Othmar

by Ouida

'That is enough,' he said to them, 'keep all you have and may it prosper with you. Your cousin has no need of it, but I thought it right to give you a chance to do your duty.'

Louis Roze eyed him with perplexity, and grew silent.

Othmar asked him nothing more and took his leave; the bride and her sisters watching his departure through the intricacy of the orange-boughs, giggling and criticising him in audible phrase, their black eyes and their gold hair-pins flashing in the sunshine amongst the glossy leaves.

'That brute will do nothing for her,' he thought, as he descended to his boat. 'And even if he were inclined ever to do so, his wife would never let him follow his inclination. There is nothing on earth so avaricious as peasants who have grown rich.'

He took his way back to the mainland, and left behind him much uneasiness, wonder, and speculation amongst the inhabitants of Bonaventure.

The will was a good will, and his position was as sound as sound law could make it, yet Louis Roze was not quiet in his mind. He was not a bad man, though greedy, and he felt that this stranger was right; that something of all he had gained by this inheritance ought to go to the child who for so many years had been allowed to look upon herself as the future owner of Bonaventure. He was pursued by his recollections of her leaping like a young kid up the rocks, steering through the sea foam and the sunshine, gathering the oranges or the olives, carrying the linen down to the beach to dry, running gaily with the white dogs before her, swimming like a fish with her beautiful arms flung out on the water, and her eyes smiling up at the sky; la mouette as the people had called her, because she was so at home in the waves and the winds.

Truly she ought to have had something; she was of the old man's blood, whether or no the law recognised her or not; and where was she and what would become of her? His thoughts were painful and perplexed as he smoked his pipe under the orange trees.

But he was not ready to part with any portion of what had been bequeathed to him. He was well off certainly, still no one has ever enough; and his wife was with child, and might in time give him a score of children. It was better to keep what he had got, and, after all, Damaris had insulted him after being affianced to him from the time she was twelve, and his heart hardened utterly against her at that memory. If she had not been an obstinate, insolent, wayward fool she would have been here now, instead of the young woman from St. Tropez, who had a shrew's tongue, which Louis Roze heard oftener than he cared to hear it.

So he thrust the matter from his mind and counted the oranges on the tree nearest him with complacent sense of ownership. This stranger had said that Damaris was with friends, let them look after her; his conscience was clear.

When in the course of the day he learned from some deep-sea fishers trawling near the island who his visitor had been—for the fishermen had recognised Othmar as he had passed in his boat—Louis Roze felt yet less sure that he had done wisely. To have pleased such a rich man might have been worth more than an acre of land, than a handful of gold. He hated aristocrats with all the savage hatred of a socialist of the south, but he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem which those who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual abundance. The good-will of this archimillionnaire might have been more valuable to him than a little piece of the land, had he offered it frankly as his cousin's share.