissimilar, even so inharmonious, had become in a manner friends. Their mutual pain had drawn them together. The thought which was the same in the minds of each, and which each understood in the other without speech, made a link of union between them. Both divined the secret of her death. Neither ever spoke of it.

'He is a priest, but he is a man,' said Friedrich Othmar of Melville, who in turn said of him:

'He is encrusted all over with gold, egotism, and disbelief; but beneath that crust there is the heart of humanity.'

And they shook hands across the profound gulf of sentiment and opinion which divided them.

'I think that, for once, the wise Baron is mistaken,' reflected Melville, without saying his thoughts aloud. 'Othmar may have grown less imaginative, because most men do as they grow older, unless they be truly poets. But I do not think he is a whit more contented. I believe, if he could see into his heart, that he has found his apple of paradise not very much richer in flavour than a common rennet!'

But he forbore to say so. What business was it of his? Only, being the profound student of the comedy and tragedy of humanity that he was, he could not help feeling a keen interest in watching the issues of this marriage of love.

Melville, like all persons of fine penetration and quick sympathies, was deeply interested in all characters which were out of the common lines of human nature, and whenever his busy years had any leisure he spent it where he could observe all those who interested him most.

Of all these the Lady of Amyôt had the most powerful interest for him. But for his years and his priest's frock, it might have been a more tender and profound sentiment still with which she inspired him. For Melville, as for all men of intellect, the very despondency she cast over them, the very intricacy and unsatisfying changeability of her character, possessed the most powerful charm. But whether these were qualities which would make bon ménage in the familiarity and the triviality of daily life—of this he was not so sure.

CHAPTER V.

She, who had been so exacting as a friend, was not in any way exacting as a wife. There were a generosity and a breadth of thought in her, which made her accord freedom in proportion to what lesser minds would have considered her right to deny it. She held the whole ordinary mass of womanhood in too absolute a disdain for her ever to stoop to the same ways and weaknesses as theirs. She might have been the most despotic of mistresses: she was the most lenient of wives. Tyranny, which would have seemed, did still seem, to her natural and amusing when used over lives which in no way belonged to her, would have appeared to her bourgeois and ridiculous exercised over her husband: that sort of thing was only fit for two shopkeepers of Belleville. She had too supreme a scorn for the Penelopes of the world, whose jealousy was as impotent as their charms, not to let the reins which she drew so tightly over others lie loose and unfelt on the shoulders of Othmar.

'Penelope thinks that no object in all created nature is more lovely and important than her distaff; naturally Ulysses gets sick of the sight of it,' she said once. 'Why are all women, in love with their husbands, much more miserable than those who detest them? Only because they insist upon giving so much of themselves, that the men grow to view them with absolute terror, as the Strasbourg goose views the balls of maize paste. Love is an art, and ought to be dealt with artistically; in marriage, it has to contend with such insuperable difficulties that it needs to be most delicate, most sagacious, most forbearing, most intelligent, to surmount them. Instead of which, women, usually, who have any love for their husbands at all, look on them as so much property inalienably assigned to them, and treat them as Cosmo dei Medici treated Florence: "Mi piace più distruggerla che perderla!"'

Othmar himself had changed little; men at his years do not alter physically, though great changes, moral and mental, may in brief time transform their feelings and their ambitions.

Women looked at him inquisitively many a day, to try and see whether that great wonder-flower of romantic passion, which had astonished his world in a generation in which such passions are rare, had brought forth contentment or disenchantment. But they could not be sure. No one had ever succeeded in making him unfaithful to this great love, which had been merged in marriage, but no one had ever penetrated his confidence sufficiently to satisfy themselves whether any disillusion had followed on the fulfilment of those dreams and desires, to which he had been willing to sacrifice his life, his honour, and his soul. All that society in general, or his most familiar friends could see, was the outward pageantry of a life in the great world; that life which leaves so little space for thought, so little time for regret, so little leisure for conscience to speak or memory to waken. If he were not entirely content he allowed no one to suspect so; and he did not even like to admit it to his own reflections: yet there were times when life did not seem to him much more complete than it had done before he had attained the supreme desire of his heart; there were times when the old vague indefinite dissatisfaction came back to him—the sense of emptiness which moved the Cæsars of Rome with the world at their feet.

'I suppose it is inevitable,' he said to himself. 'I suppose she is right; nothing on earth is content except a sucking child and an oyster.'

It irritated him that he should be pursued by this foolish and shapeless sense of still missing something, still desiring something, still seeking something unknown and unknowable; but it was there at the bottom of most of his thoughts, at the core of most of his feelings.

'You have had a great misfortune all your life,' Friedrich Othmar said once to him. 'You have always had all your wishes granted you. When a child is indulged in that way he kicks his nurse, when a man is indulged in that way he sulks at destiny. It is human nature.'

'Human nature,' said Othmar, 'according to you and Nadège, is such a consummate fool that it is scarcely worth the bread it eats, much less the elaborate analysis which philosophers have expended on it from Solomon to Renan.'

Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders.

'It is not always a fool,' he made answer; 'but it is, I think, always an ingrate.'

Was he himself an ingrate? Or did he only suffer from that inevitable law of recoil and rebound which governs human life; that cessation of tension which makes a great passion, once satisfied and become familiar, like a bow unstrung?

There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss in the midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of every great desire. If anyone had told him that he was not perfectly happy, he would have indignantly denied the accuracy of their assertion. Whenever any misgiving that he was not so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it with contempt as the mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature. Yet now and then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect than it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to him, occasionally came over him, though he always thrust it away.

She herself felt sometimes an almost irresistible inclination to say to him; 'And you, you who set your soul on marriage with me, have you found the lasting joys that you expected, or have you learned that the fulfilment of a dream is never quite the dream itself—has always some glory wanting?'

But she refrained. Women are always so unwise when they ask those questions, she reflected; so like children who pull up the plants in their garden to see what growth or what roots they have.

'We are just like anybody else, after all!' she did say once, with a mingling of despondency and of humour. 'I suppose we cannot escape from the age we live in, which is neither original nor imaginative, nor anything that I know of, except feverish and unhappy. Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, certainly, is gone to live in Syria, and we might do the same, but would it be any better? Do you think life is any larger there? I should be afraid there are only more mosquitoes.'

'I imagine we should only find in Syria what we took there, as Madame de Swetchine said of Rome,' replied Othmar, with some discontent. 'Life is an incomplete thing; unsatisfactory because its passions are finite, its years few, and its time of slow development and of slow decline wholly disproportionate, as you said just now, to its short moment of attainment and maturity; and also because habit, routine, prejudice, human stupidity, have all contrived to weight it with unnecessary burdens, to bind it with needless and intolerable laws, to take all the glow and spontaneity and rebound out of it. Conventionality is its curse.'

'And marriage!' said his wife. 'Oh, my dear, I do not mean to be unpleasant, but you know it is indisputably true that I should have been much fonder of you, and you of me, if we had never married each other. There is something stifling in marriage; it confounds love with property. I often wonder how the human race ever contrived to make such a mistake popular or universal.'

'It is not I who say that,' said Othmar with a touch of embarrassment.

'Oh no; but you think it. Every man thinks it,' she replied tranquilly. 'I often wonder,' she continued more dreamily, 'how it will be when you love some other woman. You will some day—of course you will. I wonder what will happen——'

'How can you do such injustice to me and to yourself? I shall never care for any other living thing.'

She looked at him through the shadow of her drooped lids.

'Oh yes, you will,' she repeated. 'It is inevitable. The only thing I am not sure about is how I shall take it. It will all depend, I think, on whether you confide in me, or hide it from me.'

'It would be a strange thing to confide in you!'

'Not at all. That is a conventional idea, and the idea of a stupid man. You are not stupid. I should certainly be the person most interested in knowing such a fact, and if you did tell me frankly, I think—I think I should be unconventional and clever enough not to quarrel with you. I think I should understand. But if you hid it from me, then——'

The look passed over her face which the dead Napraxine had used to fear as a hound fears the whip, and which Othmar had never seen.

'Then, I give you leave to deal me any death you like with your own hand,' he said with a laugh, which was a little forced because a certain chill had passed over him.

She laughed also.

'Well, be wise,' she said as she rose; 'you are warned in time. Oh, my dear Otho, you grant yourself that every passion is finite. I think it is; but I think also that the wise people, when it fades, make it leave friendship and sympathy behind it, as the beautiful blowing yellow corn when it is cut leaves the wheat. The foolish people let it leave all kinds of rancour, envy, and uncharitableness, as the brambles and weeds when they are burnt only leave behind them a foul smoke. But it is so easy to be philosophic in theory!'

'Your philosophy far exceeds mine,' said Othmar with a little impatience. 'I have not yet reached the period at which I can calmly contemplate my green April fields laid sear to give corn to the millstones; they are all in flower with the poppy and the campion.'

'Very prettily said,' replied his wife. 'You really are a poet at heart.'

Othmar went out from her presence that day with a vague sense of depression and of apprehension.

He had never wavered in his great love for her; the great passion with which she had inspired him still remained with him ardent and profound in much; the charm she had for his intelligence sustained the seduction for his senses; he loved her, only her, as much and as exclusively as in the early days of his acquaintance with her; she still remained the one woman upon earth for him. He could not hear her calmly speak of any future in which she would be less than then to him without a sense of irritation and offence. It seemed to him that such deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side by side with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used to it in her; he was accustomed to her delicate and critical dissection of every human motive and impulse, his, her own, or those of others; but it touched him now with a sense of pain, as though the scalpel had penetrated to some open nerve. His consciousness of his own devotion to her made him indignantly repulse the suggestion that he could ever change; yet his own knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said that such a change might come, would come; and he thrust the consciousness of that truth away as an insult and affront. Was there nothing which would endure and resist the cruel slow sapping of the waves of time? Was there no union, passion, or fidelity, strong enough to stand the dull fallings of the years like drops of grey rain which beat down the drooping rose and change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale, scentless wreck of itself?

CHAPTER VI.

On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St. Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the intervening flower-fields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to do so, and Othmar had not opposed it, though he would have preferred never again to see those shores; but, although she never spoke to him on that subject, she herself chose to go there with most winters, for the very reason that the world would sooner have expected her to shun the scenes of Yseulte's early and tragic death. She invariably did whatever her society expected her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame with which her conscience was moved, whenever she remembered the dead girl, was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and indifference which, for once, she did not feel.

She never remained long upon the Riviera; she seldom stayed long anywhere, except it were at Amyôt; but she went thither always when the violets were thick in the valleys, and the yellow blossoms of the butterwort were flung like so many golden guineas over the brown furrows of the fields. The children spent the whole winter there. This day, when they had wished her bonne fête, and brought her their great baskets of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play of children could ever be very long interesting; her mind was too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect thoughts of childhood. But in her own way she loved them. In her own way she took great care of their education, physical and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the world would honour; and she wished her daughter to be wholly unlike herself.

As yet they were hardly more than babies; lovely, happy, gay, and gentle. 'Let them be young as long as they can,' she said to those entrusted with their training. 'I was never young. It is a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after years.'

It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the odour from the orange buds; such a day as that on which Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him.

Several years had gone away since then; the whole world seemed changed; the dead past had buried its dead; there were the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness of the present.

'Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all governed at heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods. 'And by beauty,' she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of childish loveliness; ideal children also, who were always happy, always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood. Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming? Why had the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys of their possession? Why did her eyes delight to follow their movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter?

The other children had been as much hers, and she had always disliked them; she disliked them still, such time as she went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and that of all her dependents.

Othmar was devoted to the interests of Napraxine's two little sons; an uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he had not merited the frank and steady friendship of the dead man, perpetually impelled him to the greatest care of their fortunes and education. They were kindly, stupid, vigorous little lads, likely to grow into the image of their dead father; but all that could be done for them in mind and body, for their present and their future, he took heed should be done; and placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self-esteem which the adulation and submission they received everywhere on their estates had implanted in them long before they could spell. He never saw them come into his presence without painful memories and involuntary repugnance; but he repressed all signs of either, and the children, if they feared him, liked him. Of their mother they saw but very little: a lovely delicate vision, in an atmosphere scented like a tea rose, with a little sound in her voice which made them feel they must tread softly and speak low, looked at them with an expression which they did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother because they had always heard so: but Othmar seemed nearer to them than she did, and when they wished for anything, it was to him that they addressed their little rude scrawled notes. For the rest, they were always in Russia: it was the only stipulation with which their father had hampered their mother's guardianship of them.

'Let them be Russians always,' he had said in his last letter to her. 'Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign ways, which draw them away from their people, make their lands unknown and indifferent to them, and lead them to squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents. Paris is the succursale of Petersburg, and it is also its hell. When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the Nihilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach what I have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I would spend my strength, and my gold, and my years amongst my own people.'

'Poor Platon!' she had thought, more than once remembering those words. 'He thinks he would have done so, but he would not. The first drôlesse who should have crossed the frontier would have taken him back with her in triumph. It is quite true what he says; an absent nobility leaves an open door behind them, through which Sedition creeps in to jump upon their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the power, men will go where they are amused, and the Russian tchin will not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the Jews, and the drunken villagers all around his house, when he can live in the Avenue Joséphine, and never hear or see anything but what pleases him. Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and will ruin Russia; but, tant que le monde est monde, the man who has only one little short life of his own will like to enjoy it.'

Nevertheless, she and Othmar both respected his wishes, and his boys were brought up in the midst of the vast lands of their heritage, with everything done that could be done by tuition to amend their naturally slow intelligence and outweigh the stubbornness and arrogance begotten by centuries of absolute dominion in the race they sprang from. She herself only saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the flowering seas of grass and the scent of the violets in the larch woods brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They were unpleasant to her: always unpleasant. They were the living and intrusive records of years she would willingly have effaced. They were involuntary but irresistible reproaches spoken, as it were, by lips long dumb in death.

Living, their father had never had power to do otherwise than offend, irritate, and disgust her: the least active sentiment against himself that he had ever roused in her had been a contemptuous pity. But dead, there were moments when Platon Napraxine acquired both dignity and strength in her eyes: the silence of his death and its cause had commanded her respect: he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd, troublesome, in all his life; but in his death he had gained a certain grandeur, as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and white on their bier.

He had died to defend her name, and she could not remember ever once having given him one kind word! There had been a greatness in his loyalty and in his sacrifice to its demands which outweighed the clumsiness of his passion and the grotesqueness of his ignorance. 'If he were living again, I should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,' she thought at times; 'he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be as ridiculous, he would be as odious; and yet I should like for once to be able to say to him "Pauvre ours! vous êtes mal léché, mais vous avez bon cœur!"'

It was a vague remorse, but a sincere one; yet in her nature it irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought, and unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away as she had used to bid her women lock the doors of her chamber; and the poor ghost went away obediently, timid, wistful, not daring to insist, as the living man had used to do from the street door.

Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet's metrical romance and the dramatist's tragic story; but in the great world, in the pleasant world, in the world of movement, of distraction, of society, it is but a very faint mist, which at very distant intervals clouds some tiny space in a luminous sky, and hurries away before a breath of fashion, a whisper of news, a puff of novelty, as though conscious of its own incongruity and want of tact.

When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young Otho and his sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained on the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond with some friends about her. It was the last day in February, a day of warm winds and full sunshine and fragrant warmth. The air was penetrated with the sweet breath of primroses and the scented narcissus which were blossoming by millions under the woods of St. Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under her directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south coast of Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace made; a long line of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea, backed by palms and araucarias, with sheltered seats that no angry breeze could find out, and wide staircases descending to the smooth sands below. Here, lying on the cushions and white bearskins, and leaning one elbow on the balustrade, she could watch all the width of the waters as they stretched eastward and westward, and see the manœuvres in the cupraces of her friends' vessels without moving from her own garden. To the sea-terrace, when it was known that she would receive them, came, on such sunny afternoons as this, all those whom she deigned to encourage of the pleasure-seekers on the coast.

To see the sun set from that rose-marble terrace, and to take a Russian cigarette or a cup of caravan tea beneath those araucaria branches, was the most coveted distinction and one of the surest brevets of fashion in the world. She refused so many; she received so few; she was so inexorable in her social laws; mere rank alone had no weight with her; ambassadors could pass people to courts, but not up those rose-coloured stairs; princes and princesses, if they were dull, had no chance to be made welcome; and, in fine, to become an habitué there required so many perfections that the majority of the great world never passed the gates at all.

'The first qualification for admittance is that they must find something new to say every day,' she said to the Duc de Béthune, who was in an informal way her first chamberlain. 'The second is, that they must always amuse me.'

'The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall attain to fulfilment of the second?'

'That will remain to be seen,' she said with a little yawn, while she reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her feet on a silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly on a tortoiseshell field-glass. It was five o'clock; the western sky was a burning vault of rose and gold; the zenith had the deep divine blue that is like nothing else in all creation; the sea was radiant, purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere, as the light fell on it; delicate winds blew across it violet-scented from the land; the afternoon sun was warm, and as its light deepened made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the flowers of a pomegranate tree. She forgot her companions; she leaned her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many things; of the day she had first come thither most of all. It had been nine years before.

Nine years!—what an eternity! She remembered the bouquet which Othmar had given her on the head of the sea-stairs. What a lover he had been!—a lover out of a romance—Lelio, Ruy Blas, Romeo—anything you would. What a pity to have married him! It had been commonplace, banal, stupid—anybody would have done it. There had been a complete absence of originality in such a conclusion to their story.

If Laura had married Petrarca, who would have cared for the sonnets?

She laughed a little as she thought so. Her companions hoped they had succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard a word they were saying. She gazed dreamily at the sea through her eyelids, which looked shut, and pursued her own reflections.

Her companions of the moment were all men; the most notable of them were Melville, the Duc de Béthune, and a Russian, Loris Loswa.

Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a week or two in Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good works out of the sinners there, and lifting up the silver clarion of his voice against the curse of the tripot with unsparing denunciation.

The Duc de Béthune was there because for twelve years of his still young life he had been uneasy whenever many miles were between him and the face of his lady, whom he adored with the hopeless and chivalrous passion of which he had sustained the defence at the Court of Love at Amyôt. He would have carried her muff or her ribbon to the scaffold, like d'Aubiac and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take the trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at first sight with an intense passion for her, which had coloured and embittered some of the best years of his life. On the death of Napraxine he had been amongst the first to lay the offer of his life at her feet. She had rejected him, but without her customary mockery, even with a certain regret; and she had employed all the infinite power of her charms and tact of her intelligence to retain him as a companion whilst rejecting him as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to him, and had been long painful; but at last he chose rather to see her on those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time passed on, he grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife of Othmar, and the love he bore to her softened into regard, and lost its sting and its torment.

In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a great degree; he resembled the portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore himself like the fine soldier he was; he had a grave temperament and a romantic fancy; the cradle of his race was a vast dark fortress overhanging the iron-bound rocks of Finisterre, and his early manhood had been ushered in by the terrible tragedies of the année terrible. As volunteer with the Army of the North, Gui de Béthune had seen the darkest side of war and life; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes of his country had added to the natural seriousness of his northern temper. The most elegant of gentlemen in the great world of Paris, he yet had never abandoned himself as utterly as most men of his age and rank to the empire of pleasure; there was a certain reserve and dignity in him which became the cast of his features and the gravity and sweetness of his voice.

But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously to herself she was so used to consider that implicit and exclusive devotion to her as one of her rights, that she would have been astonished, even perhaps annoyed, had she seen that he took his worship elsewhere. Her remembrance had spoiled twelve years of the promise of his manhood, but if anyone had reproached her with that, she would have said sincerely enough, 'I cannot help his adoring me.' She would have even taken credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harmless breeze of friendly sympathy.

The Duc de Béthune was one of those conquests which flattered even her sated and fastidious vanity; and she had been touched to unwonted feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and lofty character of the loyalty he gave her so long.

She jested at him often, but she respected him always; occasionally she irritated Othmar by saying to him, half in joke and half in earnest:

'Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Béthune!'

That he remained unmarried for her sake was always agreeable to her.

Loris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her many servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early compromised in a students' revolt at Kieff, and through family influence had been allowed self-exile instead of deportation to Tobolsk. He had turned his steps to Paris, and, possessing great facility for art, had pursued the study seriously and so successfully, that before he was thirty he had become one of the most noted artists in France.

He had a wonderful talent for the portraiture of women. No one rendered with so much grace, so much charm, so much delicate flattery, running deftly in the lines of truth, the peculiar beauties of the mondaine, in which, however much nude nature may have done, art always does still more. All that subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of society, which is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and manner and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things, was caught and fixed by the brush or by the crayon of Loris Loswa with a power all his own, and a fidelity which became the most charming of compliments. Ruder artists, truer perhaps to art than he, grumbled at his method and despised his renown. 'Faiseur de chiffons' some students wrote once upon his door; and there were many of his brethren who pretended that his creations were nothing more than audacious, and unreally brilliant, trickeries.

But detraction did not lock the wheels of his triumphal chariot; it glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the pleasant avenues of popular admiration. And his art pleased too many connoisseurs of elegant taste and cultured sight not to have in it some higher and finer qualities than his enemies allowed to it. He had magical colouring, and as magical a touch; a woman's portrait, under his treatment, became gorgeous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid, ethereal as a butterfly floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times arrogant in his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters; he was given to call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his critics and increased his vogue; he was an aristocrat, and very good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any class of women; and what increased it still more was, that he refused many more sitters than he accepted. Not to have been painted in water colours, or drawn in pastel by Count Loris Loswa, was to any élégante to be a step behindhand in fashion; to have a pearl missing from her crown of distinction.

'If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,' a great critic had said one day. 'Have you never seen dew on a cobweb? It is the most beautiful thing in the world, especially when a sunbeam trembles through it.'

His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers, mingled with a certain depreciation of them. 'Perhaps it is only a trick,' she admitted; 'but it is a divine trick—a trick of Hermes.'

He leaned now over the balustrade of the terrace of St. Pharamond, the warmth of the western sun shining on his fair curls and straight profile.

'A coxcomb can never be a genius,' murmured the Duc de Béthune, glancing towards him with sovereign contempt and dislike.

'You are always very porté against poor Loris,' returned his hostess with a smile. 'Yes, he has genius in a way, the same sort of genius that Watteau had, and Coustou and Boucher; he should have been born under Louis Quinze; that is his only mistake.'

'He is a coxcomb,' repeated Béthune.

'He seems so to you, because all your life has been filled with grave thoughts and strong actions. All artists are apt to seem mere triflers to all soldiers. Who is that girl he is looking at?—what a handsome face!'

She raised herself a little on her elbow, and looked down over the balustrade; a small boat with a single red sail and two women under it were passing under the terrace; one of them was old, brown and ugly, the other was young, fair, and with golden-brown hair curling under a red woollen fisher's cap. The water was shallow under the marble walls of St. Pharamond; the boat was drifting very slowly; there was a pile of oranges and lemons in it as its cargo; the elder woman, with one oar in the water, was with her other hand counting copper coins into a leathern bag in her lap; the younger, who steered with a string tied to her foot, was managing the sail with a practised skill which showed that all maritime exercises were familiar to her. When she sat down again she looked up at the terrace above her.

She had a beautiful and uncommon countenance, full of light; the light of youth, of health, of enjoyment; she wore a gown of rough dark-blue sea-stuff much stained with salt water, and the sleeves of it were rolled up high, showing the whole of her bare and admirably moulded arms. The memories of Melville and of his hostess both went back to the day when they had seen another boat upon those waters with the happy loveliness of youth within it.

Loris Loswa, full of outspoken admiration, exhausted all his epithets of praise as he watched the little vessel drift by them, slowly, very slowly, for there was no wind to aid it, and the oar was motionless in the water.

'Stay, oh stay!' he cried to the boat, and began to murmur the 'Enfant, si j'étais roi——'

'If you were a king you could hardly do better than what, I am quite sure, you will do as it is,' said Nadine. 'Find out where she lives, and make her portrait for next year's Salon. She is very handsome, and that old scarlet cap is charming. Let us recompense her for passing, and astonish her.'

As she spoke she drew a massive gold bracelet off her own arm, and leaning farther down over the marble parapet, threw it towards the girl. Her aim was good; the boat was almost motionless, the bracelet was very weighty; it fell with admirable precision where it was intended to fall—on the knees of the girl as she sat in the prow behind the pile of golden fruit.

'How astonished and pleased she will be!' said Loswa. 'It is only you, Madame, who have such apropos inspirations.'

Even as he spoke the maiden in the boat had taken up the bracelet, looked at it a moment with a frown upon her face, then without a second's pause had sprung to her feet to obtain a better attitude for her effort, and with a magnificent sweep of her bare arm upward and backward cast the thing back again on high on to the balustrade, where it rolled to the feet of its mistress.

Without waiting an instant, she plucked the oars up, one from the hand of the old woman the other from the bottom of the boat, and with vigorous strokes drove her sluggish old vessel past the terrace wall, never once looking up, and not heeding the cries of her companion. In a few moments, under her fierce swift movements, the boat was several yards away, leaving the shallow water for the deeper, and hidden altogether from the gaze of her admirers by the red sail flaked with amber and bistre stains, where wind, and sun, and storm had marked it for their own.

'What has happened?' said Melville, who had not understood the episode of the bracelet, rising and coming towards them.

'We are in Arcadia, Monsignor!' cried Nadine. 'A peasant girl rejects a jewel!'

'Is she a peasant? I should doubt it,' said Béthune.

Melville looked through one of the spy-glasses.

'No, no! It is Damaris Bérarde,' he said as he laid it aside. 'She is by no means a peasant. She is a great heiress in her own little way, and as proud as if she were dauphine of France.'

'Damaris! What a pretty name!' said Loswa. 'It makes one think of damask roses, and she is rather like one. Where does she live, Monsignor?'

'She lives with her grandfather on a little island which belongs to him. He is a very well-to-do man, but a great brute in many ways; he is not cruel to the girl, but were she to cross his will I imagine he would be. Krapotkine is his hero and Karl Marx his prophet; he is the most ferocious anarchist. You know the sort of man. It is a sort very common in France, and especially so in the South. Did you give her a jewel, Madame Nadège? Ah, that was a very great offence! She must have been mortally offended. When that child is en fête she has a row of pearls as big as any in your jewel-cases.'

'She looked a poor girl, and I thought I should please her,' said Nadine, with impatience. 'Who was to tell that the owner of pearls as big as sparrows' eggs was rowing in a fruit-boat, bare-armed and bare-headed?'

'Where did you say that she lived?' asked Loswa, curious and interested.

'Oh, on an island a long way off from here,' said Melville, regretting that he had spoken of this source of dissension.

'Take me to that island, Monsignor,' murmured Loris Loswa in his ear.

'Oh, indeed no,' said the priest hastily. 'You are a "cursed aristocrat;" the old man would receive you with a thrust of a pike.'

'I would take my chance of the pike,' said Loswa, 'and I would assure him that the future lies with the Anarchists, for I believe it, and I would not add that I also think that their millennium will be most highly uncomfortable.'

'Will you take me to that island, Monsignor?' said Nadine. 'It will not be favourable to fashionable impressionists like Loris.'

Loswa coloured a little with irritation; he had not thought she would overhear his request. He was, besides, despite his vanity, always vaguely sensible that her admiration of his powers was tinged with contempt.

'You, Madame!' cried Melville, cordially wishing that the island of Damaris Bérarde was far away in the Pacific in lieu of a score of leagues off the shores of Savoy. 'Would I take the world incarnate, the most seductive and irresistible of all its votaries, into a convent of Oblates to torture all the good Sisters condemned to eternal seclusion? That poor little girl is a little recluse, a little barbarian, but she is happy in her solitude, in her sauvagerie. Were she once to see the Countess Othmar she would know peace no more.'

'She must see many very like me if she live a mile or so off these shores,' said Nadine, dismissing the subject with indifference. 'I am sure it is she who is to be envied if she can find any entertainment in rowing about in a boat full of oranges. I would do it this moment if it would amuse me, but it would not. That is the penalty of having sophisticated and corrupted tastes. How old is your paragon?'

'Did I say she was a paragon? She is a good little girl. Her age? I should think fifteen, sixteen; certainly not more. Her birth is rather curious. Her mother was an actress, and her father the master of a fruit-carrying brig; dissimilar enough progenitors. Her father was drowned, and her mother died of nostalgia for the stage; and Damaris was left to the care of her grandfather, the fierce old Communist I have described to you. However, he is not so terrible a bigot after all, for he allowed her to be taught by the Sisters at the Villefranche Convent, as a concession to me when I knew him first, in return for a little service I had done him. He thinks it does not much matter what women do; to him they are only beasts of burden; he likes to see his hung with pearls only as he puts tassels and ribbons on his cows when they are taken to market.'

'And what service did you render him?'

'Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,' said Melville, who never spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were many. The old man's younger and only remaining son had lain dying of Asiatic cholera, brought to the coast in some infected load of Eastern rags, with which they had manured the olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to approach the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized at dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over, and with his own hands had aided Jean Bérarde to lay the body of his boy in mother-earth. When the grave was filled up, the old socialist, to whom priests had been as loathliest vermin, gave his knotted work-worn hand to the slender white hand of Melville:

'The only one that had the courage!' he muttered. 'Do not try to do anything with me, it would be no use; but do what you like about the child. I will say nothing. You alone stayed by me to see her uncle die.'

So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to learn of the Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to go also to Mass on high days and holy days. But Melville saw no necessity to say all this to his worldly friends upon the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he even reproached himself that, in a momentary unconsidered impulse, he had given the name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a man to go in cold blood on a seducer's errand, but he was conceited, sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without much consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or to others. And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he had committed an imprudence.

'Jean Bérarde,' he continued, 'of course, abhors priests, and would have a general massacre of the Church. But I chanced to do him a service, as I said, some time ago, and so he allows me now and then to go and sit under his big olives and talk to the child, and even, grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now and then. His past is written clearly enough in the history of Savoy, but he either does not know or does not care anything about his descent. All he does care about are his profits from olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from smuggling. What is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew his forefathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his own. Perhaps the fury of the Ça ira got into him, being begotten, as he was, in that time of blood and flame through which his progenitors passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of socialists now.

'The Counts de la Bérarde were very mighty people; almost as great as their suzerains and neighbours, the Counts of Dauphiné. The cradle of their race, of which you may see one tower standing now, was set amongst the glaciers and gorges of the Val St. Christophe; it stood above the Romanche on a great slope of gneiss, with the snow mountains at its back. Up to the time of Richelieu the Bérardes were omnipotent, and they had sway as far down as the sea coast, and it is said that sea piracy, as well as stoppage of land travellers going on their horses and sumpter mules through the passes, swelled their wealth and their power not a little. All these mountain lords were robbers in those days. If you have never been up as far as the St. Christophe valley, you should go as soon as the weather opens and the roads are passable; all the cols and the combes are fine, well worth a little Alpine climbing; and the Pointe des Écrins may hold its own with the peaks of the Engadine.

'Well, to revert to the Counts de Bérarde: Richelieu broke the back of their power—it is odd that a Churchman, doing all he could to strengthen the hands of a king, did in truth lay the first stone of what became centuries after the Revolution!—their chiefs were beheaded on the ramparts of Briançon, their castle in the Alps was razed, and only two or three of their younger scions survived the general destruction of the race. From one of these distant branches, Jean de la Bérarde, who had a small stronghold on the sea, and who became, by all these executions, the head of the family, this old man who owns Bonaventure, and is the rudest and roughest of cruisers and farmers, is lineally descended. I have been at pains to make out his genealogy. These matters always have interest for me, and it is curious to trace how the old patrician strain comes out in the girl, his grand-daughter, though he himself is nothing more than a boor. The Bérardes never recovered the massacres and confiscations of the reign of Louis XIII., though they were small suzerains on the sea-coast up to the days of Louis XV. They then fell into poverty, and lost their hold over their neighbours; the Terror extinguished them entirely; they were swallowed up in the night of anarchy. But Jean Bérarde of Bonaventure is legally heir of the Count Alain de la Bérarde, who was taken to Toulon, and shot there by the Maratists of Freron and Barras. His only son, being a lad at the time, was saved by disguising himself as a fisherman, and, being utterly beggared by the Jacobins, took to the coasting trade, and in time saved money, married a peasant, and bought the island: my socialist friend was his son.

'That is the story of these people, who in two generations have dropped the very memory of the fierce nobles they sprang from so entirely that the old man on Bonaventure is as rabid a Communist as any man can be who has property and clings to it. There—I have been terribly prosy, and Madame will say that all this genealogy is of no earthly interest to her; and, indeed, it cannot be to any of you, only that to a student of human nature it is always, in a measure, interesting to see how old races look under new hoods.'

'In this instance,' said Nadine smiling, 'the old race looks very pretty under the Phrygian cap. The girl is unusually handsome. You would be wild to paint her, Loswa, if only she were a duchess!'

'I would ask no better fate as it is,' he replied. 'But perhaps it might not be so easy. The grandfather Bérarde is sure to be a Cerberus.'

'You must air your destructive doctrines before him; he will be fascinated; he will not know that you live with the duchesses, and would not trouble yourself actually to walk the length of a boulevard to save All The Russias.'

'I am not a political hypocrite, Madame, though you are pleased to ridicule me as an artistic impostor,' said Loswa, with an angry flush on his face.

She cast the end of her cigarette into the sea.

'Oh no; you are not a hypocrite; you would very much like to see the destruction of the whole world, provided only that your own armchair should withstand the shock. There are so many anarchists of that type; and, indeed, why should you die for politics or creed when you can live and paint such charming pictures? For your pictures are very charming, though they are all pearl-powder and point-lace, all satins and brocades, and we are all going to Court in every one of them.'

'Vandyke did not paint beggars,' said Loswa, who would have lost his temper had he dared.

She looked at him with amusement.

'But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris; you are, at most, Lely or Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your brushes a little more than it should have done. You have only one defect as an artist, but it is a capital offence, and you will not outgrow it—you are never natural!'

He was silent from vexation.

He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw in himself a mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and Largillière, and was often restless and nervous under his sense of her depreciative criticism; but he was very proud of the intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and usually bore her chastisement with a spaniel's humility; a quality rare in him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was.

'If you do take a portrait of that child,' she pursued, pointing to the distant boat, 'you will be utterly unable to portray her as she is; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown, the sea-tan on her face, the rough dull red of that old worn sea-cap. You will idealise her, which with you means that you will make her utterly artificial. She will become a goddess of liberty, and she will look like a maid of honour frisking under a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court. The simple sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish, will be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond the Lelys and the Bouchers, though it would not have been beyond Vandyke. Do you think you could paint a forest-tree or a field-flower? Not you; your daisy would become a gardenia, and your larch would be a lime on the boulevards.'

'Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly become a patroness of nature? Then surely even I, poor creature of the boulevards though I be, need not despair of becoming natürlich?'

'You mistake,' said Nadine with a little sadness. 'I have lived in a hothouse, but I have always envied those who lived in the open air. Besides, I am not an artist; I am a mere mondaine. I was born in the world as an oyster is in its shallows. But an artist, if he be worthy the name, should abhor the world. He should live and work and think and dream in the open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose Millet could have breathed an hour in your studio with its velvets and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and screens and rugs, and carefully shaded windows? He would have been stifled. Why is nearly all modern work so valueless? Because it is nearly all of it studio-work; work done at high pressure and in an artificial light. Do you think that Michel Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell Road? Or do you think that Murillo or Domenichino would have built themselves an hotel in the Avenue Villiers? Why is Basil Vereschaguin, with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way sublime? Because he works in the open air; in no light tempered otherwise than by the clouds as they pass, or by the leaves as they move.'

'For heaven's sake!' cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal.

She laughed a little.

'Ah, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and graces!—of course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is terrible to you. But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what he is; I suppose it is as much your duchesses' fault as your own.'

Then she turned away and left this favourite of fortune and great ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and mortified; bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things, wounded vanity.

Good heavens! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a woman's base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted her portrait in such wise that season after season each succeeding one had been the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon? Was it for this that he had immortalised her face looking out from a cloud of shadow like a narcissus in the mists of March?—that he had drawn her in every attitude and every costume, from the loose white draperies of her hours of langour to the golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress at imperial palaces? Was it for this that he had composed that divinest portrait of them all, in which, with a knot of stephanotis at her breast and a collar of pearls at her throat, she seemed to smile at all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile which had killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying in an ivory case, which once was steeped in aqua Tofana for Lucrezia or Bianca? Was it for this!—to be called opprobrious, derisive names, and have Basil Vereschaguin, the painter of death, of carnage, of horror, of brown Hindoos and hideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master!

He hated Vereschaguin as a Sèvres vase, had it a mind and soul to hate, might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator; and his tormentor, in a moment of mercilessness and candour, had wounded him with a weapon whose use he never forgave.

'He is a coxcomb! Béthune is quite right,' she said of him when Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. 'He has marvellous talent and technique, but he dares to think that these two are genius. If he had not likened himself to Vandyke I might perhaps never have told him what I think of his place in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty painter, and his portraits of me are charming; but if they be looked at at all in the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we rank now the pastels of Rosalba; certainly not higher than we rank the portraits of Greuze.'

'If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,' said Melville with a smile.

'No you would not,' said Nadine; 'you would not be content to be a d'Estrées in your own profession, nor any other mere Court cardinal.'

CHAPTER VII.

The following morning Loris Loswa rose much earlier than his wont, and went out of the gilded gate of the pretty little villa which he had taken for the season at St. Raphael; a coquettish place with large gardens and trellised paths overhung with creepers; and down below, a small cutter ready for use in a nook of the bay where the aloes and the mimosa grew thickest. It all belonged to a friend of his, who was away in distant lands to escape his creditors, and by whose misfortunes Loswa had profited with that easy egotism which had been so advantageous to him throughout his life, and which looked so good-natured that no one resented it. He descended this morning to the shore by the winding cactus-lined path which led down to it, and asked the sailors if they knew of an island called Bonaventure. They knew nothing about it; they, however, consulted the admiralty maps and found it: a tiny dot some leagues to the south-westward.

A fisherman who was on the beach at the time told him more. He knew the island, everybody knew it; but nobody ever was allowed to land there; its owner was an odd man, morose and suspicious; the demoiselle was good and kind; the islet belonged to Jean Bérarde, who owned every inch of it. He would leave it to the girl of course. It was small, but of very considerable profit. Loswa listened with impatience, and told his skipper to make for the isle as fast as he could. He himself knew nothing of the sea, and hated it; but he was piqué au jeu. Melville had almost forbidden him to go thither, and the great lady who had ridiculed him had doubted his power to paint the picture of a peasant-girl. The irritation of antagonism had aroused all the obstinacy and all the capricious self-will of an undisciplined and vain nature.

'To Bonaventure!' he said with triumph, as in the glad and cloudless morning air his little vessel danced over the waves, the great seagulls wheeling and screaming in her wake. There were a buoyant sea and a favouring breeze.

Loswa detested both sea and country, and was never at heart content off the asphalte of the boulevards. But since it would have looked very vulgar to spend his whole winter in Paris, he selected the south coast usually for the colder months, because the world went with him there, because he saw so many faces that were familiar, and because on this shore so thickly set with châlets and villas, so artificially adorned, so trimmed, and trained, and levelled, and planted by architect and landscape gardener, it was possible for him to forget that he was not in Paris; the very sea itself, so blue, so tranquil, so idly basking in broad light and luminous horizons, seemed like the painted sea of an operetta by Lecocq.

Besides, though he had no pleasure in rural or maritime things, found no joy in solitude and no consolation in nature for the loss of the movement of the world, he could not have been the fine colourist he was without possessing a fine sense of colour, and the power to appreciate beautiful lines, and all the changeful effects of light and shade. He did not see Nature as Millet or Corot saw it, but as Lancret or Coypel saw it. It was only a background for a nymph or a goddess to him as to them; but he was not insensible to the forms which made up that background: the sunlit vapour, the blue mountain, the golden woodland, or the shadowy lake.

The sea was full of life: market-boats, fishing-boats, skiffs of all kinds, with striped curved lateen sails, were crossing each other on it. There were a few yachts, French, English, American, at anchor in the bays, in waiting for the cup-races; there were some merchant ships afar off, brown-canvased brigs bearing in from Genoa or Ajaccio, and the ugly black smoke of a big steamer here and there defaced the marvellous blue and rose of the air at the birth of day. The sea was buoyant but not rough, his light cutter few airily as a curlew over the azure plain. There were mists to the southward, lovely white mists, airy and suggestive as the veil of a bride, but they floated away before the sun, so rapidly as the day grew on, that the bold indented lines of Corsica became visible, bathed in a rosy and golden warmth. He had enough soul in him to feel the beauty of the morning though he had been playing baccarat at the club till an hour or two previously; to be conscious of the charm of this full clear sunrise which bathed the world of waters in its radiance, of the silver-shining wings of the white gulls dipping in the hollow of the wave, of the grandeur of the land as he looked back at it with its semicircles of snow-capped hills towering to the skies. But he would not have cared for them had there been no human interest beside them.

After sailing steadily some two hours or so they sighted, and in another two hours neared, a little island which was certainly the one marked on the French chart as Bonaventure, lying all alone far out to the south-west. Loswa did not need the positive assertion of his crew to tell him that he had arrived at his desired goal. It was small, conical-shaped, high, and steep, with a broad reef of sand to the northward. It rose aloft in the air, grey with olives, green with orange-trees. No habitation was visible upon it; but on the sand there was drawn up high and dry an old boat with a sail of Venetian red stained brown by wear and tear.

The island had evidently been made fruitful at the cost of many centuries of labour; the natural rock of it was terraced with many ridges rising one above another, each planted with productive trees; the soil had no doubt been carried up load by load with infinite trouble; but the effect of the whole was luxuriant and picturesque, as the conelike mass of verdure, here silver-grey and there emerald green, towered upward in the thin sun-pierced vapours of the early day.

The soundings showed deep water almost up to the rock itself.

'I am going to sketch,' said Loswa to his skipper as he pointed to the level strip of sand. 'Let me land there.'

Their assertions that no one ever did land there he disregarded. A small boat was rowed up to the strip of beach, and he got out, bidding his sailors wait round the edge of a jutting rock, which would give them shade as the day should advance.

He glanced at the old red coble drawn up on the shore. It was the same he had seen three days before; he felt sure of it by its colour and its build.

He looked about him and around him for a means of ascent, and saw a zigzag path that wound up through the hanging orchards of olive, of lemon, and of orange, and higher still the rope-ladder called passerelle, so often used in the Riviera to climb steep rocks. The air was full of the intense perfume of the trees, which were starred all over with their white blossoms. He thought of Sicily, where you have to shut your door against the fragrance of the fields in spring, lest you should faint and sleep for ever from their fragrance.

The path and the passerelle would certainly, he reasoned, lead up to any house there might be at the summit. He slung his sketching things over his shoulder and began to mount the crooked rocky road of moss-grown stone with cyclamen growing in its crevices, and the rose-hued flowers of the leafless cereus springing up here and there.

But he was not allowed to ascend unchallenged; high above him there was a rustling sound, then a deep angry growl, and in a moment or two a great white Pyrenean dog showed himself, stared down at him with frank hostility, and bounded headlong from ridge to ridge underneath the boughs, with full intent to reach him and devour him. But a voice called aloud: 'Tò, tò, Clovis!' and Loswa smiled. He knew he had succeeded.

Through the labyrinth of branches, springing after the dog, came the girl who had thrown back the gold bracelet to the lady of St. Pharamond.

'The dog will not hurt you whilst I am here,' she called out to him. 'But he might kill you if I were not. Do you want my grandfather? Why have you landed here? It is private ground. He has gone to Grasse for two days to see an oil merchant.'

Loswa felt that he could not have timed his visit more felicitously.

'Good heavens! what a handsome child,' he thought, as he bowed to her with his easy grace and that eloquent glance which had power to stir the most languid pulses of his patrician sitters.

'I landed in hopes that I might be allowed to paint the view from this exquisite little spot,' he said with well-acted hesitation in his manner. 'A friend of mine, who is, I think, a friend of yours too, a priest of the name of Melville, has spoken to me so often of the beauty of your island.'

Standing above him, holding the big dog by the collar, she smiled at the name of Melville, and came a few steps nearer with more confidence. She never for a moment doubted the entire truth of what he said.

Her blue-and-brown-striped linen gown was but a wisp; it had been drenched through in its time with sea-water, and had the stains of grasses, and dews, and sands, and fruits upon it; it was bound round her waist by a leathern belt, and its short sleeves were pulled up to the shoulder, as they had been the day before. But no artist would have wished for a better dress, and even a sculptor would not have desired to remove it from the limbs that it clung to so closely that it hid nothing of their perfect shape and the curves of the throat and breast that had the indecision and softness of childhood with the fulness of feminine growth. Her hair was tucked away under a red fisher cap, a veritable bonnet rouge; and her large brilliant eyes, of an indescribable colour, were shining, as if the sun was imprisoned in them, under level, dark delicate eyebrows. Her skin was fair, her hair auburn. He thought he had seen nothing so perfectly lovely in all his life: it was a living Titian, a virgin Giorgione.

'Anyone who knows Monsignor Melville is welcome to Bonaventure,' she said frankly. 'It is a pity my grandfather is away. He does not like strangers, but a friend of Monsignor's would not seem so to him. No one has ever been here to paint anything before. What is it you want to paint—the house?'

Loswa knew that he had done a dishonourable thing, and a mean one, in using Melville's name as a passport to a place where Melville would never have allowed him to go had he known it; but, like everyone else, having begun on a wrong course he went on in it. He had succeeded so well at the commencement that he would not listen to that delicacy of good breeding which represented conscience to him.

'Do not be afraid of Clovis. He will not hurt you now he sees that I speak to you; he is so sensible. Will you come now or another day?' she asked him with the frankness of a boy.

'We have a Latin poet who tells us that to-day alone is our own,' said Loswa with a smile. 'I will come now at once, and most gladly. Clovis is a grand dog and a good guard for his young mistress,' he added; thinking to himself, 'how lovely she is, and she knows it no more than if she were a sea anemone on the shore; and she looks at me and speaks to me with no more embarrassment than if I were but the wooden figure of a ship!'

'I will come up most gladly,' he said again, with more ardour than he showed in a duchess's drawing-rooms. 'It is so very kind of you. I am sure the view from the summit must be magnificent. I fear though,' he added, with hypocritical modesty, 'that it will be beyond my powers.'

'I hope not. I shall like to see anyone paint,' she said with cordiality; and added, a little ashamed, 'I have never seen anyone paint; I have heard of such a thing of course, and there are the pictures in the churches and chapels which one knows were painted by men; but I have no idea of how it is done.'

'You should have been shown by Raphael himself,' said Loswa.

'Raphael?' she echoed. 'Oh no, he is our fruit-packer; he would not know how to do it any better than I do,' she said as she turned and began to ascend to show him the way.

'Can you climb?' she added, looking at him doubtfully. 'I mean climb where it is like a stone wall?'

She had taken him under her protection and into her favour, but he felt that he would have preferred to this frank innocent friendliness a certain hesitation and embarrassment such as would have indicated a different kind of sentiment as possible. She was as kind to him, as simple and frank and candid with him, as if he were any old fisherman that she had known from her birth. It was not what he desired, yet it had a certain charm; it was so childlike, so honest, so free from all affectation or self-consciousness, or lurking suspicion or intention of any sort.

'Clovis is so good,' she pursued, all unconscious of his reflections. 'His wife (she is called Brunehildt) had four puppies yesterday. Two were drowned; it was such a pity! I am going to give one of the two left to Monsignor; he is always fond of dogs. Take care how you come up, it is very steep; for me I am used to it. I run up and down a dozen times a day; but a person not used to it may slip.'

It was, indeed, steep, and often there were ledges of rock in the way which had to be jumped over or scrambled over in any handiest fashion, whilst on others the perpendicular face of the cliff could only be ascended by the rope-ladder so often in use in the Riviera; but Loswa, in an indolent way, was athletic; he had in his youth been skilled in gymnastic exercises, and though now enervated by his life in cities, he kept apace with her, and soon had gained the level summit of the island, a broad green tableland planted with olives and oranges, with here and there a great stone pine, relic of the wild pine woods which, before the petite culture had stepped thither with axe and spade, had clothed doubtless the whole of Bonaventure down to the water's edge.

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 drew her hand from him and frowned a little.

'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, was as profoundly ignorant of the tripot and its works as if Bonaventure had been in the Pacific.

'I have heard,' she continued, 'that there are very strange things and people over there, that it is a feast-day every day with them, and all their life like a fair. My grandfather always says he would shoot them all down as they shot the hostages in the Commune, but I do not think that would be right. If they are silly, one should pity them.'

'They are silly indeed, and I fear your sweet pity would not avail to save them. The feast-day is a sorry affair at its close.'

'Oh, I know. I have seen Raphael come home drunk and beat Jacqueline (that is his wife) because she cried; and he is as good as gold when he is sober, and as gentle as a sheep when there is no drink.'

'In some way we all drink, we unfortunates,' said Loswa; then, seeing her look of surprise, he added, 'I did not speak literally, my dear; your Raphael's drink is a petit vin bleu, and ours is a costly thing we call Pleasure, but it comes to the same result; only, I suppose, Raphael has some five or six days in the week that he is good for work, and we cannot say as much as that. We are all the week round at the fair.'

She ruffled her pretty loose short locks that hung over her forehead, and her brilliant eyes looked at him perplexedly.

'I am glad I live on the island,' she said as the issue of her perplexity.

'And I too am glad you do,' said he, with more sincerity than he usually put into his pretty speeches.

He felt that before he approached the great object of his voyage he must justify his pretences and win her confidence by painting something which would please her fancy. To his facility of touch it was easy and rapid work to sketch on his block of paper the sea view, the terrace wall, the interior of the sitting-room, the old chairs, and the silver tankards. Sheet after sheet was filled and cut off and sent fluttering into her eager hands. To her it seemed the work of magic. Just a little water and a few pans of colour could make all the sea and sky, all the plants and stones, all the pots and pans and household things, seem real again on fragments of paper! She did not heed or even know that he was a man, young and handsome, whose eyes spoke a bold and amorous language; she was absorbed in his creations; he seemed to her the most marvellous of sorcerers. With delighted cries of recognition she welcomed the likeness of all the places and the objects so familiar to her; she was filled with a rapture of childish ecstasy. She hung over his work and watched him with a wonder which was only not awe, because it was such frank and childish delight.

Whilst he sketched, he let her talk at her will, in her own fashion, putting a few careless questions now and then. She was by nature gay and communicative; the seclusion and severity of her rearing had not extinguished the natural buoyancy and originality of her temper, and it was a pleasure to her to have anyone to speak to of other things than the land labours and the household work.

In a few brief phrases she had described to him all her short simple life; how her mother had died at her birth, they said, and her father when she had been eight years old; how she had never been baptised 'or anything,' until, to please Melville, her grandsire had allowed her to enter the Church's fold like a little stray sheep; how she had been brought up by old Catherine, and taught to read by her, and how she had managed to read all the books her mother had left: Corneille, Racine, Lamartine, Lamotte, Fouquet, La Fontaine, and knew them almost all by heart, for she had no new ones; she told him all about the culture of the olive and the various kinds of oranges, and all the different methods of pruning, tending, packing them; the big fragrant golden balls were much nearer to her heart than the black oily olives, but she was learned about both; she told him also all about the poor people she knew on the coast, of the young men whom the conscription had taken just as they were of use to their people, of the old women who took the flowers into the towns, of the children who could swim and dive like little fish, and were her playmates when she had time to play; the boat-builders, the fisherfolk, the flower-sellers, the toilers of the working world of whom all the fashionable world that flocks to the Riviera knows nothing, unless it throws them a few pence in the dust of the road, or thinks they form a pretty point of colour against the white walls and the flower-filled grass, or bids them make a bouillabaisse for a picnic in some little wooden cabin high up upon the red rocks, amongst the cactus spikes and the sea-pinks.

All this simple talk interested Loswa as it would never have done had not the mouth which uttered it been as lovely to look at as a half-opened damask rose.

'How came Monsignor Melville to speak of me to you?' she asked once with a persistency which was a strong trait of her character.

'He recognised you,' he answered her. 'He told us that you were prouder than any princess of them all, and that where we had meant but a joke you had, very naturally, seen an affront. He is much attached to you, I am sure, and felt quite as angry as you were.

'I was very angry,' she said passionately, with the colour hot in her cheeks. 'I thought the lady took me for a beggar. When one goes in a boat one cannot be endimanchée. I was taking the oranges to the Petite Afrique; there is a little old woman who keeps a little old shop there, and has nothing but what she makes by the sale of the fruit people give her. There are three trees here that are my own; my father planted them when he was home from a voyage, and to all their fruit I have a right. Grandfather lets me sell it or give it away.'

'And I am sure you do always the latter?'

'Oh, not quite always. Sometimes I want money for something, and then I sell the oranges; but it is only if there be a wreck, or a boat lost at sea, or a death or a birth. Of course I want nothing for myself; grandfather does not let me want, but he is not fond of giving to others, he likes to keep money locked up, and see it grow slowly bit upon bit like the coral. Do you like that? Myself, I think there is no pleasure at all in money except to give it away.'

'But whom do you give it to? You are all alone on your island.'

'There are the people who work for us; and then I know so many on the coast. I have come and gone between this and the mainland so many many times, ever since I was a baby. It is such a good life being on the sea; so long as I have the water I never want anything else. Some of them call me la mouette.'

'It is the best of all lives. I am much on the sea myself,' said her companion, who hated the sea.

'You have a boat then?'

'I have a yacht; yes.'

'All to yourself?'

'Yes; to go about in as I fancy. I shall be delighted if you will sail in it some day.'

'Ah! it is a pleasure-ship then? I see those little ships racing often; they are beautiful. You must be very rich to have one all to yourself, not trading anywhere, or even dredging. How much money have you? And how do you keep it? In boxes, in coffers? Some of my grandfather's is down the well; he took bricks out of the side of the well, put the money in the hole, and then put back the bricks again. He did it at night; no one knows it but me. Do you keep your money like that?'

'No; in our world we give it to other men to take care of for us.'

'That seems very stupid. Why not take care of your own?'

She was sitting on the parapet of the terrace, her feet hung down; she leaned one hand on the stone she sat on; behind her was the broad blue of the sky, and about her all the shining of the effulgent light. She looked like a rhododendron flower growing up into the sunshine out of a corner of a dusky old garden.

'You have not told me how much money you have,' she pursued. 'If you let other folks take care of it for you, it is no wonder that you gentle people come to poverty so often.'

'We have too many caretakers, no doubt,' said Loswa, 'and they feather their own nests. But I am not a very rich man; pray do not think I am. I am only an artist. Nobody is rich now except the Jews here, and the rogues across the Atlantic. Would you let me make a sketch of yourself just as you sit now? It would be charming.'

'Will you give it to that lady?'

'No, on my honour. I will give it to you, and make a copy for myself.'

'Well, if you like; but would it not be better if I put on my Sunday frock?'

'Not for worlds. Sunday frocks have no affinity with art, my dear; yours is, no doubt, a very pretty one, but I should prefer to make your portrait as I have seen you first.'

'Oh, I do not mind; only this gown is very shabby and old. I am grown too big for it. I am always growing. Monsignor says that if I grew in grace as I do in centimètres I should soon be a saint like our St. Veronica.'

'It is not for me to disparage the saints,' said Loswa, 'but I think you will have another mission in this life than to be of their community. Keep still a little while; I will not detain you long. So!—that is just right. I wish I were Raffaelle and Leonardo in one, to be worthier of the occasion.'

'Who are they?' said Damaris, as he set his folding easel straight before him and began to sketch in the flowerlike figure on the wall, fresh and wholesome as the sea-lavender that grew in the sand below. He who was all his life in a hothouse recognised the value and fragrance of that sea-born plant, though it was too homely and simple for him; recognised it with his mind, though not with his soul.

The girl knew nothing of all that made up the world to him; the names most common to him in modern literature and art were to her dead letters that said nothing; the allusions familiar to him would have been to her phrases without meaning; all that constitutes modern culture was to her as an unknown country, and the only whisper she had ever heard of all that poets and artists tell the world was what she had felt rather than understood of the read and re-read pages of 'Athalie,' and of 'Attila,' of 'Cinna,' and of 'Sintram.' Yet there was a certain richness, as of virgin soil, in that absolute freedom from conventional education, and from received ideas; she expressed herself with simplicity and vigour, and this unworn, untrained mind, only nurtured on the high thoughts of great poets, had escaped all the bondage of tradition and of secondhand knowledge, and remained what it had been made by nature.

It required a higher intelligence than Loswa's was wholly to appreciate this charm; he was too conventional to be greatly attracted by unconventional things; he was too used to all the artificial attractions of artificial women, and too artificial himself to enjoy and admire all this freshness of fancy. It would have needed a poet to have done so, and he had nothing of the poet in him. But he was enough of a student of human nature to understand that with which he scarcely sympathised, and she was so handsome that her physical beauty created in him a compassion for the solitude in which it dwelt, such compassion as her intellectual solitude, and her half-unconscious longing for wider worlds than her own, would have failed to awaken.

'Is it possible that all that is to go to a gros bourgeois who builds boats?' he thought, as he looked at the beautiful lines of her features and her form, and that fairness of her skin just warmed by sun and air into the bloom as of a peach, which he strove in vain to reproduce to his own satisfaction in his drawing. A face that would turn all Paris after it like sunflowers after the sun, to be left to pass from the glow of youth to the greyness of age on a little island in mid-sea! It seemed impossible—it would become impossible if she once learned her own charms.

'Your isle is worthy of Paul and Virginia,' he said to her, speaking to her in the phrase that she could understand, for she knew every line of Bernardin de St. Pierre. 'But where is Paul? Is there no Paul?'

'No, there is nobody at all like Paul,' she answered, with a little laugh at the idea. 'The youngest man is Raphael, and he has a fat wife and five children. They live down on the other side of the cliffs.'

'But Paul will come,' said Loswa. 'He always comes. Would you let me substitute myself for him?' he added with that somewhat impertinent audacity which had made his success so great amongst women of the world.

It did not please Damaris. Her brows drew together in that instantaneous and tempestuous anger which her face had expressed as the bracelet had fallen on her lap.

'You are not at all like Paul,' she said a little contemptuously. 'You are not young enough, and you have wrinkles about your eyes.'

Loswa reddened with irritation. He was still young, but life in the world ages fast, and he was conscious that to this child, in the first flush and sunrise of her earliest girlhood, he might well seem old.

'You are cruel,' he said humbly, 'and I am unhappy; I can only envy the Paul of the future.'

'Oh,' said Damaris very tranquilly, 'I know all about my future. I am to marry my cousin, Louis Roze; he has a chantier at St. Tropez; he is quite rich; he is very ugly and stout; he builds boats and barques; myself, I would sooner sail in them.'

She said all the sentences in the same even voice; marriage seemed to her to be hardly of as much interest as the boats.

'Good heavens!' said Loswa involuntarily. 'Athene to a Satyr!'

He could imagine the shipwright of St. Tropez without much effort of imagination; a black-browed son of the soil, smoking a short pipe, supping up prawn-soup noisily on feast days; a Socialist, no doubt, and an argumentative politician when he had drunk his glass of brandy, or he would not be to the taste of the Sieur Bérarde, her grandfather. This her future! As well might a young nightingale, singing under acacia flowers in spring, talk of its future when it should be roasting on the spit to give a mouthful to a boor!

'Do you not intend to refuse?' he said abruptly, without thinking whither such suggestion might lead her.

She turned quickly and looked at him with astonished eyes; her breath came and went more quickly.

'Refuse!' she repeated. 'Refuse! oh no; what would be the use? No one refuses to do what my grandfather has decided for them.'

'But you cannot be willing to make such a marriage?'

She was astonished and troubled by the rebellious suggestion.

'I do not think about it,' she replied at last, shaking the hair out of her eyes. 'It is a thing which is to be, you know. What is the use of thinking I am not to leave Bonaventure. I should not like to marry anyone who would not live on Bonaventure; but if I stay here and live as I always have done, it will not make any difference at all.'

He was silent. This absolute ignorance of what she talked about seemed to him pathetic and sacred. He did not wish to be the one to break away the wall which stood between her and the realities of life.

'He thinks of making a chantier here,' she explained; 'the only doubt is whether anyone will ever come such a distance to order a boat or a brig; and whether it would really pay to bring the timber out so far as this——'

'Good heavens!' said Loswa again.

'Why are you so surprised?' she said, looking at him in perplexity.

'How can you think about timber and shipwrights?' he said, irrationally enough he knew. 'What a life for you! I thought you loved Racine and Corneille.'

'But there is no one else here who loves them,' she answered with a little sigh. 'It is only making money that they care about—money—always money—and when it is made nobody enjoys it.'

'But who can oblige you to marry this man of St. Tropez?'

She ruffled her hair, not very well knowing what to reply.

'It is decided so,' she answered at last.

'But many things are decided for us which we do not accept. No one has any right to dispose of our own future against our own will.'

She looked vaguely troubled: the sense of herself as of an independent entity had never before presented itself to her.

'All those things are settled for one,' she said with some impatience. 'It is not worth talking about. Whether it is Gros Louis or another, it is the same to me. They are all stupid, they all smoke, they all drink when they can, they all say there is no God, and that there must never be any kings. They are all just alike.'

She was not conscious of the sombre revolt and vague contempt which were at work in her as the heat of the distant thunder cloud dulls slightly the sunny blue of a June sky.

'But there is another world than theirs,' said Loswa.

'Out of the books?'

'Yes, beside the dreamland of the books. All the earth is not peopled with shipwrights and skippers. There is a world——'

He hesitated, for he was afraid of alarming her; it seemed to him that, were she displeased, she would send him spinning down the cliff with short ceremony.

'There is a world where life is always en fête, where women are treated not as goods and chattels and beasts of burden, but as sovereigns and sorceresses; where you yourself——'

'I shall never go there,' she said, abruptly interrupting him. 'Do not talk about it. It makes me restless. I feel as I do when I look over there.'

She pointed northward, where the unseen shore was.

'I see the sun shine on the mountains, and I see a dazzle of gold, a gleam of white, a long low line under the blue of the hills, and I know that is what they call the world, the big world; but I never land there; it is not for me.'

'Let me take you,' he said softly.

'No,' she said with petulance and resolution. 'Grandfather does not allow me ever to see the mainland without him; he says it is accursed, that the people are all mad. And now, as you have eaten and drunk all you will, it will be best that you should go: he may return any time, and he does not love strangers.'

'But I may come back and bring you your portrait?'

Her eyes smiled, but she said carelessly, 'That can be as you like. You are very welcome to what you have had. I will show you the way to the shore, though I dare say you would find it again by yourself.'

He endeavoured to linger, but she gave him no leisure to do so. She escorted him to the edge of the steep descent, and there bade him a decided adieu.

Loswa, with all his grace and ease and habits of the world, felt at a loss before this child. He would have kissed her hand in farewell, but her arms were folded on her chest as she stood on the rock above him, and nodded to him a good-humoured good-bye; cheerfully, indifferently, as any boy of her years might have done.

'It is easy to see that you come from Paris!' she called after him, watching his descent along the passerelle with a kindly little laugh at the hesitation of his steps.

'Let her marry Gros Louis!' he thought angrily as that clear childish laughter echoed through the sunlit air from above his head. 'I have her portrait—that is all that matters.'

What a feature of the next year's Salon would be that brilliant, bold head when it should be hung in the full light of a May day, for all Paris to gaze upon, marked 'D'après Nature,' and signed Loswa!

He soon, despite his indolent limbs, which were more used to the boulevards than the sand and the shingle, regained his boat, and pushed it in deep water.

Damaris Bérarde stood above on the brow of the cliff, amongst the olive-boughs and the great leaves of the fig-trees, looking towards that pale golden far-off shore where 'the world' was a world with other men than Raphael and Gros Louis, with other fruits than the round orange and the black olive, with other music than the tinkle of the throat-bells of the goats.