by Ouida
Yseulte did not hear; she was thinking piteously, ‘And I did so want him to see how beautiful it all looked through his kindness!’
She was quite sure that Othmar would come to one office or another during the day. She was ashamed to be so occupied with this one thought when the drone of the acolyte was chanting in monotonous sing-song the opening words of the Mass; but it was stronger than herself. She thought of nothing else, to her own surprise and confusion; she was wholly unable to keep her mind to the holy offices of the hour; for the first time, the sonorous Latin words failed to carry her soul with them; she was glancing while she knelt at the closed rickety door, she was wondering whilst she sang the ‘Agnus Dei,’ would he come? She had taken such infinite pains with the flowers, and now all their beauty was gone! — they were only faded, helpless-looking melancholy wrecks of themselves, disfiguring the altar rather than lending it grace and glory.
‘Pauvre pétiote!’ thought Nicole, fingering her beads, and bending her stiff knees from habit. ‘The frost will come just like that to her, and nobody will care. Often have I a mind to go up to Millo and tell them it is a shame, a vile shame; but they would not care, they would have me turned out for an old mad woman.’
The church was very dark; the few lights there were did not dissipate the shadows of the dawn; the clear melodious voice of Yseulte rose in the gloom as a nightingale’s does in the lovelier dusk of a midsummer daybreak.
All her heart thrilled out in it, and when the last notes sank to silence there was a tremor as of tears in them.
Nicole’s heart swelled too as she heard, half with pain, half with rage.
‘I would sooner she were singing “do’, do’, l’enfant dor’!” by her baby’s cradle,’ thought this heathen.
She attended every office of the church during the next twelve hours, but Othmar came not to one of them. With Vespers all hope of seeing him there — such a vague, innocent, half-conscious hope as it was — had perished quite, like the orchids on the altar.
The day was over: the church had once more no light except that of its twinkling candles; the peasants shuffled to their feet and clattered out over the stones; Nicole began to chatter to the maid; the old vicar had tottered into the sacristy and was pulling off his vestments; the last office was done; the butterfly orchids were dying in the stench of the sputtering candlewicks; the acolyte — a ploughboy in a short linen tunic which showed his hobnailed boots — began to put the wicks out with a brass extinguisher fixed at the end of a long stick; she thought she would never bring flowers there any more — it was cruel — they withered and faded, and who could tell what they might suffer? She had never remembered that before.
The flowers had died in the service of the church; so would she. It had seldom seemed hard before.
While the two women chattered in low tones of the doings of Millo, she turned quickly back to the altar-steps and knelt down there and said one last prayer confusedly, conscious that she had been at fault all through the Mass in thinking of other things than the holy services in which she had taken part.
She rose, with the tears in her eyes, and went out through the little dark aisle between the two women, leaving the poor lost flowers in a confused and shadowy mass upon the altar until dawn, to be tossed away and thrust out under the sacristan’s broom to the dust-heap. Othmar had not come.
He was sitting at his own table, with the Princess Napraxine at his right hand.
The girl could see the lighted windows of his château as she walked down under the olives through the dusky furrows, already dotted with blades of corn, the women still chattering as they came behind her, the woods of Millo black under the moon, the stars shining, a distant watchdog giving tongue.
‘You are late, pétiote,’ said her foster-mother, kissing her hand at the door of the house. ‘But it will not matter; they are all dining at Count Othmar’s; if no one of those cats of gouvernantes tell the Duchesse, she will be none the wiser.’
‘There is nothing to conceal,’ cried Yseulte a little coldly. ‘My cousin knows that I go out to Vespers as well as Mass. Good night.’
She kissed her nurse on the cheek, and went up the staircase of Millo. Her heart had contracted with a sort of pang as she heard the idle words, ‘They are all dining at Count Othmar’s.’ She did not wonder that he had not invited her; no one invited her anywhere; she was a schoolgirl now, and would be a nun later on; she had nothing to do with the world, and yet her heart ached a little.
She did not touch the coffee and the cakes that her maid brought her. She sat at the window of her own little room, and looked every now and then out into the chilly night and across the moonlit landscape to the towers of S. Pharamond. There were points of light of all colours sparkling in the darkness round the château. They were the lamps of his gardens, which were illuminated down to the very edge of the sea. She felt a great longing to cry like a little child; but she would not yield to it. Only two great tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. She knew that she had been very foolish to expect him at the church; only he had said that he would come! ——
CHAPTER XI.
A few mornings later, after his noonday breakfast, Alain de Vannes sauntered out into the rose gardens of his wife, having seen there the figure of his wife’s young cousin in her demure grey dress with the cape of sable, which he was just then in the mood to think the prettiest female garb in the world. He went up to her with easy and good-humoured courtesy, as became her kinsman and her host.
‘My cousin,’ he said tenderly, ‘you have no trinkets and pretty things, as a little lady of your years should have. I believe there are all that are left of the Valogne jewels waiting for you in strong coffers, but meantime here is a little bird that will whisper to you pretty things if you will listen to him. You may wear a dove, you know, at the convent itself. It is the bird of the Holy Spirit.’
And with that he gave her what he had telegraphed for from Paris, a locket of blue enamel rimmed with pearls, and a dove, made of pearls, flying on it; it hung from a thick gold chain.
She was so astonished that she could not speak.
The Duc watched her with amusement. ‘Pardieu!’ he thought, ‘it is much more entertaining to give to the ingénue than to the belle petite. What wonder, what delight, what innocent gratitude! — and the others only box your ears if the diamonds be not big enough or the emeralds do not please them. Really we are fools.’
Yseulte meanwhile had not spoken yet; what moved her so intensely was not the gift of the medallion itself, splendid though it was, but the idea that anyone had had so much remembrance of her. She had scarcely had more notice than a careless bow or a brief ‘bon jour’ from her cousin’s husband in all her life, and now, he brought her this magnificent present! And yet, how much sooner she would have had Othmar remember to go and hear her sing!
‘Well, mignonne,’ said the Duc gaily. ‘You look as if you were not sure whether you were in earth or in heaven. We are not, when we look at you.’
‘It is most good of you; it is most beautiful,’ she said, with hesitation. ‘That you should have thought of me is so kind; but I fear I ought not to wear it; you know in two years’ time I am to enter the Carmelite communion.’
‘Nonsense! It is the bird of the Holy Spirit,’ said de Vannes, with an ambiguous smile. ‘I think you may wear it when you are an abbess — if ever you be an abbess. Ah, my child, it is a cruel thing to doom you to the religious life; only ugly women should go there, and you are so handsome, fillette, — you will be so handsome!’
‘Oh, no!’ she said, quickly; she blushed very much; she had been always told that it was a sin to think of any physical charms, and yet she had enough of the instincts of a beautiful woman in her to take an unconscious delight in the whiteness of her limbs, the thickness of her hair, the smile of her own eyes from a mirror.
‘Oh, yes!’ said de Vannes, still with that smile which vaguely hurt her. ‘You will be marvellously handsome, Yseulte; I think that is the chief r
eason why the ladies wish you in the cloister! It was certainly the reason why they would not take you to Othmar’s last night. To be sure you are not in the world, but in the country they might have made an exception; you are seen in our drawing-rooms.’
She lifted her eyes with eager appeal. ‘Did he ask me? Did he think of me?’ she said, under her breath.
The keen glance of the Duc flashed over her face, and grew harsh and suspicious.
‘Because he spoke to you once,’ he thought, ‘I suppose, though you be a young saint in embryo, you are not proof against his millions! You are all alike after all, you women, even in the bud.’
Aloud he said: ‘Yes; I believe Othmar bade my wife bring you. Perhaps she thought it was too much like the great world for you; it was a brilliant affair — all done for the Princess Napraxine.’
‘Who is the Princess Napraxine?’ she asked, surprised at her own temerity.
‘She is the lady of Othmar’s dreams,’ said de Vannes, with an unkind satisfaction. ‘You are sure to see her here sometime. What did you think of him the other night? You know, I suppose, that he could buy up all France if he chose.’
‘I did not know,’ she murmured. ‘Nicole, I think, said that he was rich.’
‘Rich!’ echoed the Duc, with derision. ‘That is not a word to describe Othmar. He has about a million millions, and he would probably be happier if he were the blind beggar of the Pont Neuf. His millions do not do anything for him with Nadine Napraxine, and it is only for Nadine Napraxine that he exists.’
Then he paused; the respect for la jeune fille, by which the most dissolute of his countrymen is restrained from long habit, making him repress the sentence he had on his lips; that momentary flush and light of happiness at being remembered by Othmar which he had seen on his young cousin’s face had made him bitter against his neighbour and friend, and he would willingly have continued his sarcasms on a man who, with all the world at his feet, cared only for another man’s wife, who laughed at him.
Yseulte listened with serious and wistful eyes; she did not know enough of his meaning, nor enough of the sympathy which had attracted her towards Othmar, to understand why she felt a vague pain at hearing these things said of him mingled with a delighted gratitude that he had remembered her. It was not to have gone to his party that she cared for, but to be remembered by him.
The children and their governesses approached her at that moment, and the Duc somewhat hurriedly turned away.
‘Do not let these fools see your locket,’ he said quickly, meaning by that epithet the wise women who educated his daughters. ‘If Cri-Cri notice it, tell her, of course.’
Yseulte, surprised at the injunction, looked at him in wonder; but she saw so much irritation in his expression that, being accustomed to obey the orders of others without comment, and to be taught that silence was one of the first of duties, she put his gift in her pocket as the children approached, and their father, with a petulant word or two, turned away, lighting a cigar.
‘What was petit papa saying to you?’ cried the little sisters in a breath.
They were pretty children, with clouds of hair and saucy peevish little faces. They wore sailor dresses, made very short at the knee and showing legs very shapely though too thin. Blanchette was blonde; Toinon was a little darker and rosier. Blanchette was the more elegant and the more witty by far; Toinon was the sturdier and the naughtier. But Toinon had still something of childhood left in her; Blanchette had lost every atom of hers years before, though she was only ten years old now. Toinon loved horses, dogs, boats, and le sport generally; Blanchette only cared for smart frocks, things which cost a great deal of money, scandal which she overheard, and which fascinated her in proportion as it was unintelligible to her, and the sense that she was looked at admiringly as she drove behind the ponies in the Bois or walked, with a court of small boys behind her, down the planks at Trouville.
Between her two cousins and Yseulte de Valogne there was a great gulf fixed, that gulf into which there has fallen so much of the innocence of youth, of the grace of good manners, of the charm of girlhood, and of the obligation of nobility; that gulf over which modern society dances so lightly, blind and indifferent to all it has lost.
‘What was petit papa saying?’ cried Blanchette and Toinon in one breath, their eyes wide open with curiosity and sparkling with suspicion.
Yseulte hesitated; she scarcely knew what to say, and a kind of oppression came upon her with the sense of the gift and the secret which she had to keep and conceal.
‘He was telling me that I was invited — there — last night,’ she said, as she looked across at the trees of S. Pharamond; ‘but they thought me not old enough,’ she added, with an unconscious sigh.
Blanchette turned up her little delicate nose in the air.
‘Grande nigaude, va!’ she said contemptuously. ‘You will never be anything but a big baby, you! When I am as old as you, I shall have been married a whole year to a crown prince, and have gone to all the theatres, and read all the newspapers — every one!’
‘But she will never see a newspaper, and never go to a theatre; never, never, never, — a big never!’ cried Toinon, who was two years younger than Blanchette, as she clapped her hands and capered.
‘She does not care, she is such a stupid,’ said Blanchette, with all the superiority of measureless scorn.
‘Papa was giving you something: what did he give you?’ said Toinon. ‘He said you were handsome the other night to mamma, I heard him. Mamma was angry.’
‘Mamma did not care,’ said Blanchette. ‘If it had been the Marquis Raymond!’ ——
Then the little sisters laughed.
Yseulte with difficulty escaped from her little tormentors, and wandered alone through the pretty grounds; while the closed shutters of the villa of Millo showed that her cousin and her house-party were still sleeping after the cotillon with which Othmar’s party had closed; an improvised and unexpected cotillon, for which, nevertheless, there had been all manner of admirable surprises, marvellous novelties, and costly presents.
When she was quite alone she took out her pearl medallion and looked at it with all a child’s rapture at a toy and something of a woman’s pleasure in a jewel. The kindness of her cousin de Vannes overwhelmed her. She had known him now and then, as she passed the doors of the billiard-room, or watched the drag roll out of the courtyard, give her a careless, good-tempered nod and a lazy word or two, but never any more notice than that, which was as much as Blanchette and Toinon ever received from him. At such times as he had come down to Bois le Roy or Millo, when she was there, she had heard of him as a man only devoted to horses and dogs, to sport of all sorts, to his stag-hounds and boar-hounds and otter-hounds, to his coach and his stud and his great chasses; she knew that he was a very grand gentleman in Paris, and at Bois le Roy — despite all revolutions — was a kind of king. And he had thought about her so much that he had bought her a locket! She could scarcely believe it.
She sat in a little nook made by magnolias that overhung the sea, and saw the sun shine on her dove of pearls, and wondered if she would dare to wear it; would the Duchess approve of it? There was only one thing which disturbed her, it was his recommendation to silence; there had been a look in his eyes, too, when he had said, ‘You are very handsome, fillette,’ which haunted her with a vague uneasiness. She was too utterly innocent to be alarmed by it, but a certain instinct in her shrank from the remembrance of that regard. It was the first look of sensual admiration which had been ever given her, and though he had added ‘Of course you must tell Cri-Cri,’ he had said it grudgingly, as though he would willingly, if he could have ventured to do so, have bidden her keep his gift a secret from his wife.
‘Are you counting your jewels, Mademoiselle de Valogne?’ said the voice of Othmar. ‘Leave that until you are thirty years older and need their aid.’
Without any thought of her he had been strolling on the rocks above the little harbour which belonged equally to S.
Pharamond and to Millo. He had been bathing and swimming, and was returning to his house, when he caught sight of her seated beneath the magnolias.
Yseulte coloured, and rose to her feet, dropping the medallion in her surprise as his voice startled her from her meditation. Othmar picked it up and returned it to her.
‘What a happy trinket to hold your thoughts so long,’ he said as he did so. ‘I have been watching you for a quarter of an hour, and you have never ceased to look at that most fortunate jewel.’
‘My cousin, the Duc de Vannes, gave it to me a moment ago,’ she answered him, vexed that he should suppose she could care so much for any trifle.
‘De Vannes!’ echoed Othmar in some surprise; ‘I did not know he had so much good taste in the selection either of his gifts or their recipients. It is a very pretty medallion,’ he added, noticing her look of distress and of bewilderment. ‘The dove is admirably done; I hope it will be an emblem of the peace which will always remain with you.’
She did not speak; the quick sensitiveness of her instincts made her feel the satire of his felicitations, and become conscious that for some reason or another he disapproved the gift which she had received.
‘I have never had any present before from anyone,’ she said simply, ‘so it is a great pleasure to me. I do not mean only because it is pretty — —’
‘But because of the affection it represents? I understand,’ said Othmar, while he thought to himself, ‘That goailleur de Vannes! — must he even bring his indecencies to Millo and try and corrupt a poor helpless child? The man would not spend twenty francs out of mere good nature, nor look at her twice out of mere compassion.’
He looked at her himself now where she sat under the magnolia branches; and it seemed to him as if she were the dove and he saw the hawk descending. Alain de Vannes could be seductive when he chose; he was good-looking and extremely distinguished, was accustomed to conquest, and had that charm of manner which the habit of the world and the society of women make second nature. If his fancy had lighted on his wife’s cousin he would not be likely to pause because she was penniless, lonely, and consecrated to a spiritual life.