‘You are very welcome, if you would do it for your pleasure, not as an act of bondage.’
‘Not as bondage,’ said Phœbe; ‘it is only because I ought that I care to do so at all.’
‘And that’s the reason you only make maps of the landscape.’
It was quite true that Phœbe had no accomplished turn, and what had been taught her she only practised as a duty to the care and cost expended on it, and these were things where ‘all her might’ was no equivalent for a spark of talent. ‘Ought’ alone gave her the zest that Bertha would still have found in ‘ought not.’
‘It is all I can do,’ she said, ‘and Miss Fennimore may like to see them; so, Bertha, I shall continue to carry the sketchbook by which the English woman is known like the man by his “Murray.” Miss Charlecote has letters to write, so we must go out by ourselves.’
The Provençal natives of Hyères had little liking for the foreigners who thronged their town, but did not molest them, and ladies walked about freely in the lovely neighbourhood, so that Honor had no scruple in sending out her charges, unaccompanied except by Lieschen, in case the two others might wish to dispose of Maria, while they engaged in some pursuit beyond her powers.
Poor Lieschen, a plump Prussian, grown portly on Beauchamp good living, had little sympathy with the mountain tastes of her frauleins, and would have wished all Hyères like the shelf on
the side of the hill where stood their hotel, whence the party set forth for the Place des Palmiers, so called from six actual palms bearing, but not often ripening, dates. Two sides were enclosed by houses, on a third an orange garden sloped down the descent; the fourth, where the old town climbed straight up the hill, was regarded by poor Lieschen with dread, and she vainly persuaded Maria at least to content herself with joining the collection of natives resting on the benches beneath the palms. How willingly would the good German have produced her knitting, and sought a compatriot among the nurses who sat gossiping and embroidering, while Maria might have played among their charges, who were shovelling about, or pelting each other with the tiny white sea-washed pebbles that thickly strewed the place.
But Maria, with the little Maltese dog in her arms, to guard him from a hailstorm of the pebbles, was inexorably bent on following her sisters; and Bertha had hurried nervously across from the strangers, so that Lieschen must pursue those light steps through the winding staircase streets, sometimes consisting of broad shallow steps, sometimes of actual flights of steep stairs hewn out in the rock, leading to a length of level terrace, where, through garden gates, orange trees looked out, dividing the vantage ground with houses and rocks—up farther, past the almost desolate old church of St. Paul—farther again—till, beyond all the houses, they came forth on the open mountainside, with a crest of rock far above, surmounted by the ruins of a castle, said to have been fortified by the Saracens, and taken from them by Charles Martel. It was to this castle that Phœbe’s sketching duty was to be paid, and Maria and Bertha expressed their determination of climbing up to it, in hopes, as the latter said, of finding Charles Martel’s original hammer. Lieschen, puffing and panting already, looked horrified, and laughingly they bade her sit down and knit, whilst they set out on their adventure. Phœbe smiled as she looked up, and uttered a prognostic that made Bertha the more defiant, exhilarated as she was by the delicious compound of sea and mountain breeze, and by the exquisite view, the roofs of the town sloping rapidly down, and the hills stretching round, clothed in pine woods, into which the gray olivettes came stealing up, while beyond lay the sea, intensely blue, and bearing on its bosom the three Isles d’Or flushed with radiant colour.
The sisters bravely set themselves to scramble among the rocks, each surface turned to the sea-breeze exquisitely and fantastically tinted by coloured lichens, and all interspersed with the classical acanthus’ noble leaves, the juniper, and the wormwood. On they went, winding upwards as Bertha hoped, but also sideways, and their circuit had lasted a weary while, and made them exhausted and breathless, when looking round for their bearings, they found themselves in an enchanted maze of gray rocks, half hidden in myrtle, beset by the bristly battledores of prickly pear,