Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature. His sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination was strong and governed his reason very often. There was much in the circumstances of this poor child which appealed both to tenderness and imagination, and he was haunted by her swift mellow voice, with its meridional intonations, her great dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as she remembered her island home.

He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of her birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful ways of life. They could never again make her what they had found her. Who can put back the gathered rosebud on the rose-bough?

They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of all which she had lost, indirectly but indisputably, through their means. His conscience, as well as his common sense, told him that as his wife had been the chief offender against the child's peace, so she had the first right to know the results of her interference, and amend them. But he had the moral timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures: he dreaded her irony and her indifference. He could not tell what she would say or do; possibly in the end something which he would approve; but he knew that first of all she would ridicule him: with her lips certainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even when he had been her lover she had always laughed at him for taking life so seriously, for being Ruy Blas and Rolla rather than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if she were moved to any kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty footsteps tread hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the storm-tossed wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently generous; none more so: but was it not, alas! only while her mood to be so lasted?

'I will tell her—later,' he said, with that temporising before difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings with his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with women.

Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to reconcile Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew she was of the temper which would break loose from the safest shelter and rush to the direst danger if she deemed herself humiliated by assistance. In all her grace of youth and helplessness of circumstance, there was still something warm, strong, untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds a bird will feel its wings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would, he knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her own despite.

A thought occurred to him; one of those spontaneous ideas which come to us like very angels, and which, in after years, seem rather born of hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her the next day.

'Tell me, my dear—your grandfather died after you had left the island some months? Well, did you never hear any details of his death or of his will? You know only what the pedlar said?'

'Only that.'

'Then I think you should know more. He may have repented him of his cruelty, or he may have made some sort of bequest to you, even if the bulk of what he had has gone to your cousin. My people there could soon inquire. Will you allow me to do that?'

'If you wish. But I am certain he left me nothing—never thought of me. You did not know him: once he had put any person out of his heart, it was to him as if they never had lived at all. He was very hard, and he never by any chance forgave. Beside—he told me—I had no claim on him, was nothing to him.'

'Legally. But sixteen years of life spent beside him could scarcely pass utterly out of his memory. If he had left you anything, it is possible your cousin was not honest enough to say so. I will inquire at any rate. It will be more satisfaction to you to know more definite tidings than the hawker could possibly give you.'

'I am sure he left me nothing. But I should be glad to hear of Raphael and the dogs.'

'You shall hear. Raphael, I have no doubt, will be as glad to hear of you. Meanwhile be sure that both my wife and I should be unhappy if you fled away from our roof out into the world again. The world is not a kind place or a safe place, my dear, for those who are young and motherless.'

'But I must do something,' she repeated feverishly. 'I must do something. I cannot live on your charity. I would die sooner!'

'I tell you I do not like the word of "charity,"' said Othmar. 'When people have all a common misfortune, they have as it were a common tie. We have all the misfortune, the supreme misfortune, of human life.'

Even absorbed as she was in her own great straits and needs, Damaris was astonished at such words from one who, it seemed to her, was at the very summit of all earthly happiness.

'If he be not content, who can be?' she thought.

'It is a tie,' continued he, unconscious of her surprise, 'which binds us all together. No one is so fortunate that he may not live to want aid and pity. It is not so very many years ago, as the lives of nations count, that here in Paris a king and queen became so friendless that none dare say a kind adieu to them as they went to their deaths upon the scaffold. Compared to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are! You have youth, talents, friends, and all your future.'

'I have no friends,' said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection of all solace.

'You have one at least,' said Othmar. 'You are a little in love with sorrow, my dear; all imaginative youth is so. When we have really had its actuality with us for awhile, we get to hate it bitterly, and do all we can to forget its presence.'

She looked at him with wonder.

'Have you ever been unhappy?' she said incredulously; 'with all these beautiful places? with that beautiful lady? with all the world?'

'One is never happy for more than a day,' said Othmar with some impatience. 'One wants, one wishes, one desires, one obtains, one regrets—there is the whole gamut of all human notes. The scale no sooner ascends than it descends. There is nothing happy except youth, which does not know that it is so, and so goes through all the glories of its time ignorant, purblind, longing to cease to be youth.'

'I was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully.

'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he thought with a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal happiness, born of the waves, and the winds, and the sun, and the blossoms, and the radiant joy of mere living, had been destroyed by one breath and glimpse of the world, as a flower withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in carbonised air. Had they only let her alone, she would have been happy still.

'Yes,' Damaris sighed, and her eyes had a weary, troubled, introspective look. They saw the blue sea washing the face of the cliffs, the white dogs barking on the strip of yellow sand, the steep path going up and up and up under the olive trees, the old woman in her blue kirtle and a grey hood coming from out the groves of orange and of lemon, a saucepan freshly scoured or linen freshly washed in her horny hands—had all those familiar pictures faded for ever from her sight?

BÉthune had said truly that to gather the rosebud is the act of an instant, but what power in heaven or on earth shall put the rosebud, once broken off, back again upon the mother plant? If by any force of will or of wealth they were to buy back her island again for her, it would never be possible to give her back with the solid soil, and the old house-roof, and the fruitful trees of it, the old, sweet, happy ignorance and peace of her childhood there.

'She is not here?' she asked suddenly, as she roused herself from her dream of her old home.

'My wife?' he asked in some surprise. 'No; she is in Russia.'

'She will despise me,' said Damaris, a dull red glow of shame mounting over her forehead. 'Will you tell her that I was found in the streets?'

'Not if it pain you. But you mistake if you think——'

'I should hate her to know it,' said the girl under her breath. 'I wanted to become something very great; something that she would hear of and come to see; and then I should have said to her: "Yes, it is I, madame, and you will not laugh at me any more now."'

'She never laughed at you. She admired you, and predicted a great future for you,' said Othmar with a little embarrassment, not knowing very well how to speak of one so near to him to this child, whose memory was so tenacious alike of benefits and affronts.

'Is this house hers?' asked Damaris.

'Surely, my dear: what is mine is hers.'

Her face darkened.

'I am well now,' she said abruptly. 'May I not go away? I could get work, I think, in the gardens or on the river; there would be things I could do. I learnt something, too, at the convent in the mountains; not much, but something. Pray try and get me work.'

'Do not be in such haste,' said Othmar. 'It sounds like a reproach to me. You are most fully welcome, my child. I shall always feel that we can never atone to you for being the cause, however unconsciously, of the breaking up of your happy life. Wait, at least, until I have made some inquiries into your grandfather's death and testament. It may very well be that your cousin took the occasion of your absence to help himself to more than was his due.'

'I do not think so. Louis was an honest man.'

'If he be honest, inquiry will not hurt him.'

He had resolved to go himself upon an errand which he had resolved not to entrust to any of his agents, trustworthy though many of them were.

In the warm August night he took the express train for the south, and went across the country, golden with ripe corn and green with vine-leaves, straightway to the sultry shores of the south, deserted by their hosts of guests, and sweltering, baked and white with dust, in the intense suns of the late summer weather.

He went first to the seaport of St. Tropez, and made inquiries in its dockyard and shipyard as to Louis Roze. He found that the man had really inherited the possessions of his uncle BÉrarde, had married a young woman of the town, and was now living on the island of Bonaventure. So far the tale told by the pedlar to Damaris had been true. An old man, an owner of a coasting brig, who had done business with the BÉrardes all his life, told him also of the manner of Jean BÉrarde's death, and added, with regret, that the curmudgeon had left not a penny to his granddaughter because she had refused to marry her cousin; and added, further, that the poor child had gone no one knew whither. It was a pity, the old man said regretfully, for she had had a face and a voice that it did good to the souls of men to see and to hear, and had been as active on the sea as any curlew, and so handy with a boat, even in wild weather, that it had been a pleasure to sail with her anywhere.

Asked as to whether she had truly no legal claim upon her grandsire, the old skipper affirmed that everybody had always known she was a bastard, except herself; but nobody had ever supposed it would make any difference in her succession to Bonaventure. Louis Roze had always known it, but had been willing to marry her to prevent any division of the property. So much he learned, sitting on the sea-wall of St. Tropez, and letting the old master of the brig Paul Mousse ramble on at will with the sunbaked land behind them, and before them a sea, tame as a plain, and oil-like in the drowsy drought.

He knew who Othmar was, as did most people on those shores, and readily told him all he knew, though silently wondering why he was asked these questions.

Othmar slept that night at his own house, and on the morrow, almost before the sun was up, took one of his own sailing-boats, and, attended only by one man, crossed the well-nigh motionless sea in the direction of Bonaventure. When the isle rose in sight, lifting its green cone out of the waves in the hot blue air, it was still early in the morning. As he went over the smooth surface of the summer sea, skimmed by thousands of gulls and fanned by languid fruit-scented breezes from the land, his heart ached for the sea-born child shut away under the zinc roofs and gilded vanes of Paris. Even if he could buy back her island, who could make her quite what she had been? He was angered against his wife, who, for sake of an absurd caprice, which had had no more duration in it than the light of a wax match, had brought about so sad an exile, so utter an uprooting and alteration of a simple and a happy life.

He, like many men of high position, deemed a lowly fate by far the happiest; he would have agreed with Cowley and George Herbert, and would have chidden Herrick for not being content amidst his Devon moors and streams, his cherry trees and roses.

Health, peace, and fresh air seemed to him three treasures which were ill exchanged for the feverish struggle and the artificial joys of life in the cities of the world.

When they neared the island they saw no one. The boat was easily run up on to the smooth strip of beach, and he ascended the passerelle and the steps cut in the rock, as Loris Loswa had done before him once and Damaris a thousand times.

Things were all changed upon the little isle. Catherine, dead, had left no successor so thrifty and sturdy as herself; the man Raphael had gone with all his family to live at Vallauris; Louis Roze and his wife had new faces, new ways, new things about them. The dogs were chained up; the old coble was newly painted; the little balcony had a dab of gilding, tricolour paint, and some smoking chairs; the great white rose had been cut down, the new owners had thought it harboured caterpillars and slugs. Nature had made the place lovely, and even man, the universal deformer and destroyer, could not make it wholly otherwise. But it had lost its look of freshness and luxuriance, and all its deep charm of solitude; it was choked up with vulgar furniture and gewgaws that the bride thought fine and rare. Modern china stood upon the shelves, and in the old solid silver pots artificial flowers were stuck. Some maidens, with many colours in their gowns and great ear-rings in their ears, cackled and giggled behind the orange trees. It had been an idyl of George Sand's; it was now a rustic scene for an operetta of Offenbach's.

All that could not be vulgarised was the pure air, rich with the odour of millions of orange-blossoms, and the serene far-stretching sea, blue as the mouse-ear growing by a woodland brook.

Louis Roze in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside the door, was a big, burly, red-faced man, with ear-rings also in his ears, and the broad roll of the southern accent in his thick voice; his wife was a buxom, brown, stout, and vulgar woman of four- or five-and-twenty. They did not know Othmar by sight, and he did not make himself known to them. He gave them an order for a boat in the name of one of his own yacht-builders; an order large enough to open the heart of the boat-builder of St. Tropez. Then by casual questions, and by letting the owner of Bonaventure talk on and boast of his possessions, he learned what he wanted to know: the facts of the elder BÉrarde's death, and of the amount which had been bequeathed to his nephew.

'He left everything he had on earth to me; he knew in whose hands it would prosper and increase,' said in conclusion the big, oily-tongued, boastful ProvenÇal.

'Had he no other heirs at all?' asked Othmar, 'or was it your uncle's very natural preference for yourself?'

'None on earth,' said the man hastily, with a little added red on his red cheeks, and a quick glance of his eye.

'Who was the girl, then,' asked his guest, 'who used to live with him, and go out in his brig?'

'She was nothing at all to BÉrarde,' said Louis Roze sullenly, beginning to perceive that he had been interrogated with a purpose.

'A bastard!' he added. 'The law does not recognise bastards.'

'The law, like proverbs, is the distilled wisdom of mankind,' said Othmar. 'Like proverbs also, it occasionally may be caught tripping in its wisdom.'

The man eyed him uneasily.

'She was a bastard,' he said again. 'I did generously by her, because after all blood is blood. I sent her a handsome dowry; big enough to get her a good spouse amongst better men than she had any right to look for:—'

He felt angry and baffled, and would have been quarrelsome and have told his visitant to mind his own business, only that he saw the unbidden guest was a gentleman, and the order for the craft had made him patient and obsequious.

Othmar looked at him with some disgust, changed his tone, and addressed him with more severity.

'M. Louis Roze, it is no concern of mine you will say, but I am here to tell you one thing, and you must listen to me. Legally, maybe, your cousin Damaris had no claim on this estate, but you know that she was brought up from infancy as her grandfather's heiress, that she was always encouraged to believe the island would be her own, and that only because of her refusal to marry you was she omitted from her grandfather's will, to your benefit—perhaps from an old man's perverse tyranny and rage, perhaps a little also from your suggestion and your intrigues. Be that as it will, you are morally bound, unless you are a cur indeed, to share your inheritance with one who has every moral right, and right of usage, to the whole of it. The dower you boast of having sent was returned to you. Your cousin is poor, but not so poor as to take as your alms what is her right. She is with those who can protect her, and is out of the danger to which you allowed her to drift without stretching out a hand to save her. If you consent to divide in equity your inheritance with her, I will tell you who I am, and give you all proofs and explanations that you may reasonably require. If you refuse I shall bid you good-morning, and rest content with the satisfaction, not a rare one in this world, of having seen an unjust and dishonest man.'

Louis Roze stared at him, perplexed by his tone, purple with rage and astonishment, made a coward not by conscience but by fear of losing a lucrative order, and so bewildered at the sudden attack that, southerner though he was, he had no good lie ready. All he felt for the moment sensible of was that not a bronze bit of the money, not a rood of the soil, not a rotten bough off one of the trees, should go away from himself to that girl, who had so grossly outraged him in refusing his hand. In a boorish, dumb-animal fashion he had been in love with the handsome child, who had always laughed at him and flouted him, and had never even let him kiss her cheeks in cousinly manner. As she had made her bed so she might lie in it. Not a sou should she get out of him, that he swore; the will was a good will, attested and duly proved; no one could gainsay it, and the young woman falsely called BÉrarde was without any possible claim whatever; there had been no legal adoption of her. So he declared, with many an oath to keep his courage up before this stranger, whose manner daunted him; and his wife overhearing that it was a question of the inheritance which was under discussion, thrust herself into the balcony and vociferated with shrill iteration and the fury of a woman menaced in her dearest possessions, that whilst she lived not a centime should ever go away from her lawful lord.

Othmar turned away before their clamour was half done.

'That is enough,' he said to them, 'keep all you have and may it prosper with you. Your cousin has no need of it, but I thought it right to give you a chance to do your duty.'

Louis Roze eyed him with perplexity, and grew silent.

Othmar asked him nothing more and took his leave; the bride and her sisters watching his departure through the intricacy of the orange-boughs, giggling and criticising him in audible phrase, their black eyes and their gold hair-pins flashing in the sunshine amongst the glossy leaves.

'That brute will do nothing for her,' he thought, as he descended to his boat. 'And even if he were inclined ever to do so, his wife would never let him follow his inclination. There is nothing on earth so avaricious as peasants who have grown rich.'

He took his way back to the mainland, and left behind him much uneasiness, wonder, and speculation amongst the inhabitants of Bonaventure.

The will was a good will, and his position was as sound as sound law could make it, yet Louis Roze was not quiet in his mind. He was not a bad man, though greedy, and he felt that this stranger was right; that something of all he had gained by this inheritance ought to go to the child who for so many years had been allowed to look upon herself as the future owner of Bonaventure. He was pursued by his recollections of her leaping like a young kid up the rocks, steering through the sea foam and the sunshine, gathering the oranges or the olives, carrying the linen down to the beach to dry, running gaily with the white dogs before her, swimming like a fish with her beautiful arms flung out on the water, and her eyes smiling up at the sky; la mouette as the people had called her, because she was so at home in the waves and the winds.

Truly she ought to have had something; she was of the old man's blood, whether or no the law recognised her or not; and where was she and what would become of her? His thoughts were painful and perplexed as he smoked his pipe under the orange trees.

But he was not ready to part with any portion of what had been bequeathed to him. He was well off certainly, still no one has ever enough; and his wife was with child, and might in time give him a score of children. It was better to keep what he had got, and, after all, Damaris had insulted him after being affianced to him from the time she was twelve, and his heart hardened utterly against her at that memory. If she had not been an obstinate, insolent, wayward fool she would have been here now, instead of the young woman from St. Tropez, who had a shrew's tongue, which Louis Roze heard oftener than he cared to hear it.

So he thrust the matter from his mind and counted the oranges on the tree nearest him with complacent sense of ownership. This stranger had said that Damaris was with friends, let them look after her; his conscience was clear.

When in the course of the day he learned from some deep-sea fishers trawling near the island who his visitor had been—for the fishermen had recognised Othmar as he had passed in his boat—Louis Roze felt yet less sure that he had done wisely. To have pleased such a rich man might have been worth more than an acre of land, than a handful of gold. He hated aristocrats with all the savage hatred of a socialist of the south, but he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem which those who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual abundance. The good-will of this archimillionnaire might have been more valuable to him than a little piece of the land, had he offered it frankly as his cousin's share.

When, in a week's time, some persons came to him to seek to buy the island, he was certain that they came from his late visitor, although they came only in the name and by the commission of a well-known lawyer of Aix.

He was himself dazzled by the great sums they were willing to propose, was half-disposed to treat with them; but his bride was shrewder, or thought herself so, than he.

'Would you barter your coming child's property?' she hissed in his ear. 'If rich men seek after the place, be sure it is because it has some value we are not aware of; it has some buried treasure that they know of, or some silver in the rocks, or some other ore or another. If you sell it you will never forgive yourself. Keep it, and send them about their business, and begin to bore in the ground and see what you can find.'

The suggestion heated the fancy and the cupidity of her husband. Of course, he reflected, no one offered three or four times the apparent value of a place unless they knew that it would become worth what they were anxious to pay for it; and he sternly refused to hearken to any terms of sale for the rock of Bonaventure.

'What is mine is mine, and all the kings of the earth cannot buy it of me,' he said, with a petty mind's delight in power and in the occasion of baffling and thwarting his superiors.

'I believe he is in love with the girl,' he added to his wife, 'and wants to get the island for her. We might make a rare bargain if it were so; but those men of Aix are too cautious to let out who is behind them.'

'Roze,' the wife said, 'you are a simpleton. There is no love in the business. They know of some value in the island that we do not; that is why they want to buy. Because you are for ever hankering yourself after that great-eyed, long-limbed child, you think every other man is just a fool the same.'

And Louis Roze, whose temper was cowed by the fiercer sharper temper of his bride, gave in to her argument, and remained so stubborn that the agents from Aix could come to no terms with him.

Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in the rocks, he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Tropez and elsewhere, and dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at the stone face of the cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a fantastic hope entered into him and gave him no peace; he was ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the surface, and all the artificial soil brought there at such labour in the previous century, for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in the bowels of the isle.

Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not possible to induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and ventured to hint that the property was not worth one-half or one-quarter of what he had been willing to spend on its purchase.

'That may be,' he said; 'but it is a caprice of mine. If the island ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any terms. The owner may need money some day, or may change his mind.'

His experience of men was that they always sold things in the long run, if they could do so with advantage, and that they seldom remained in the same mind when it turned to their profit to change it.