The Padrone crossed her arms upon her ample breast and smiled a cast-iron smile. "It is not for me to contradict the assertion of Madame," she replied, with a fierce shrug and a stony eye.
Ermengarde turned white, and looked steadily in the hard and hostile face for a second.
"I see that I have been mistaken in the character of this house," she said coldly. "Be good enough to accept my notice to leave at my earliest convenience." Then, without waiting for a reply, she went out into the sunshine and paced slowly through the garden, her skirts brushing scent from oak-leaf geraniums and her cheek tapped by the rounded coolness of lemons on the garden boughs, and came out upon the path that led over the open mountain ridge, drawing a long breath.
"The insolence!" she burst out to an old woman, harmlessly knitting and leading her goat, who nodded and smiled in return, under the impression that kind remarks were being addressed to her—"the incredible insolence! All the people seem to have gone out of their senses this morning, or else I've gone out of mine."
Chapter XVI
The Sapphire Necklace
The path immediately behind Les Oliviers, worn by the steps of many generations of mules and men, was steep and rugged, here and there sinking deeply and filled in with broken fragments and buttressed with rock slabs. A little further on the ridge ran up in an abrupt narrow steep; a clump of pines on its summit stood out clear and glowing upon the sky, with a straw-roofed hut under the dark boughs. Ermengarde loved that little clump of pine-trees soaring up above the house and grounds, whether, as now, in the full glow of forenoon, or in still, golden afternoons, or flushed with sunset upon a crimson and amber sky, or, later still, traced on the pale clear green of after-glow, or black against a blue-black vault pierced with shining stars. She had often and vainly tried to draw it; but even the thin man had failed to catch its charm; much paper had been spoiled and colour wasted in the attempt. When you gained that abrupt eminence you seemed to have reached the top of the world, which unrolled itself beneath, and spread blue and far to the unseen African shore; but when you turned from the sea, and saw the path winding higher along the wooded brink to mountain summits endlessly unfolding, you knew that you were still very far from the top.
The warm bright air was spiced with aromatic scents. Myrtle and lavender, cistus and juniper, rosemary, thyme, and pine, clothed and climbed every cliff and steep down to the torrent beds that ran on each side the ridge, and sprang from every crack and crevice in rock and cliff. Higher still, the ridge broadened into a pine-wood, and narrowed abruptly upon its steep wooded sides, then widened again into a grassy plateau, where the columnar trunks of hoary olives showed dim and solemn through shadows of drooping foliage shot with subdued, changing colour.
Where the pine-wood ended and the olive-grove began the ridge-side fell more gently, laying a slope of myrtle and rosemary open to the full south sun. Here Ermengarde sat, the mysterious murmur of pine-woods on one hand, the solemn stillness and blue-grey haze of olives on the other. The sunny bank was grey with massed rosemary blossom, into which countless bees plunged and buzzed drowsily in the warmth. Far below, forest and olive-terrace sank into purple bloom of shadow; the distance was closed by bare mountain peaks rolling up in great billows of stone above wooded slopes, and towered villages white in sunlight.
All this solemn beauty rebuked her and made her ashamed. She knew that she had forgotten the message and missed the healing of the mountains. She had played the fool and made herself a mark for fool's gossip. Oh, how small and cheap she felt, and how very sick of herself and her petty follies!