'I had never thought about it before then. My grandfather said it was to be. It was to me as when he said so many thousand oranges were to be packed, or so many barrels of oil sent to the mainland. I never thought about it. But after—after I had seen your wife, and your house, and your friends, then, I do not know why, but everything seemed different.'
If his wife had not gone to the island in that hour of caprice, this child would no doubt have accepted the fate prepared for her, and passed her life as so many other women did, mated to a boor but reconciled by habit to uncongenial companionship, putting aside her dreams with the orange-flowers of her bridal clothes, and learning to think only of the gold pieces in the bank, the yield of the oil-presses, the price of fish and of fruit, the growth of the children that with each year came to birth. Would it not have been better? Common sense and vulgar prudence would say yes, he knew, but in his inmost soul he could not say it. Besides, revolt might have come, disgust, the desire for wider worlds and higher thoughts and warmer passions.
With her luminous eyes and her poet's thoughts she would have never been contented long with the narrow, coarse, dull ways of such a life as would have been hers had she yielded.
'Poor child!' thought Othmar, with a pang of almost personal repentance.
Nadège had done many things which were as so much mere thistle-down on the wind in her own eyes, but which had sown dragon's teeth in the paths of others. But it seemed to him that she had never done a more unkind or a more wanton act than when, on the spur of an idle moment's caprice, she had tempted this innocent Alcina from her happy island of content.
Damaris did not say so, but he himself had haunted her dreams ever since that night's sail over the moonlit sea.
This man, with his gentle courtesies, his low soft voice, his tender care and compassion for her, his high romantic sense of honour which had made him counsel her to tell the truth, cost what it would, seemed to her a being of another world than that to which her grandfather and her affianced lord belonged.
She had thought of little else but Othmar ever since he had left her on that shore in the soft-tinted shadow, where the light of daybreak crossed the last rays of the moon. It was not love which she felt; he was too far away from her, too impersonal, too great for her to think of him with any personal thoughts; but it was an idealised admiration, a keenly grateful remembrance, a vague, unconscious sympathy, which had filled her mind with his image in the many lonely hours she had passed since that night, and the remembrance of him had made her shrink from the possible contact, from the mere thought of her cousin, with a disgust and a revolt which had made her as unmoved as the rocks of her island itself, before the rage of her tyrant and the threats of his blind passion.
A thousand times better death, she had said to herself—death under the blue waters on the deep sea bottom of her native gulf; death and peace and silence amongst the broad green weed and the jewelled fishes and the white coral branches which she had seen so often, fathoms down below her, as she had leaned over the boat's side and gazed through the pellucid water clear as a mirror to her eyes.
Startled, she was recalled to the present by the voice of Othmar, as he asked her to continue her narrative.