She had something of meridional heedlessness, and much of meridional imagination, which made the fiction of her grandsire's legacy more easily believed by her than it would have been by more prosaic and cautious tempers. To her it seemed so natural that he should have relented towards her and provided for her. All her memories were of wants provided for by him; he had been her providence, if a harsh one, for so long that it seemed a natural part of his character and of her destiny that he should continue to be her providence even in his grave.
'If I could only be sure that he is happy in heaven,' she said to Othmar, with a certain appeal and doubt in her accent. Even to her, though she had respected him, it was difficult to think of Jean Bérarde of Bonaventure in any celestial life. 'Do you not think,' she added wistfully, 'that God would remember that he was a very good man in many ways, and always honest and upright in all his dealings with rich and poor? He loved money, but he was not mean—not to me, never to me—and if laborare est orare, as the Sisters used to say, surely he must be in peace?'
Othmar heard the tormenting fear which was expressed in her tone, and refrained from adding one grain of doubt to it.
'Be sure he is at peace, my dear,' he answered; while he thought, 'more peace than such a brute deserves—the peace of utter extinction; the peace of dissolution and absorption into the earth which holds him, into the grass which covers him; peace which he shares with kings and poets and heroes!'
'He believed nothing, you know,' said Damaris wistfully, 'nothing of any creed, I mean. But then, if he could not, was it any more his fault than it is a deaf man's fault that he cannot hear? I think not. Do you remember that poem of Victor Hugo's? I forget its name, but the one in which a great wicked king of the east, all black with crime, is saved from hell because he has a moment of pity for a pig that is sick and tormented with flies and lies helpless in the sun? The king drew the pig aside out of the sun and drove the flies away. It is beautifully told in the poem; I tell it ill. But what I mean is, that I think if they are angered in heaven with my grandfather because he led a hard, selfish, crooked, cramped life, they will yet let him into paradise because he was so good to me.'
Othmar assented, with a sense of infinite compassion for her. All her dream was as baseless as the golden city which an evening sun builds out of clouds for a moment in the western sky. But he let it be. Life would soon enough wake her from such dreams with the rough hand of a stepmother, who grudges motherless children sleep.
'Let us speak of present things,' he said, to distract her thoughts. 'This is very little money, though you think so much of it, which is left to stand between you and all kinds of want. Will you let me place it out for you where it will bring you most? You may have heard, my dear, that I am one of those hapless persons who are doomed by circumstance to have much to do with gold. I hate it, but that is no matter. It is my fate. Will you trust me to try and multiply your little fortune? I will be very careful of it, but something more it shall make for you in my hands than if it were lying in a kitchen chimney or under an orchard wall, which you are too true to your nation not to think the safest kind of investment. I may? Then be it so. No, do not thank me, there is no need for that. But you are very young and you are not very prudent, I should say, and in these matters you will need advice. Remember always to command mine.'
She looked at him with grateful but questioning eyes.
'Why should you do so much for me?' she said with wonder.