'I am well now,' she said abruptly. 'May I not go away? I could get work, I think, in the gardens or on the river; there would be things I could do. I learnt something, too, at the convent in the mountains; not much, but something. Pray try and get me work.'
'Do not be in such haste,' said Othmar. 'It sounds like a reproach to me. You are most fully welcome, my child. I shall always feel that we can never atone to you for being the cause, however unconsciously, of the breaking up of your happy life. Wait, at least, until I have made some inquiries into your grandfather's death and testament. It may very well be that your cousin took the occasion of your absence to help himself to more than was his due.'
'I do not think so. Louis was an honest man.'
'If he be honest, inquiry will not hurt him.'
He had resolved to go himself upon an errand which he had resolved not to entrust to any of his agents, trustworthy though many of them were.
In the warm August night he took the express train for the south, and went across the country, golden with ripe corn and green with vine-leaves, straightway to the sultry shores of the south, deserted by their hosts of guests, and sweltering, baked and white with dust, in the intense suns of the late summer weather.
He went first to the seaport of St. Tropez, and made inquiries in its dockyard and shipyard as to Louis Roze. He found that the man had really inherited the possessions of his uncle Bérarde, had married a young woman of the town, and was now living on the island of Bonaventure. So far the tale told by the pedlar to Damaris had been true. An old man, an owner of a coasting brig, who had done business with the Bérardes all his life, told him also of the manner of Jean Bérarde's death, and added, with regret, that the curmudgeon had left not a penny to his granddaughter because she had refused to marry her cousin; and added, further, that the poor child had gone no one knew whither. It was a pity, the old man said regretfully, for she had had a face and a voice that it did good to the souls of men to see and to hear, and had been as active on the sea as any curlew, and so handy with a boat, even in wild weather, that it had been a pleasure to sail with her anywhere.
Asked as to whether she had truly no legal claim upon her grandsire, the old skipper affirmed that everybody had always known she was a bastard, except herself; but nobody had ever supposed it would make any difference in her succession to Bonaventure. Louis Roze had always known it, but had been willing to marry her to prevent any division of the property. So much he learned, sitting on the sea-wall of St. Tropez, and letting the old master of the brig Paul Mousse ramble on at will with the sunbaked land behind them, and before them a sea, tame as a plain, and oil-like in the drowsy drought.
He knew who Othmar was, as did most people on those shores, and readily told him all he knew, though silently wondering why he was asked these questions.
Othmar slept that night at his own house, and on the morrow, almost before the sun was up, took one of his own sailing-boats, and, attended only by one man, crossed the well-nigh motionless sea in the direction of Bonaventure. When the isle rose in sight, lifting its green cone out of the waves in the hot blue air, it was still early in the morning. As he went over the smooth surface of the summer sea, skimmed by thousands of gulls and fanned by languid fruit-scented breezes from the land, his heart ached for the sea-born child shut away under the zinc roofs and gilded vanes of Paris. Even if he could buy back her island, who could make her quite what she had been? He was angered against his wife, who, for sake of an absurd caprice, which had had no more duration in it than the light of a wax match, had brought about so sad an exile, so utter an uprooting and alteration of a simple and a happy life.