by Ouida
‘But, Nicole,’ the girl said often to her foster-mother, ‘if there were no rich people, no great people, who would buy your primeurs, your December peas, your January asparagus?’
‘We should eat them ourselves,’ said Nicole, sternly.
‘You might do that now; but I do not think that eating them would pay you for all they cost you,’ said Yseulte, not very sure of her ground, and therefore timid in treading it.
‘We should not grow them; there would be no need to grow them,’ said Nicole, obstinately. ‘Everybody would have his cabbage in his pot if there were not those pestilent aristocrats and rich folks.’
‘But you might plant cabbages now,’ insisted her pétiote. ‘Why should you not plant cabbages everywhere now if you like? Only you always say it is only the primeurs that pay well.’
‘Oh, ma mie, you belong to them, so you defend them!’ grumbled her foster-mother, finding the argument go against her. ‘And what are they going to do with you? Cut off all your beautiful hair, and cram you between four stone walls all your life, because it suits their pride to get rid of you!’
‘One cannot live better than in God’s service,’ said Yseulte, with a passing blush.
‘Oh, yes, one can,’ muttered Nicole, ‘when one is sixteen years old and has a face like yours; one could have a gallant lover, and a loyal lord, a home of one’s own, and children one after another at one’s breast.’
A colour like that of the red winter roses which she was binding up for the Nice markets came into the girl’s cheeks.
‘I am quite happy to dedicate my life to our Mother and her poor,’ she said, in that tone which always awed and silenced Nicole. ‘All that I fear is, not to be worthy. There have been holy women of my race. I may never content them as they watch me from their places at God’s right hand.’
The coarse blunt fashion of speech of her foster-mother, and the crude class-hatreds and political animosities which Nicole had imbibed from her husband often pained and offended the delicacy and the pride of the girl; but the rough woman loved her, was almost the only creature that did love her, save some of the younger children in the convent; and Yseulte bore with her faults with that indulgent affection which is not blind, but patient and ever forgiving.
She spoke in simplicity and sincerity; she had been so drilled to behold her only future in the religious life, that she prayed night and day to be worthy of such election; and if a thrill of longing for unknown freedom, for unimaginable joys, sometimes came over her she loyally stifled it ere it could grow to any strength. From her babyhood she had been taught to consider herself consecrated to the Church, and that knowledge had always kept her a little apart from others, made her more serious, more sensitive, more meditative, than her age usually is.
‘And, to be sure, if there be any up there who do know, it is a crying shame that they do not interfere,’ muttered her foster-mother, only half abashed. But Yseulte did not hear her; she had let the roses lie on her lap, her hands were motionless, her eyes were looking far away, farther than the snow which crowned the distant mountains; she was thinking of that saint by whom her childhood had been sheltered; could it indeed be that so great a love as her grandmother’s had been had perished utterly, had gone whither it knew nothing, saw nothing, had no power to warn or save? If it were so, she was alone indeed. But ——
‘Nay, do not think of them,’ said Nicole, roughly; ‘what is dead is dead, my sweet; be it a pig or be it a princess, when the life is out the sense is out with it; it rots, but it does not wake.’
‘Hush!’ said the girl, with a little frown and a sense of pain, as if she had heard some foul irreverence. The dead were all she had to care for; half her young life was passed in thinking of them, in praying for them, in wondering if they approved that which she did. ‘Christ will give you your dower,’ her grandmother had said often to her, a little seven-year-old child, who had vaguely understood that her future was pledged to heaven; and that she must never be fractious, or noisy, or sullen, or give way to appetite or mischief as other children did who were less honoured. It had made her neither affected nor hypocritical; only pathetically doubtful of herself and capable of repressing her naturally buoyant spirits with an incredible patience which was almost heroism, but went always unrewarded.
Faïel was a part of the old world of Bretagne, where the land is green and deeply wooded, and the days are misty and soft and still; it lies inland, and has no sight of the sea; it is traversed by narrow roads sunk down low between moss-grown walls of verdure; it seems all covered up with moss and ferns and boughs; there is always moisture in the air and there are almost always clouds in the sky, but it is a sweet, tender, if mournful country, and in the late-arriving spring becomes a very bower of flowers.
In the heart of this green country the ancient village of Faïel held the equally ancient convent of the Holy Ladies of St. Anne, with its long grey stone walls, its steep shining metal roofs, and its high belfry with its cross of gilded brass towering above the low quaint cottages which crept humbly up beneath it many centuries ago. The foundation owed its origin to Anne of Bretagne herself, and year after year, century after century, undisturbed by wars or revolutions, and unreached by any change of thought or manners the pious ladies of Faïel, in their habits of black and white, had reared the young daughters of the Breton nobility and gentry in the ways of God and in such secular learning as seemed not too profane. The community was severe in its rules and austerely simple in all its customs; but the children were happy if not gay; the green, leafy, silent country was between them and the world, the sisters were kind and gentle, the young girls murmured together, joyously, unreproved, like young swallows chirping under the eaves in midsummer. This holy house in pious Morbihan was wholly unlike those fashionable convents of Paris, and near it, where all the pomps and vanities of the world find their way, and its jealousies and its rivalries fret and fume in miniature mimicry. The Dames de Ste. Anne had all the primitive faiths, the unblemished loyalties, the devout beliefs in tradition of the Middle Ages; they taught the history of France from religious instead of secular records, and the history of the saints from the Golden Legend; they worked silver lilies on white banners, and in their chapel every day a Mass was said for Henri Cinq. Their little maidens became under their hands simple, earnest, grave, and most innocent and truthful creatures, ignorant, no doubt, in many things, but possessing a perfect courage and a beautiful candour; such maidens as in the old days, from the Combât des Trente to Quiberon, had become the wives and mothers of the Breton seigneurie, and had, if need were, defended a castle and headed a sally of men-at-arms in the holy cause of their duke or of their king; women like the arum lilies that covered the damp green earth in their native woods; women whose eyes look at us still, serious and serene, from the gold blazonries of illuminated missals, where their miniatures have been painted beneath their scutcheons and their crowns.
Of these children, when they had passed from the gates of Faïel for the last time, some went to pass all their years in the small secluded châteaux or the dull stone-built towns of the seashore or the interior; some, finding a wider flight, a bolder fate, went into the life of the world and lived that life. But wherever they went, whatever they became, none of them ever wholly forgot Faïel; all of them when they bore children said, as they looked on their little daughters, ‘They shall go to the Dames de Ste. Anne;’ so that generation after generation came to the great Gothic gateway, and passed within and dwelt there for eight or ten peaceful years; and the sisters, though death made changes amidst them, yet seemed always the same.
Yseulte, who was a fanciful child like most of those who have a lonely childhood, used to believe that they were like that woman of the time of Clovis who learned the secret of eternal life from listening to the singing of the forest birds.
She used to look through the grating down the deep green shade of the woods without, and think, ‘That is why they live so long, why they are always content.’
/> One day an old peasant, who was called a witch in Faïel, saw her looking so and heard her say something of her thoughts to her companion, and the old crone shook her head wisely, ‘Do not wish to live long; wish to live so that you have all heaven in one hour; it is not the birds, nor is it the woods, nor is it the saints, that will give you that.’
‘What does she mean?’ said Yseulte.
‘In the village they say she has been a wicked woman,’ said the girl who was beside her.
Yseulte pondered often on the mysterious words, but she could never understand them.
At Faïel her days and years went by without any sorrow, if without any pleasure save such as youth and perfect health and willingness to accomplish all allotted tasks can bring with them. She always wore grey or black or white; no colours were ever seen, no ornaments were ever allowed within the sacred walls. She was regarded as certain to enter the religious life. ‘Tu seras des nôtres,’ said the nuns so often to her that before she was ten years old she had grown so imbued with the idea that she had never dreamed of resisting such a destination. Her life was so entirely simple, in a way so barren, that the spiritual world assumed a proportion in it which would have been morbid had not the high courage and bodily healthfulness of her resisted the gloom which those who had to do with her deemed most fitting to the loneliness of her lot. She came of a race of gay nobles, of reckless soldiers, of high-handed seigneurs, and some instincts of their courage, of their temper, of their imprudence, stirred in her now and then beneath the calm of cloistral habit and the spirituality of her natural temperament.
‘Do you think the daughter of Gui de Valogne will ever be a saint?’ the Duc de Vannes often said to his wife. He thought that blood would out even beneath the coif of a Carmelite. His wife replied that the Valogne had always kept their women pure, if at the sword’s point, and that amongst them there had been more than one canonised; besides, she added, Yseulte was a child both grave and good; she would never know the world or its temptations; she would live and die as a lily did in a convent garden.
The Duc shrugged his shoulders:
‘She has her father’s blood in her,’ he said, ‘and he would have suited no cloister but Roissy or Medmenham.’
He believed in very few things, but his one belief was his conviction that the bias of a race goes with it as do its diseases or its excellences. Most racing men are implicit believers in hereditary influence, and the Duc, who had bred winners at Chantilly and at Ascot, did not credit that the daughter of Gui de Valogne would contentedly become a Ste. Catherine or a Sœur Rose.
‘Of course you may shut her perforce in a religious house; so might you shut her in a coffin. To be sure, the one murder is legal and the other would not be so,’ he said, with some ill-humour, the night after Othmar noticed his young cousin with her long black gloves, her stately curtsy, her sash à l’enfant, and her beautiful figure, which had the slimness of a child and the promise of a goddess.
‘I believe you are almost in love with her yourself,’ said the Duchess.
‘I wonder no one else is wholly,’ he answered, with petulance; and he wrote to his jeweller in the Rue de la Paix for a locket, a girl’s locket; something with pearls. He thought even a Mother Superior could hardly object to pearls.
Yseulte, all unconscious of the perilous honour projected for her by her cousin’s lord, passed the whole day up at the little church, arranging the flowers which Othmar had given her in the morning, and others which his men, by his orders, had brought thither in the forenoon. She was happier than she had been since her grandmother had died. A warm human interest had come suddenly into the monotony and solitude of her existence. She worked at the decoration of the little place with ardour and delight. She had never before possessed such flowers as these; the woods had yielded all those which had ever decked the altar of the chapel at Faïel. She had only seen such gorgeous blossoms as these in the glass-house at Millo, where she would no more have dreamed of gathering them than of wearing her cousin’s diamonds.
‘He shall see how beautiful it looks to-morrow,’ she thought with each blossom that she added, each leaf she touched. That he would come she never doubted; a promise, ever such a little one, was so sacred to herself that for any pledge to be forgotten would have seemed to her quite impossible.
The old vicar came and went, the sacristan and the housekeeper stood and chattered and told her for the hundredth time all their household troubles; the gay sunshine streamed in past the open door and through the dulled grey glass of the small windows, a goat trotted up the aisle and nibbled at the bay boughs which she had tied together. The morning passed like a pleasant dream; it seemed not December to her but May. She was but a child, and for once the weight of her future fell off her young shoulders. She laughed, — softly, because she sat on the altar steps, — but she laughed. ‘God is so good,’ she thought, in the simple sincerity of her glad gratitude.
‘You will let me sing, my reverend, at all the offices?’ she said to the old man when she had finished her welcome labours and stood with him within the stone porch whilst the sun was setting.
‘Surely, my child,’ he said willingly. ‘It does me good to hear your voice, and I think it must even be pleasant to the angels too.’
She went happily along the uneven little path which led down the hill under great olive trees and warm evening sunset skies to Millo. Her feet went so rapidly that the maid whose duty it was to attend her out of doors could ill keep pace with her. Her heart was so light; she had the vision of the beautiful flowers always before her eyes, of the altar which she had made like a garden. It mattered nothing to her that when she entered the house she was met by a reprimand, that she found her simple supper cold, that her little cousins were malicious, quarrelsome, unkind; all those were trifles. She bore them with perfect patience, and with never a word of harsh reply; and she went to her bed and slept soundly, dreaming of roses and lilies, and S. Cecilia, and of a world of angels who leaned on the sunbeams as on golden spears, and looked down on her and smiled.
She was up long before the first gleam of coming day lightened the eastward seas. No one ever forbade her going to the church as often as she chose; they deemed it in unison with her future vocation. She had attached herself to this rude, lonely, little place in the winters which she had passed there under the charge of Nicole Sandroz. Her cousin had said once that it would be better if she attended instead the offices of the house chapel, but she had not insisted, and the child, who had a certain obstinacy in her affections, had persevered in her loyalty to the parish church under its silvery mist of olives.
This morning her foster-mother was in waiting to accompany her. The cold was keen in the greyness of the dawn; the sun, which at noon would vivify the winter landscape to summer-like warmth, was still hidden in the nether world, the earth and the sea were dark, the stars still lingered in the shadowy skies.
‘What folly, pétiote!’ muttered Nicole, who had her lanthorn, ‘to get up out of your bed to go and sing an ave! If it were to pack a crate of oranges there would be some sense!’
‘Hush, please,’ said Yseulte gently. ‘Perhaps grandmère hears.’
The memory of the old Marquise always touched and silenced the irreligious grumbling of Nicole. She said nothing more, but toiled on stoutly, her lanthorn twinkling amongst the rough grass, white with passing frost.
‘The child would be best in her bed,’ she thought; ‘but there is one thing, — she never takes cold. One would like to think the saints had a care of her, but that is all rubbish; even our mayor says so now, and he is such a dunderhead, what he cannot stomach nobody can.’
Still Nicole, who came to Mass for her sake, though the good woman in her soul hated the bigots, the black beetles, of the church, held on her way up the hill, stumbling over the roots of the old olives; it pleased the pétiote that she should come, and after all it could do no harm.
Eager, proud, joyous — more joyous she feared than was meet for the sancti
ty of the hour and the errand — Yseulte led her into the church as the first pale light of daybreak spread itself over the earth.
‘Now you will see how beautiful it is!’ she murmured to Nicole.
Alas, the fair garden she had made and left at twilight was a ruin now! Where she had caused the metal and the wood and the stone to bloom as with the blossoms of Paradise, there were only poor pale yellow withered things colourless as ashes!
The frost of the night had stolen the glory from the flowers as the hand of the Church would strike the youth from her life and leave it hard and dumb as a stone. The blossoms had died of cold like little children lost in the snow, like bright butterflies beaten down and drowned in a storm of hail.
A low pathetic cry of grief escaped her as she saw the lovely things, which she so ignorantly and innocently had slain, hanging their folded petals in the chill glimmer of the early day as the limbs of infants hang in death.
Her eyes filled with hot quick tears that ran down her cheeks.
‘Oh, look! Oh, look!’ she cried piteously.
‘What could you expect, pétiote,’ said Nicole with rough sympathy, ‘if you bring hothouse flowers from under their glass? Our nights are cold — my man said last night it was two below zero by the mercury tube in our wall. Do not cry, mignonne; you could not help it; you did not think of it; children never do think. But bay and laurel and all those common shrubs are best fit to stand the cold of the church. These things are only aristocrats.’
Nicole checked herself; she remembered the Marquise de Creusac, with the frost of poverty and cruel loss upon her, meeting misfortune with serene courage and unchanging dignity; her comparison, she saw, halted and failed.