'Mind how you steer,' said Othmar, as in the multiplicity and gravity of her thoughts they drifted perilously near the troubled water churning in the wake of a steam yacht. With prompt dexterity and coolness she corrected her oversight in time.
'There are few things more delightful than being at sea at night when the moon is bright, and the vessel is small enough to make one very near the water,' he said, as they pursued their course and he aided the passage of the boat with the oars. 'Just like this, between the sea and sky, with all those stars above, and all the silent night around one—one ought to be a poet to be worthy to enjoy it, or able to put the charm of it into fitting words.'
'Yes.'
She had felt herself what he said so often, and she too had never been able to find speech for that deep delight, that nameless melancholy, which came to her with the solitude of the sea at night.
He looked at her as she sat at the tiller with the moonlight falling full upon her face, and making it older and more spiritual than it had been by day. So she would look when years had saddened her, chastened her, etherealised her, taken from her the boylike buoyancy of her spirit, the frank audacity of her childhood. Or rather, no;—she would not look like that, she would have wedded Gros Louis, have had sturdy, healthy, riotous children plucking at her skirts; have grown heavier, stouter, coarser, duller; have ceased to care about the moonlight on the sea; have heeded only the sea's harvest of tunny, crawfish, cod, and haddock. Poor Galatea, whom the Polyphemus of a common marriage would bind upon her rock with all the greedy waves of common cares leaping at her and licking her with unkind tongues! Yet there was no fate better for Galatea than her rock; he was persuaded of it; he wished her to be so persuaded.
CHAPTER XIII.
As the boat went smoothly and fleetly over the calm water, through the silvery night, beneath the immense vault of the starry heavens, he talked to her with kindly gentleness, and heard from her all there was to hear of her short life and of her great love for Bonaventure.
The course they took was almost wholly free of vessels; some heavy brig, fish or fruit laden, alone crossed their path, and the great green or red lights of the steamships were always afar off. The navigation of their little vessel did not so engross either of them that they had not leisure to converse, and Damaris, in the dusk of the night, in the familiar sea breeze and sea scent, in the motion of the boat which was as welcome and soothing to her as the rocking of its nurse's arms to a child, felt an exhilaration which restored her spirits and loosened her power of speech. She ceased to be afraid of the chastisement she would receive at Bonaventure, and she felt a confidence in the kindness and the protection of her companion which was very different to the flattered vanity and fascinated awe which his wife had aroused in her.
That he was a grand seigneur did not affect her with any sense of diffidence, both because the granddaughter of Jean Bérarde had been reared in an utter indifference to such divisions of rank, and also because in her own heart she fondly nourished the legend of her own pure descent. The sea lords of the mountain above San Remo were as true and near to her in her belief as Hugh Lupus to the Grosvenors, as Hugues Capet to Don Carlos.