by Ouida
Othmar, meanwhile, unconscious that they talked of him, even unconscious that his passion for his friend’s wife had been ever suspected by his world, found the dinner tedious, and was not distracted by his neighbours, both of whom were lovely women.
When they returned to the salons at the further end of the great central drawing-room, which was all white and silver, with satin panels embroidered with silver thread, and doors made of mirrors painted with groups of flowers, there was seated all alone at one of the little tables a very young girl, who wore a plain white gown, with a plain black sash tied around her waist, à l’enfant, and a black ribbon holding up the thick masses of her fair hair.
‘That is Cendrillon,’ thought Othmar, moved to a vague interest as he recalled the story which Melville had told; and he looked on her more attentively.
As she rose at the entrance of the Duchess he saw that she was very tall for her age; the slim, straight, unornamented frock became her: she had neither awkwardness nor self-consciousness, neither much timidity nor any self-assertion. There was a look about her of spirited but restrained life which was pathetic, the look of any high-couraged young animal which is too early and too rudely tamed.
‘Poor child!’ thought Othmar in an involuntary pity, as he saw the Duchess go up to her, tap her carelessly on the shoulder with a fan, present her to another lady and with that other lady turn away indifferently after a few words. The girl curtsied low with perfect grace, and resumed her seat; she appeared used to be forgotten. She sat quite still, neither embarrassed by neglect or solicitous of attention. She might have been a statue but for her half-veiled eyes, of a luminous golden brown shaded by long black lashes, and her mouth like a rose, which had made him call her a Greuze picture as she had passed him in the boat. She had looked much happier in the boat than she looked now in the drawing-room.
Othmar watched her a little while. No one approached her: the men present did not care for ingénues; the women, it is needless to say, cared still less. The Duchesse did not think it necessary to trouble herself about a child who was still in a convent and would soon be in one for the rest of her days. She was not averse to such an evidence of her own charity as her young cousin presented sitting there, carefully dressed, admirably educated, in living testimony of the benevolence of Aurore de Vannes; but there was no need for more than the tap with the fan and the good-natured indifferent Comment va-t-on ce soir, petite?
Othmar waited some ten or twelve minutes, then approached his hostess.
‘Duchesse, will you do me the honour to present me to Mdlle. de Valogne?’
She stared at him in astonishment.
‘Certainly — yes; why not? — But how did you know her name? And she is only a child at Sacré Cœur.’
‘Melville told me her sad little story and of all your amiability towards her. Surely she will soon be a very beautiful woman?’
‘Elle n’est pas mal,’ said the Duchess, somewhat irritably. ‘Melville is always romancing, you know; there is nothing to be romantic about; she is destined to the religious life; it was her grandmother’s wish, and is her own. As for presenting you to her, she is only a child; it would not be well to make her think herself in the world. If you would excuse me — —’
‘Pray present me, Duchesse,’ he persisted. ‘I assure you I do not eat children; and if she be doomed to take the veil so soon, the world will lose her anyhow. But will you have the heart to cut off all that hair?’
‘You will always have your own way,’ said Madame de Vannes, who knew very well that he did not have it where most he cared; then she took him across to where her young cousin sat, and said, ‘Yseulte, Count Othmar wishes to know you; he is a friend of Monsignor Melville’s.’
The girl made him the same grand curtsy, which she had made before, only a little less low than she had given to the lady. Then she seated herself once more, and waited for him to speak first, as we wait for a royal person to do so.
He spoke to her of Melville, divining that the way to her confidence would be through his regard for the early period of her childhood. She listened with pleasure to his praises of her grandmother’s friend, and answered him in few syllables; but the restraint seemed to him the result neither of timidity nor of want of intelligence, but of the reserve which had been imposed upon her alike at her convent and here at Millo, where no one heeded her unless the Duc threw her a good-natured glance, or the Duchesse a petulant word of censure. It was easy to see that on a nature formed for light and laughter, the sense of being unneeded and undesired in the home of others had early cast shadows too deep for childhood.
‘How very handsome she is!’ he thought, as he spoke of Melville and his many noble works. Close to her he could see the exceeding regularity of her features, the splendour of her eyes, the purity of her complexion, which was not the narcissus whiteness of Nadine Napraxine, but that childlike fairness under which the colour mantles at any passing thought, or any effort or exercise. Her form, too, had all the slenderness and indecision of youth, but it had also the certainty of a magnificent womanhood. Her low dress showed her white shoulders, her quickly-breathing childlike breast, her beautiful throat.
‘All that to be wasted in a cloister!’ he thought, with repugnance. It seemed a sin against nature’s finest work, youth’s most gracious grace. To be sixteen years old, and to have a face as fair as a flower, and to be the last of a great race, and yet to be doomed to be joyless, loverless, childless, from birth unto death, because a little gold and silver were lacking to her! To the master of millions it seemed the cruelest irony of fate that he had ever encountered. Why should the absurd codes and prejudices of the world make him powerless to give this unhappy child out of his abundance the little which she would need to take her place amidst those common human joys which the poorest can attain, but which the selfishness of man and the customs of society forbade to her, merely because she had been nobly born? He was thinking of her fate all the while that he talked to her of Melville; he was thinking of that supple slender form disguised under the nun’s heavy garb, of that abundant hair shorn and falling to the stone floor. Could those gay, good-natured, idle, spendthrift people who condemned her so lightly to such a sacrifice, not surrender one of their luxuries, one of their follies, to save her?
Then he pictured to himself, with a smile at his own whimsical conceit, the tailors’ bills of Madame de Vannes curtailed, her caprices sacrificed, her equipages diminished, her parties de chasse discontinued, her superfluous jewels sold, to furnish with the result attained a dower to her portionless cousin! These good people called themselves Christians; nevertheless, such generosity would have seemed to them as impossible as to go out on to the boulevards in the goatskin of John the Baptist. Would there ever be a religion that should influence the lives of its professors? Christianity had had its own way for nigh two thousand years, and had scarcely left a mark on the world so far as practical renunciation went.
While he mused thus, he talked lightly and kindly to the girl, but he met with little response. The convent education had taught her silence, and she thought that he had only come to her side because he had pitied her solitude; that thought made her shy and proud. With all his good will, he failed to make much way into her friendship, or to elicit much more than monosyllabic replies, and he would have felt his benevolence wearisome had it not been that there was so much true loveliness in her features and in her form that he was not glad of his release when she was called by the Duchesse to the piano.
‘Could you make anything of Yseulte?’ said the Duc de Vannes to him. ‘She is the true ingénue of the novelist and dramatist; she knows nothing beyond the four walls of the convent. It is a type fast disappearing, even with us, under the influence of American women and English romances. I am not sure that it is not to be regretted; it is something, at least, to have a girlhood like a white rose.’
‘But you are going to set the rose to wither before the sanctuary of Marie?’ said Othmar, still moved by his one
idea.
The Duc shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh, that is my wife’s affair. Myself, I think it is a pity. The child will be a magnificent woman; but then, you see, she has no dower. Where can she go except to the cloisters? Listen! she sings well.’
She was singing then, and her voice rose with singular richness, like the notes of a nightingale smiting the silence of a golden southern noon. The quality of her voice was pure and strong, with a sound in it as of unshed tears, of restrained, and perhaps unconscious, emotion.
‘And she will only sing the Laus Deo and the Kyrie Eleison,’ thought Othmar, ‘and no one will hear her except a few scores of sad-hearted, stupid women, who will succeed in making her as sad-hearted and as stupid as themselves!’
What she rendered was the sweetest of all the simple Noëls written by Roumanille, the song of the blind child who begs her mother to take her to see the Enfant Jésus in the church, and to whom the mother long replies, in chiding and hardness of heart: ‘What use, since thou canst not see?’ Saint-Saëns had set the naive and pathetic words to music which was penetrated with that esprit provençal which has in it ‘les pleurs du peuple et les fleurs du printemps;’ and the voice of the girl was pure, tender, and solemn, in unison with what she treated.
‘Je sais qu’au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure;
Je sais encor
Que je ne verrai pas, divine créature,
Ta face d’or.
‘Mais qu’est-il besoin d’yeux pour adorer et croire?
Si mes yeux sont
A te voir impuissants, mes mains, ô Dieu de gloire,
Te toucheront!’
L’aveugle à ses genoux pleure si fort, et prie
Sur un tel ton,
D’un air si déchirant, que la mère attendrie
N’a plus dit non.
Oh! comme la pauvrette, en entrant dans la grotte,
En tressaillait!
De Jésus sur son cœur elle mit la menotte:
Elle voyait!
Of all those who listened to her, the old minister, who had spoken of Karl Huth, and Othmar himself, were the only persons touched by the likeness of the words of the Noël to the destiny which awaited the singer of it.
‘Je sais qu’au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure,’
Othmar repeated to himself. ‘Poor child! there will be no miracle wrought for her.’
It seemed to him pathetic, and even cruel.
She had sung with science and accuracy which were in contrast with the very youthful cadence of her voice, and when she ceased there was a murmur of applause. She blushed a little, and with a composure that was almost dignity accepted the compliments paid her, and went back, without a word, to her seat.
‘She would make a name for herself as an artist if she were not the last Comtesse de Valogne,’ thought Othmar. ‘Poor child! it is hard to bear all the harness and curb of rank and have none of its gilded oats to eat.’
A pretty élégante was now singing a song of Judic’s with even more suggestion by gesture and of glance than the original version of it gave; the air of the drawing-room rippled with her silvery notes and their response of subdued laughter; everyone forgot Mdlle. de Valogne and the Provençal Noël. When Othmar looked again for her, she was gone: the salon saw her no more that night.
‘You were soon tired, Othmar,’ said the Duchesse. ‘Naturally: what should you find to say to a child from a convent? She has not two ideas.’
‘She speaks little, certainly,’ he answered; ‘but I am not sure that it is from want of ideas; and even if she have no ideas, what does a beautiful woman want with them? — and she is beautiful.’
‘I thought you liked clever women.’
‘Clever! Oh, what a comprehensive word. It is like that balloon they advertise, which you can either fold up in your pocket or float as high as the moon. As for Mdlle. de Valogne, I should think she was very intelligent, to judge by her brow and her eyes. But convents do not nourish their pupils on Rénan and Huxley.’
‘Rénan?’ said the Duchess, with a charming affectation of ignorance. ‘Oh, that is the man who writes so many volumes about himself to explain why he cannot bring himself to believe some story about an almond bough that swallowed snakes! When Voltaire began that sort of thing, it seemed shocking, but it was new; nowadays it is not new and nobody is shocked; it is only tiresome.’
‘But you, Madame, who laugh, yet respect the Church enough to sacrifice a virgin to it as the Greek to the Minotaur?’
‘There is no other retreat possible for girls of good family who are portionless,’ said the Duchess very positively.
‘But there are many men who do not marry for a dower.’
‘Perhaps, but not with us; it would be quite impossible, an unheard of thing,’ said the Duchesse, scandalised at such a suggestive violation of all etiquette and family dignity.
From time immemorial the younger sons or the unmarriageable daughters of the Valogne, of the Creusac, of the d’Authemont, of all the great races whose blood met in this child, had hidden their narrowed fates with decorum and stateliness in the refuge of the cloisters; why should she, because she had been born in the latter half of the nineteenth century, rebel against so just a disposal? And she did not rebel at all, would not, unless some man made love to her and put rebellion in her head. That man would not be Othmar; he had only one thought — Nadine Napraxine. If she had not been sure of that, she would not even have presented him to her young cousin, for she was a very proud woman despite her frivolity, and to seek a rich alliance for a poor relative would have seemed to her the last of degradations. Her own people, and her husband’s, had always married as sovereigns do, accepting and conferring equal advantages.
‘Poverty has the right to be as proud as it chooses so long as it accepts nothing; when once it has accepted anything, it has become mendicity,’ had said often the old Marquise de Creusac to her granddaughter, and Yseulte would not do dishonour to that lesson.
‘One can trust her implicitly,’ said Madame de Vannes once to her husband, who had answered:
‘Oh, yes, my dear; that is the result of an old-fashioned education. When your Blanchette and Toinon are at her age, they will know everything objectionable under the sun, but they will not let you know that they know it. You are bringing them up more britannico!’
CHAPTER VIII.
Yseulte de Valogne, waking the next morning and looking through the little panes of her high window in the roof at the landscape which the red leaves of the Canadian vine framed in crimson, was conscious of a new interest in her life. Some one, she did not know whom, for in her confusion she had not heard his name, had spoken to her with kindness, and that deference to her incipient womanhood which is the sweetest flattery to a very young girl. Othmar, with the grace of his manner, the seriousness and coldness which made him different to the men of his time, and his handsome features, to which an habitual reserve had given that expression of self-control and of melancholy which most attracts her sex, had seemed to her imagination like some gracious knight of old bending to pity her loneliness, and to succour that timidity which was in so much due to her pride and her unwillingness to be regarded with compassion and to her dread lest she should seem to seek attention.
She thought of him with a vague personal interest stronger than any she had felt in her simple and monotonous life, since her childhood on the Ile St. Louis had become to her like an old book of prayer, shut up unused, with the lavender and southern-wood of long dead summers faded and dried inside it. Though she was only sixteen, that childhood seemed so far, so very far, away. It would have appeared to Blanchette and Toinon, with their artificial, excited, blasé little lives, a dull and austere childhood enough, passed beside the infirmities and incapacities of age, and with no other active pleasure than to gather marguerites on the grass islands of the Seine or to hear a Magnificat sung at Notre Dame.
The rooms they lived in had been narrow and dark, their food had been of the simples
t, their days regulated with exact and severe precision. But she had been so happy! When her grandmother, with the white hair like spun silk and the thin small hands, on which one great diamond sparkled — sole relic of a splendid past — said, with a smile, ‘C’est bien fait, mon enfant,’ all the universe could have added nothing to her content.
When the old man servant Bénoît had taken her out to the Sainte Chapelle, or the graves at the Abbaye, and had told her tales of how her forefathers had died on the scaffold, in the noyades, on the battle-fields of Jemappes, or in the slaughter of Quiberon, she had known that purest of all pride, which rejoices in the honour and loyalty of the dead who have begotten us. All the air about her had been redolent of fidelity, of courage, of dignity. She had breathed in that fine clear atmosphere of integrity as the transparent dianthus drinks in the sea-water which the sunbeams pierce with vivifying gold. When the Marquise had sometimes taken, out of old sandal-wood coffers, antique brocades, dusky old jewels, faded yellow letters, perhaps a ribbon and a star of some extinct order once worn at Marly or at Amboise, the child had listened with reverent ear and beating heart to the stories which went with the relics and keepsakes, and it had always seemed to her as if some perfume of the past entered her very veins, as its fragrance is poured upwards from the root into the flower. Nor had it been always melancholy, that innocent, tranquil life; gentlemen of the old courtly habits had made their bow humbly in those narrow rooms, and the old gaieté gauloise had laughed sometimes beneath the sad serenity of losses nobly borne. There had been merry days when Bénoît had taken her in one of the boats which crossed the Seine in summer, and had rowed to one of those quiet nooks of which he had the secret, and had landed with her amidst the tall hay grasses, and had set her noonday meal there — a little fruit and roll of bread — watching the poplars quiver in the light, and the women work upon the shore, and the clumsy brown brigs come and go on the broad breast of the river; and she had clasped a great sheaf of may and daisies and kingcups in her arms, and had run hither and thither in a very ecstasy of limbs set free and eyes delighted, and had cried her delight aloud to the old man, who had nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oui, oui, c’est beau,’ but had thought, with a pang at his faithful heart, ‘Si jeunesse savait —— .’