Othmar

by Ouida

There was a great regret and longing in her voice.

'I did not like to stop anywhere on the coast, for there were many people there who knew me; and I was sure they would ask me so many questions. I drank some water at a well; I was not hungry. I dare say you will wonder that I did not feel afraid, but I did not. I went out of the town on the northern road; I wished to get to Grasse and so to Paris.

'I had not gone very far before I met a Brigasque woman mounted on a mule. I knew her as a friend of Catherine's. She was well-to-do, and owned a flower-farm not far from St. Dalmas de Tende; she grew common plants for the perfume distillers of Grasse. She thought I had run away from the island, and I let her think so; and as she hated my grandfather, because he had outbidden her years before at the sale by auction of some acres of land in the Roya valley, she offered me to go home with her and work for her amongst the flowers. As I did not know what to do or where to sleep I accepted her offer, and she hired a mule for me at the next inn we came to, and so I rode with her into the Brigasque country, which I did not know at all, but which I found was very pretty and had more trees in it than usual. I stayed with her all the winter, helping her in what ways that I could.

'I passed the winter there, for I knew I must not go to Paris without some little money at least. One day in the new year there came by a pedlar whom I knew; we had bought little objects of him once or twice, when Catherine and I had been at St. Jean at the same time as he. He recognised me at once and roughly called me a fool, for he said that my grandfather had died of apoplexy straining at the oil-press one day, in place of a bullock which had dropped at the work. He called me a fool, because he said if I had not run away I should have now inherited the island and all he had, whereas it was now left unconditionally to Louis Roze. I did not tell him that I had not run away.'

'In what little things,' thought Othmar as he listened, 'a high and generous nature shows itself, quite unwitting how it innocently displays its own fine instincts!'

'Did you not tell him of your wrongs then?' he asked aloud.

'Oh no: not when my grandfather was dead and could not defend himself! To me it was the end of all hope. I had hoped that one day I should go home. I had always thought he would relent and seek me out; it made me miserable to think that he should have said such cruel words to me for the last words, and he had certainly been good to me, very good in his way. He could not be very gentle, it was not in him; but he had been generous to me, and sometimes kind and quite proud of me too. I was very sorry, because when a person is dead, you know, one only remembers what was good in them, and one wants so much to say so many, many things to them; but now I knew that this could never be, and I was very wretched. The pedlar had said that everything was given to my cousin, but the people I was with would not believe it. They got a letter written to my cousin, and asked for my share (unknown to me; I would not have let them do it had I known). Louis Roze wrote back to them that I inherited nothing under the will, and had no legal claim to insist on any division of the property; he said he was about to marry a young woman of St. Tropez, and he sent me a bank note for a thousand francs. I sealed it up and sent it back to him. You know he knew that all the island would have been mine. I care nothing for the money, but I love the island; I love every stick and stone upon it, every shell on its sand, every wave that breaks on its rocks!'

'You shall have your island again, if money can buy it!' thought Othmar, with one of those heedless impulses of generosity which had more than once cost him dear.

'I was so unhappy to think my grandfather was dead, and dead with rage in his heart against me, that for weeks I could do nothing,' she pursued, while the tears rolled off her lashes. 'But then I felt that there was no one on earth to do anything for me if I did not do it for myself, and I worked hard to get together money enough to take me to Paris, and keep me there a little while. They all said that life there was very dear, and money ran like water. You see I was always thinking of what your Lady had said, about my having some talent in me. I thought of it all day long as I worked in the rose-fields and among the great thickets of jessamine. Your Lady had said that I might be great some day, and it is always to Paris that people go who wish to be great, at least all the books say so. Watteau went, and Molière, and Rousseau, and Napoleon, and ever so many others——'

'Ah, poison of the world!' thought Othmar. 'What cruelty we did! She would have stayed on her island and been the mother of little brown children, and known nothing of the world but its fresh honest sea and its frank, bold winds! What a pity! What a pity! The rattlesnake is kinder than such dreams of fame!'