Othmar

by Ouida

'I do very little,' returned Othmar. 'And were it far more, you have a direct claim on me—on us. If my wife had not tempted you away that memorable day, you would have been dwelling contented on your island still, and probably for ever.'

'No: not there,' she said slowly, as if she reasoned with herself. 'I do not think I should ever have stayed there very long. I loved it, but I wanted something else. When I used to sit, as so often I sat, all alone on the balcony that hangs over the sea, when it was late at night, and everyone else was asleep, and the nightingales were shouting in the orange-boughs underneath, I used to think that some other world there must be where some one cared for Ondine and Athalie, where some one had cried as I cried for Triboulet and Hernani; where they did not all talk all day long of the price of oil, and the cost of cargoes, and the disease in the lemons, and the worm in the olive wood. I knew that all these great and beautiful things could not have been written unless men and women were, somewhere, great and beautiful also; and very often—oh, often! long before your Lady spoke to me—I had thought that whenever my grandfather should die I would go and find that world for myself. And now——'

He waited some moments, but her sentence remained incomplete.

'And now?' he repeated at last. 'Now do you think still that there is such a world, or do you not see that no one does care for Ondine or Athalie? that the price of oil and the worm in the olive (or their equivalents) are the sole carking cares of the great world, just as much as of your peasant-proprietors? Did you not dream of Hernani, and did you not only meet the sergent de ville?'

'I met you!' she said gently, with a tinge of reproach in her voice.

'My dear child!' said Othmar, touched and a little embarrassed. 'I am far from heroic. Ask the person who knows me best, and she will tell you so. I only rake the world's gold to and fro as if I were a croupier, and I assure you the olives and the lemons are much worthier subjects of thought.'

She made a little involuntary gesture of her hand, as if she pushed away some unworthy suggestion which it was not needful to refute in words. Her face had grown serious and resolute; she had the look of a young Pallas Athene. Innumerable thoughts were crowding on her which she could ill express.

Ever since a possible fate had been suggested to her in which fame might attend on her, ever since a vague immeasurable ideal had been suggested to her in the music of Paul of Lemberg, it had become impossible for her ever to remain content with the homely aims and the prosaic thoughts of the people amongst whom she had been born. Heredity and accident had alike combined to divorce her from her natural fate. Of those thus severed from their original source, thus rebellious against their native air, two or three in a generation become great, famous, victorious; the larger number fall back from the summits which they aspire to reach, and fill the restless, dissatisfied, tarnished ranks which are comprised in the all-expressive word déclassés. But the word seemed unfitted to her; there were that simplicity, that originality, that force in the child which mark the higher natures of humanity, whether they be found in peasants or in princes; there were in her also that natural high breeding and absolute self-unconsciousness which render all vulgarity and assumption impossible; those marks of race which are wholly independent of all circumstance. Jeanne d'Arc greeted her king as her brother, and Christine Nilsson meets sovereigns as her sisters.

He had seen this child also bear herself with inborn grace and natural dignity in the first dazzling scene and unkind embarrassment of circumstance which she had ever known. It seemed to him that she would go thus through life.