He, like many men of high position, deemed a lowly fate by far the happiest; he would have agreed with Cowley and George Herbert, and would have chidden Herrick for not being content amidst his Devon moors and streams, his cherry trees and roses.
Health, peace, and fresh air seemed to him three treasures which were ill exchanged for the feverish struggle and the artificial joys of life in the cities of the world.
When they neared the island they saw no one. The boat was easily run up on to the smooth strip of beach, and he ascended the passerelle and the steps cut in the rock, as Loris Loswa had done before him once and Damaris a thousand times.
Things were all changed upon the little isle. Catherine, dead, had left no successor so thrifty and sturdy as herself; the man Raphael had gone with all his family to live at Vallauris; Louis Roze and his wife had new faces, new ways, new things about them. The dogs were chained up; the old coble was newly painted; the little balcony had a dab of gilding, tricolour paint, and some smoking chairs; the great white rose had been cut down, the new owners had thought it harboured caterpillars and slugs. Nature had made the place lovely, and even man, the universal deformer and destroyer, could not make it wholly otherwise. But it had lost its look of freshness and luxuriance, and all its deep charm of solitude; it was choked up with vulgar furniture and gewgaws that the bride thought fine and rare. Modern china stood upon the shelves, and in the old solid silver pots artificial flowers were stuck. Some maidens, with many colours in their gowns and great ear-rings in their ears, cackled and giggled behind the orange trees. It had been an idyl of George Sand's; it was now a rustic scene for an operetta of Offenbach's.
All that could not be vulgarised was the pure air, rich with the odour of millions of orange-blossoms, and the serene far-stretching sea, blue as the mouse-ear growing by a woodland brook.
Louis Roze in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside the door, was a big, burly, red-faced man, with ear-rings also in his ears, and the broad roll of the southern accent in his thick voice; his wife was a buxom, brown, stout, and vulgar woman of four- or five-and-twenty. They did not know Othmar by sight, and he did not make himself known to them. He gave them an order for a boat in the name of one of his own yacht-builders; an order large enough to open the heart of the boat-builder of St. Tropez. Then by casual questions, and by letting the owner of Bonaventure talk on and boast of his possessions, he learned what he wanted to know: the facts of the elder Bérarde's death, and of the amount which had been bequeathed to his nephew.
'He left everything he had on earth to me; he knew in whose hands it would prosper and increase,' said in conclusion the big, oily-tongued, boastful Provençal.
'Had he no other heirs at all?' asked Othmar, 'or was it your uncle's very natural preference for yourself?'
'None on earth,' said the man hastily, with a little added red on his red cheeks, and a quick glance of his eye.
'Who was the girl, then,' asked his guest, 'who used to live with him, and go out in his brig?'