'Clovis knew me again,' said Loswa. 'Besides, a man was at the foot of the passerelle, and brought us up to you.'
'He did not do his duty,' said the girl with a little frown, which drew together her pencilled eyebrows.
'The man or the dog?' asked Nadine, amused.
'Neither,' said Damaris. She was angered, though she did not divine how many napoleons had passed into Raphael's hand, who had been pruning olives, and had had much trouble to hold back the faithful Clovis, for whom gold had no charm.
'If Brunehildt had not been shut up with her puppies,' she added regretfully; 'she is much more savage than Clovis.'
'You seem very sorrowful that we did not all have the fate of Penelope's suitors,' said Nadine, much amused. 'We are the friends of Monsignor Melville; may not that fact protect us? Is your grandfather at home?'
No; he was away in the sloop; gone to St. Jean with a cargo. Damaris did not add that he would have been much worse to pass than even Brunehildt.
'But I pray you come into the house, Madame,' she added, her natural courtesy gaining the ascendancy over her embarrassment. 'It is a poor place, but there is a fine view, and if I had only known——'
'You would have been endimanchée and hideous,' thought Nadine, as she answered with her sweetest grace that she would go willingly to that balcony of the beauties of which she had heard so much from Loswa.
'All her eyes are for me,' she whispered to Béthune. 'She does not see that any of you exist.'
'I suppose,' rejoined Béthune, 'that we, after all, do not differ so very much from Raphael and Gros Louis; but between a woman and a woman of the world there is as much difference as between a raw egg and a soufflé, between a hen and a peahen.'
'You might find a more poetic comparison; say a poppy and a gardenia,' said Nadine smiling. 'She is not at the age to think of you. Have patience; ça viendra. She is really very handsome, lovelier than Loswa's sketch.'
Damaris, meanwhile, was thinking with agony that there were ready no cakes, no cream, no white bread, nothing which this delicate and ethereal visitant would be able to touch—thinking of the linen swinging in the wind, and of the bacon grey with smoke, and of Catherine, who, on washing-days, was in her crossest mood!
Nadine, with that swift intuition into, the thoughts of others which made her the most sympathetic of companions where she deigned to be sympathetic at all, guessed what was passing through the girl's mind, and hastened to relieve her embarrassment by asking to be permitted to remain out of doors, alleging that the air was so soft and the scent of the orange-blossoms so sweet, that she was reluctant to leave either.
'Will Madame really prefer it?' said Damaris, unable to conceal her relief.
'There is the same view to be seen from here,' she added as she opened a door in the wall and showed them the southern sea stretching far away, shining blue and violet through arches of olive-boughs lying all hushed and bright and warm in the glow of the afternoon sun.
Then she caught a little boy by the shoulder, the son of Raphael, who was looking on stupidly.
'Run and bring some wine and some fruit,' she whispered to him, 'and ask Catherine to send the old silver.'
Her sense of the obligations of hospitality was stronger than the dread of her great lady.
'It is not because she is great,' she told herself, angry with her own timidity. 'But she is so wonderful, so wonderful!'
That supreme distinction in the wife of Othmar, which, when she walked down a throne-room, made half the other women there look vulgar, had its charm even for this child, who could not have given a name to the superiority which awed and fascinated her, even whilst it made her ready to hide her head beneath the stones like the lizards.
Nadine, pleased with everything, or so professing herself, sat on a stone bench within sight of the sea and quartered a mandarin orange with her white fingers, whilst the sun played on the jewels of her great rings.
'Of all your many conquests, perhaps you have had none more flattering than the adoration and amazement of this child,' whispered Béthune to her.
She smiled.
'And I should not think,' she answered, 'that she was by nature easily daunted or easily impressed. She has reigned here, the innocent Alcina of a bucolic paradise. She has character, whether she have genius or no. Look how coolly she puts poor Loswa aside! As he discovered Alcina, it will be hard on him if he be not her Rinaldo!'
'You are kinder to him than to her,' said Béthune.
'You always think ill of him.'
'I think of his character much as I do of his art.'
'Surely his art is admirable?'
'It is clever; it is not sincere.'
'My dear Duke, is not that a little hypercritical? You mean that it is a mannerism.'
'And what is a mannerism but an affectation? And what is an affectation but a want of truth?'
'That is a wide subject. I cannot discuss it with you just now, because I want to speak to this child.—My dear, I am a neighbour of yours; I live on the coast which you see every day; will you come and stay a few hours with me? We would show you things which would amuse you.'
'Stay with you?'
The eyes of Damaris opened to their fullest, her face flushed scarlet; she was so amazed that she forgot her awe of the speaker.
'Why should you want me?' she said bluntly.
'When you are older you will know that people want many things without knowing why they want them. But I can give you very good reasons: Monsignor Melville has interested me in you, and I think it a pity anyone so gifted as you are by nature should never see anything better than your yard-dogs and—what is your fiancé's name?—Gros Louis? My poor child, how can you know what it is you do with yourself? You cannot tell what the world is like.'
'I am very happy,' said Damaris.
The world was a name of magic to her. How often had she not looked over the strip of sea which severed her from that dazzling shore where amethystine hills and ivory snows and silvery olive woods spoke of a world from which she was forever severed!
'I would come to you if I were ever alone,' she said after a pause.
'Well, come with us,' said her temptress smiling. 'It is three o'clock only now. We will take you with us for a while and send you back by twilight. Loris has told you who I am.'
The name of Othmar was, even to the ears of Damaris, a spell of might upon those shores. She was flattered, amazed, touched to intense emotion, but she stammered out that, although she was most grateful, yet she dared not; her grandfather would kill her if she left the island; he was most severe; he never forgave.
'I promise to disarm your grandfather if that is all your fear,' said Nadine, as she thought to herself, 'These good Communists, je les connais! They would string us all up to the lamp-posts, if they could, and yet, when we speak
