by Ouida
‘One ought to put her on her guard, and yet, who could venture to do that,’ he thought; he, at all events, had no title to do so, and if he had, he could not willingly have been the first to tell her that under the roses there were vipers, that behind the dew and the sunrise there were evil fires burning.
‘Will you stay long at Millo?’ he asked abruptly.
‘I came here for two months,’ she said. ‘We were all sent away, — there was fever; I have been here often before. I am very fond of Millo.’
‘Why would they not let you honour me last night?’
‘I do not go into the world at all. I never shall.’ She hesitated a moment, then added timidly, ‘It was very kind to think of me.’
‘It would not be easy to forget you,’ said Othmar with a sincerity which surprised himself. ‘I wish you had been with us; yours is the age for sauteries and enjoyment. I should like to see you at your first ball.’
‘I shall never go to a ball. It would not be thought right.’
‘And do you never rebel against so harsh a destiny?’
She coloured to her eyes as she answered almost inaudibly, ‘Sometimes — yes — but then I know that it is I who am wrong and they who are right.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The Mother Superior; my uncle, de Creusac, by his will; my cousin Aurore; everyone that I belong to at all: my grandmother especially desired it.’
‘It makes one wish all the world were agnostic!’
‘What did you say?’
Agnostic was not a word she had been allowed to hear.
‘I say that it is a cruel thing to force on you such a choice. At least you should be allowed to know what you do, ere you do it. You should see what the world is like before you renounce it. I can fancy that women tired, sorrow-laden, unlovely, unloved, feeble of health, may be glad of the refuge of religious life; but you! — —’
‘Do you think one should only give God what is weary and worn out?’ she said softly. ‘Surely one should give one’s best?’
Othmar was touched by the words and the tone. To him, whose boyhood had been filled with spiritual faiths and hopes, and whose manhood had the pain of knowledge that all these gracious myths and wistful desires were but mere dreams, there was the echo of remembered adorations, of exquisite unreasoning beliefs, in the simple answer which bespoke that faith in heaven which a child has in its mother, unquestioning, undoubting, implicit in obedience and in trust.
Beside the cultured mind of the woman he loved, with its fine scepticism, its delicate ironies, its contemptuous rejections, its intellectual scorn, no doubt this simple, narrow, unintelligent faith was foolish and childish, and out of date; yet it touched him; in Yseulte de Valogne it had an unconscious heroism, a beautiful repose, which lifted it out of the cramped rigidity of creeds and the apathy of ignorance.
There were beneath her gravity and spirituality a warmth, a vitality, a latent force, which seemed to him to cry aloud for enjoyment and expansion. Sooner or later all that teeming life slumbering in her would awake and demand its common rights; no creature perfectly organised and full of health and strength can forego the natural joys of human existence without suffering a thousand deaths. As yet, no doubt, she was as innocent, as ignorant, of the tyranny of the senses, as any shell that lay at the bottom of the blue waters yonder. She might have fallen from heaven that day for aught she knew of all which, in her unconsciousness, she was ready to renounce. But any hour that divine innocence might be destroyed by a word, banished at a touch. Alain de Vannes, or any other, might choose to find sport in waking and in slaying it; and then, how unhappy she would be! How like a bird freshly captured, and beating itself to death against the bars!
It was only in France that a high-born and beautiful girl could be sacrificed thus because she had no dower. Everywhere else women without dowers were sought and taken in marriage every day. As if a few hundred thousand francs were needful to make youth, and loveliness, and purity, and high lineage, acceptable to men!
‘You know my cousin the Duc very well?’ she said timidly after a long silence.
‘We have lived in the same world; I have not been intimate with him.’
‘Do you think he would be very vexed if I asked Nicole — that is, my foster-mother — to sell this locket for me?’
‘I fear he would not be best pleased. Why should you wish to sell it?’
She hesitated, then answered: ‘I want to buy the vicar that new gown he wants so much. He will never spend a centime on himself, and his gown has been mended and mended and mended; it is all a patchwork, and even that is dropping to pieces, and the bishop’s visitation is near at hand. I thought the value of this locket would buy a priest’s gown, if my cousin de Vannes would not be angry.’
‘That is a pretty thought of you; it would certainly buy many soutanes,’ said Othmar. ‘But I think Alain would not be at all pleased if you sold his present; and I told you the other day that I will give the curé a new gown myself with the very utmost pleasure. You say that I belong to his parish.’
She smiled; nevertheless, she hesitated to accept his offer.
‘You must have so many things to give. Nicole says that people are always asking you for things.’
‘They do not always get them,’ replied Othmar, with a smile. ‘If they wished only for such useful and harmless things as soutanes, they should always have their wish.’
‘Are you so immensely rich then?’ she asked him, opening widely her golden-brown eyes, which looked as if the sunshine was always shining in them.
‘To my misfortune,’ said Othmar, annoyed. Could not even a child of sixteen out of a convent forget his riches? Was it possible she too was going to ask him for something?
She looked at him gravely.
‘I wonder you do not build a cathedral,’ she said, after a pause.
‘A cathedral!’ he echoed, in surprise. ‘I would if I had the faith of those who used to do so.’
‘It is what I would do if I had money,’ said she, still very gravely. ‘I would build one in the heart of a forest, with the deer and the birds all round it; not jammed up amongst streets and crowds like Nôtre Dame or Chartres.’
Then a sudden sense came over her that she was violating all the rules of propriety by which her life was ordered in thus speaking out her thoughts to one who was almost a stranger; in tarrying at all by the side of a man who was of no parentage to her. She rose, a little hurriedly, but with the stately grace which was natural to her; the grace of old Versailles and Marly.
‘I think I must go back to the house,’ she said, with a little shyness. ‘My cousin does not like me to be alone, or to talk to anyone — —’
‘The Duchesse will not object to me,’ said Othmar, with the same smile as he had had when using the same words a few days before. ‘Besides, Mademoiselle, you are in another world than your convent. At Millo men are not thought dragons and tigers. We are poor creatures, indeed, but harmless; more injured than injuring. Do not be so alarmed. I want you to tell me a great deal more about our vicar. Where am I to get his measure for his gown? Will he be surprised with it? Will you not let me send it to you that you may take it to him? I should be ashamed to do so. I have never been inside his church, even to hear you sing.’
‘No, you never came yesterday!’ she said, with a sigh, innocently revealing that she had remarked his absence with regret.
‘To my shame and loss, I did not. I had my uncle with me all the day, and at night a dinner, a concert, and the sauterie, to which I hoped you would have been brought.’
‘But I cannot dance,’ said the child, blushing very much as she made the humiliating confession.
‘So much the better,’ said Othmar, inconsistently, ‘I am sure, however, that you would dance with admirable grace if you danced at all. Anyone who moves well can dance well.’
This time the colour in her cheeks was that of pleasure at his praise. She was silent, looking at him a little wistfully, recallin
g what De Vannes had said of the Princess Napraxine.
The kindliness of his tone, its mingling of familiarity and reverence, melted her reserve and disarmed her shyness. There had been that in the compliment of Alain de Vannes which had startled and alarmed her; but in the almost paternal gentleness and friendliness of Othmar’s words there was nothing to do so. He had little to her of the chillness and languid irony which often frightened even women in him, whilst he had all the graceful courtesy of a man polished by all the habits of the great world, and accustomed to that pre-eminence which gives supreme ease of manner. To her Othmar seemed a hero, a king, an ideal among men; when her cousin had said to her that this person, so powerful, so great, and so rich, was also unhappy, he had said the only thing needed to complete his fascination for her and to make him the master of her dreams.
He bowed low before her with a sense of something holier than was often met with in this world, and looked after her as she sped over the lawns to the house.
‘A beautiful creature, with a tender heart in her breast,’ he thought. ‘Why could I not meet her and find my heaven in possessing her, instead of caring only for a woman who has no more passion or pity than those Mexican aloes?’
As he walked home the remembrance of Nadine Napraxine seemed like a little adder growing in his heart, and the large eyes of Yseulte de Valogne seemed to look into his soul with their golden sun-rays. He was passionately in love with the one, bitterly, angrily, resentfully, in love; for the other he felt an extreme pity, a sympathy, which with propitious circumstances might become affection, an admiration of the senses which might with time be heightened to desire, an inclination to take her in his arms and save her from her fate as he might have taken up a wounded bird to save it from the trap.
CHAPTER XII.
Yseulte the next day was sitting writing a German theme in the children’s room, of which the windows opened on the gardens, when Alain de Vannes, with a cigarette in his mouth, pushed open the glass door and sauntered in from the open air.
‘Well, my cousin,’ he said gaily. ‘Here you are, shut up like a little mouse. What nonsense it is! German? What good will that do you? When the revanche comes, we shall speak with bullets and they will understand as we understood. Pardieu! When they burnt my woods in Charente! — I had a ball in my ribs at Saarbrück; did you know it? Where were you? In Paris? — during the siege? A baby like you! Is it possible!’
‘There were many other little children there,’ said the girl with a shudder; she had been such a little child then, that the horror of the time had left an ineffaceable mark upon her.
‘Of course, of course,’ said the Duc, seating himself on the edge of the table. ‘But not many of your rank. Most people got away. Ah, to be sure, I remember your uncles de Creusac were both shot; yes, we all lost heavily; it is no use thinking of it; but I would give my life to enter Berlin. Tiens! this is not what I came to say, but you make one serious; why will you not laugh? Do you know that we have a ball next week?’
‘I heard Blanchette saying so.’
‘Ah, the little cat! She knows everything. Now, this ball — would you not like to come to it, instead of being shut up in your room writing crabbed German characters?’
‘It is impossible.’
While she said the cruel word firmly, her heart gave a great leap of longing that was almost hope.
‘Not impossible; perhaps difficult,’ said de Vannes, with a smile as he threw his cigar out on to the grass. ‘But I think I could persuade Cri-Cri; it is a shame for you to be shut up; you will have enough of that all your life if you go where they say.’
Yseulte was silent; her heart was still beating tumultuously, she breathed quickly.
‘How handsome she is!’ thought the Duc. ‘She only wants that flush of life to be perfect. Women are like alabaster lamps, unlit until they learn envy and desire. When that flame is lighted, then the alabaster glows.’
He stooped his head and kissed her hand, but he did it with a different touch to Othmar’s, and she coloured with a sense of pain and anger.
‘Ma mie!’ he murmured. ‘I will undertake to combat successfully the scruples of your cousin; you shall see the ball next week. Cri-Cri shall find you a frock, and jewels you want none; you have the supreme jewel — youth; crowns are dull without it; and, let our dear women use what arts they may, they cannot counterfeit it. I will be your good genius, Yseulte, and open your prison doors. You will not refuse me a little gratitude — a little goodwill? Something quite simple and commonplace will content me, you see, but you must give it de bon cœur.’
The words were harmless, and said little, but his eyes as they were bent upon her said much; much more than he knew. There was a look in them which lighted their pale blue with a fire from which she shrank by instinct, as from something which scorched and hurt her. The eyes of Alain de Vannes, like those of most men who have lived his life and had his experiences, were cold, jaded, passionless in repose, but when amorous, were cruel, eager, rapacious. Yseulte drew her hand from him; her heart sank five fathoms deep, but she gathered up all her courage.
‘You are very good, M. mon cousin,’ she said with a ceremonious coldness worthy of one twice her years. ‘But do not trouble yourself for me. That sort of pleasure would not accord with the life that I am always to lead. I do not know the world; I do not wish to know it; it is never to have anything to do with me; it is better I should not even see it, I might only regret.’
She said the little speech bravely, not faltering once, though to make it cost her a pang, but she crushed out all her natural longings, all her wistful instincts, all her youthful dreams to do so; flowers plucked up by the roots and thrown down at the foot of the altars of Marie. But even at this moment the altar still seemed to her that which she had been always told that it was, a refuge sweet, safe, unfailing. A refuge from what? She did not know, but a vague fear had assailed her.
De Vannes looked at her with surprise and irritation; at the bottom of his heart he was himself ashamed of the unholy wishes which had awakened in him, of the treacherous temptations which he had begun to put in the path of a girl who was his own guest, his wife’s relative, and whose position ought in its sheer defencelessness to have been her best safeguard with any man of honour. He was not without honour, in a loose fashion, but he was very unscrupulous when his fancy was excited. If before her retirement to the religious life she should have an ‘affaire,’ and if that ‘affaire’ should have himself for its hero, it did not seem to him that anything terrible would have taken place. What was the use of occupying a high position if one could not successfully conduct and cover a little intrigue like that?
At the same time he knew that his designs would scarcely be condoned, even by the very light-minded set amongst which he lived, if it were seriously known that he endeavoured to be the first to corrupt his young cousin. Therefore her words struck a certain nerve of susceptibility within him; he felt a kind of compunction before that serious and guileless regard. Yet he was very angry. He, Alain de Vannes, who never looked at a fillette, who never deigned to notice any lesser thing than some of the famous beauties of the great world, or of the half-world, had taken the infinite trouble to distinguish this child, to seek her and to offer her his influence and protection, and she had repulsed him, with her hands lying crossed on her German books and her rose-leaf cheeks growing neither the warmer nor the colder for his regard.
He rose, and his eyebrows contracted in a heavy frown. He was a good-humoured man usually, but in such rare times as his will was crossed he had the petulance and the malice of a spoiled child.
‘You are not wise, fillette,’ he said, with a little laugh. ‘I would be a good friend to you, and you may want one before you are safe in the bosom of Our Lady. I wonder the ball did not tempt you. You would have seen your friend Othmar — and Madame Napraxine.’
Then he pulled the glass door open with an impatient hand, and went out into the grounds without, leaving behind him the odou
r of his cigarette and the sting of his last words.
Blanchette peeped in from behind a silk curtain; her saucy babyish eyes were full of curiosity and wonder.
‘Tiens, Yseulte,’ she said, running up to her cousin, ‘I heard all papa said. Why should he want you at the ball, and why should you not go? You are a goose, such a goose! You know papa can always make mamma do what he chooses. He always threatens to send away M. de Prangins.’
Then Blanchette laughed, curling herself up in a little ball at her cousin’s feet.
‘You should not say such wicked things, Blanchette,’ said Yseulte; ‘and it is very shameful and dishonourable to listen anywhere unseen — —’
Blanchette made a pied de nez with her little rosy fingers, with all the mockery and insolence of Gavrôche himself.
‘You are vulgar as well as wicked,’ said her cousin sadly, as she looked away.
‘It is distinguished to be vulgar, now,’ said the little ten-year-old Parisienne. ‘All the great ladies are, except Madame Napraxine; she is always wrapped up in herself. She has no entrain, she cares for nothing. She is not at all my model. Listen! If you were not such an idiot, you would see that petit papa is in love with you, ever so much in love! Why don’t you get all kinds of things out of him while he is in the humour? He would buy you all the Palais Royal if you knew how to manage him, and mamma will not say anything as long as the Marquis Raymond is here.’
‘Blanchette!’ cried the girl, indignantly. She rose to her feet; a flood of shame seemed to roll over her.
The insolent, malicious turquoise eyes of Blanchette amused themselves with her horror and trouble.
‘You are such a baby!’ said the child again, contemptuously. ‘You never seem to understand anything. Me, I understand it all. I shall do it all when I am married. I shall be just like mamma. It is the Marquis Raymond now; it was the Prince Jacques last year. I liked the Prince Jacques best. He gave me an orchestra of monkeys; you wound it up and all the monkeys played — fife, drum, clarionet, flute, too-too, too-too, tra-la-la-la! The marquis has never given me anything, except a sack of bonbons he might have bought at St. Cloud. If he do not give me something very good at new year, I shall say out loud in the salon, when a lot of people are making visits: “You are not as nice as Prince Jacques!” And how he will look, because he always frets and fumes about the prince! I think they fought about mamma. Oh, it must be such fun to be a woman! I wish, I wish, I wish I were fifteen. I would be so naughty, they would have to marry me to-morrow! If you were not a goose you would be as naughty as ever you could be. They would get you a husband then; papa would see to it.’