This, I say, she might have been; yet I knew well that she was not. Though I had led Barbarossa to believe me profoundly ignorant even of the existence of his “little Christine,” I had seen her once before—at Vienna, in the first week of the January of that year. She was driving a sleigh in the Prater then, and all the city pointed the finger and cried: “That is she.” I remember the look of girlish triumph upon her face as she drove through the throngs which were so eager to anticipate a victory for her; I could recollect even the splendour of her furs and the excellence of her horses; the muttered exclamations to which her coming gave birth. Yet here she was, become the peasant again, on the island of Zlarin.
We had come upon the girl suddenly, as I have written, and the drift of our boat towards the shore was without wash of water, so that minutes passed and she did not see us. So close, for a truth, did the stream carry us to the bank that I could have put out my hand and clutched the roses as we passed. From this near point of view the child’s face was very plain to me. In many ways it was the face of the Mademoiselle Zlarin I had seen in Vienna; yet it lacked the feverish colour which then had been the subject of my remark, and there were lines now where no lines had been eight months before. Whatever had been her story, the fact that she had suffered much was plain to all the world. Yet suffering had but deepened that indescribable charm of feature and of expression which set Vienna running wild after her in the January of the year. She was of an age when a face loses nothing by repose. Her youth dominated all. She could yet reap of the years, and glean beauty from their harvest. Neither dress nor jewels were needed to round off that picture. I said to myself that she was the prettier a hundred times for her tawdry Greek cap and her skirt of common stuff. I declared that the rôle of peasant girl became her beyond any part that she had played in the life of the city. And with this thought there came the engrossing question—how was it that she, who had disappeared like a ray of sunlight from her haunts and her triumphs in the capital, should be here upon an island of the Adriatic, the mistress of a home which made the people about her raise their hands in wonder, the subject of a story of which no man was able to tell more than a chapter? And this was the question I now set myself to answer.
All this passed through my mind quickly as our felucca lay flapping her sails in the wind, and we drifted slowly under the shadow of the bushes. I was still speculating upon it when the girl saw us, and awoke, as it were, from a reverie, to spring back and hide herself behind the bushes. But Barbarossa called out loudly at the action, and when she heard his voice she returned again to the water’s edge and kissed her hand to him most prettily. Then she ran away swiftly towards her house, and was instantly hidden from our sight by the foliage.
“Barbarossa,” said I, when she was gone, “does your wife permit you often to come to these islands?”
The old rogue feigned astonishment for a moment, but pluming himself upon the compliment, he leered presently like some old man of the sea, and his body danced with his laughter.
“Ho, ho, that is very good. Does my wife permit? Per Baccho, that I should have a woman at my heels—I, who am the father of the city and can kiss where I please! Ho, ho, excellency, what a fine wit you have!”
“But,” said I, with some indignation, “the lady had the bad taste to mean that salute for you and not for me.”
He became grave instantly, stroking his long beard and carrying his mind back in thought.
“Securo!” cried he, after a pause; “it was meant for me, and why not? Have I not been a father to her? Was it not to me that she came for bread when all the world cried out upon her for a vagrant and worthless? Did I not shelter her from her brother’s blows and the curses of the priest? Nay, she is my daughter—the little Christine that I love.”
I heard him out, silent in astonishment.