'Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,' said Melville, who never spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were many. The old man's younger and only remaining son had lain dying of Asiatic cholera, brought to the coast in some infected load of Eastern rags, with which they had manured the olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to approach the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized at dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over, and with his own hands had aided Jean Bérarde to lay the body of his boy in mother-earth. When the grave was filled up, the old socialist, to whom priests had been as loathliest vermin, gave his knotted work-worn hand to the slender white hand of Melville:
'The only one that had the courage!' he muttered. 'Do not try to do anything with me, it would be no use; but do what you like about the child. I will say nothing. You alone stayed by me to see her uncle die.'
So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to learn of the Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to go also to Mass on high days and holy days. But Melville saw no necessity to say all this to his worldly friends upon the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he even reproached himself that, in a momentary unconsidered impulse, he had given the name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a man to go in cold blood on a seducer's errand, but he was conceited, sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without much consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or to others. And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he had committed an imprudence.
'Jean Bérarde,' he continued, 'of course, abhors priests, and would have a general massacre of the Church. But I chanced to do him a service, as I said, some time ago, and so he allows me now and then to go and sit under his big olives and talk to the child, and even, grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now and then. His past is written clearly enough in the history of Savoy, but he either does not know or does not care anything about his descent. All he does care about are his profits from olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from smuggling. What is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew his forefathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his own. Perhaps the fury of the _Ça ira_ got into him, being begotten, as he was, in that time of blood and flame through which his progenitors passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of socialists now.