by Ouida
It did not occur to him that he might only run the risk of cruelly compromising the poor child. He gave hardly more thought to the action than he would have given to a rose which he might have broken off its stalk to offer to her. All his heart had gone with the basket of flowers which he had sent at sunrise to Nadine Napraxine, who allowed no other offering.
The chances were a million to one that his casket would never reach its destination without being seen, if not intercepted, by the governesses; but as it happened, his messenger gave it to the gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper gave it in turn to the woman who served her as maid during her stay at Millo, and who was passing through the gates, on her way home from matins. The woman was attached to her; indeed, being a religious person herself, considered that Yseulte was the only creature whose presence saved Millo from the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah; therefore, pleased that the girl should have pleasure, she carried the packet straight to her as she rose from her bed; and in the cold, misty morning of the New Year the first thing that greeted the astonished eyes of Yseulte was the Coronation of the Virgin, glowing like a jewel on the side of the ivory casket.
The whole day passed to her in an enchanted rapture.
In the large, idle, careless household there was a general exchange of congratulations and étrennes, and a pleasant tumult of good wishes and merriment. Blanchette and Toinon danced about before a pyramid of bonbons and costly playthings, and the Duchesse, descending at her usual hour, two o’clock, gave and received a multitude of felicitations, gifts, and visits. ‘The most tedious day of the whole three hundred and sixty-five,’ she said pettishly, giving her cheek to the touch of her children’s pale little lips.
In the many occupations and ennuis of the day no one heard or knew anything of Othmar’s present. At noon some bouquets of roses and some orchids, laid on a plate of old cloisonné enamel, were brought in his name to Madame de Vannes, but she knew nothing of her cousin’s casket. Meanwhile nothing could hurt Yseulte. The contempt with which her little cousins received the gifts she had made for them in the convent, the oblivion to which she was consigned by every one, the carelessness with which the Duchesse received her timidly-offered good wishes, the severity with which the governesses forbade her to go out in such weather to see Nicole or attend Mass in the little church, the unconcealed ill-temper with which Alain de Vannes flung her a word of greeting — none of these things had any power to wound her; she scarcely perceived them; she was lifted up into a world all her own. Unnoticed in the general branle-bas of the day, she passed the hours, when she was not at Mass in the chapel, locked safely in her own room, before her treasure, in a rapt happiness, in a wonder of ecstasy, which were so intense that she feared they were cardinal sins.
The weather was cold, some snow had even fallen, and the north winds blew, making all the chilly foreigners gathered on those shores shiver and grumble like creatures defrauded of their rights; but all the grey, cheerless, misty landscape, and the fog upon the sea, appeared more beautiful to her than they had ever done before in its sunshine. From her window she looked at the towers of S. Pharamond, and on her table — all her own — was the ivory casket.
The Duchesse de Vannes, waking in the forenoon after the Jour de l’An, cross, peevish, sleepy, and yet sleepless, which is, in itself, the most irritating and dispiriting of all human conditions, and morbidly conscious that, as her little daughter had said, she was beginning to baisser un peu, was in a mood of natural resentment against all creation in general and the human race in particular, and quite ready to vent her ill-humour on the first object which offered itself. That first object was one of the little prim notes by which her children’s instructresses were wont to communicate any terrible event in the schoolroom, or any entreaty for guidance when Mademoiselle Blanchette had insisted on riding the wooden horses at a village fair, or Mademoiselle Toinon had dressed herself up in the smallest groom’s clothes. ‘Ne m’ennuyez pas; vous savez vos devoirs’ was the only reply they ever received; but the good women continued to write the notes as a relief to their consciences. They wrote one now, signed in their joint names, humbly entreating to be informed if it were the pleasure of Madame la Duchesse that Mdlle. de Valogne should receive presents of which the donor was unknown. Mdlle. de Valogne was in possession of a new and very valuable locket; they believed also that she was in the habit of going to the gardens of S. Pharamond; they had deemed it their duty to acquaint Madame la Duchesse, &c., &c.
Blanchette, with the most innocent face in the world, had said to them, ‘I have seen the big pearl locket of Yseulte! Oh, vrai! When I am as old, I will not hide my handsome things as she does. Who gave it her? Who do you think could give it to her? She is friends with that gentleman at S. Pharamond — the one that is as rich as M. de Rothschild. I think he gave it her! Do you tell mamma.’
Blanchette guessed very shrewdly that her father had given the locket; but she was too wary to offend him. Blanchette was like the little cats who steal round and round to their mouse by devious paths unseen. She had alarmed the governesses, and the prim note was the consequence.
When the Duchesse read it, she flung it away in a corner. ‘Tas d’imbéciles,’ she said, contemptuously; then said to one of her maids, ‘Request Mdlle. de Valogne to come hither.’
Yseulte was presented in a fortuitous moment as the whipping-boy on whom could be spent all that useless irritation which she could not spend on the real offenders, her ineffective chloral, her increasing wrinkles, and the indifference of Raymond de Prangins.
‘Mamma is always cross,’ the wise little Blanchette had reflected. ‘She is always angry, even for nothing. That great baby will get a lecture, and she will be sure to say it was papa; she always tells the truth — such a simpleton! — and papa will hate her for ever and for ever!’
Then Blanchette made a pied de nez all by herself in her little bedroom: when you were a child you could not have many things your own way, but you could spoil other people’s things very neatly with a little pat here, a little poke there, if you looked all the while like your picture by Baudry, an innocent cherub with sweet smiling eyes, who could not have made a pied de nez to save your life. Blanchette had already acquired the knowledge that this was how the world was most easily managed.
When Yseulte was summoned to her cousin’s presence, the girl was startled to see how old she looked, for it was scarcely noon, and the handsome face which ‘Cri-Cri’ was wont to present to her own world had scarcely received its finishing touches from the various embellishing petits secrets shut up in their silver boxes and their china pots, which were strewn about under the great Dresden-framed mirror in front of her.
‘Good-day,’ she said, with irritation already in her voice, as Yseulte timidly kissed her hand. ‘Is this true what they tell me, that you receive presents without my knowledge and consent? Do you not know that it is perfectly inconvenable? Are you not taught enough of the world in your convent to be aware that a young girl cannot do such things without being disgraced eternally? What is it you have accepted? Is it a jewel? Can you realise the enormity of your action? — —’ she paused, in some irritation and uncertainty. ‘Well, why do you not speak? Can you excuse yourself? What is it you have taken? From whom have you taken it? My people have told me you have a new and valuable jewel and refuse to say who gave it.’
‘My cousin, M. le Duc, gave it me,’ said Yseulte. ‘He said that I was to tell you if you asked me, but not anyone else.’
She spoke frankly, without any hesitation. The Duchesse stared at her, half rose in her amazement; her face was dark with anger for a moment, then cleared into a sudden laughter.
‘My husband!’ she echoed. ‘A fillette like you! And they say there are no miracles now! Do you absolutely mean to say that Alain gave you a jewel? — —’
‘He was so good as to give me a locket — yes,’ murmured Yseulte, conscious that her cousin was angry, insolent, and derisive, and afraid that the Duc would be irritated at the issue of his kindnes
s to her.
‘Pray, has he given you anything else?’ echoed Madame de Vannes. ‘Has he given you the diamonds he had bought for Mdlle. Rubis, or the coupé from Bender’s which he meant for la grande Laure?’
‘He has not given me anything else,’ answered Yseulte, to whom these terrible names conveyed no meaning.
‘Where is this locket? Show it me.’
‘It is in my room. Shall I fetch it?’
‘No, no. It does not matter. You can send it me. I will send Agnès for it. The idea of Alain having even looked at you! — it makes one laugh; it is too absurd.’
She continued to laugh, but the laughter did not convey to the ear of Yseulte any impression either that she was pardoned or that her cousin was amused. It was a laugh expressive of irony, irritation, wonder, contempt, rancour, all in one.
‘You should not have taken it. You should have told me,’ continued the Duchesse. ‘To be sure, he is your cousin. But it is not proper to take a man’s gifts. It is not becoming. It is too forward. It is even immodest. Is that the sort of thing the Dames de Ste. Anne have taught you? Surely you might have known better.’
These phrases she uttered in a staccato rapid succession, as if she thought little of what she said; she was indeed thinking as the girl stood before her:
‘What a skin! What shoulders! What a throat! What a thing it is to be sixteen! Why did not le bon Dieu make all that last longer with us? It goes too soon; so horribly soon; after one is five-and-twenty it is all one can do to make up decently. If it were only the complexion which went it would not matter; that one can easily arrange; but it is the features that change; they grow out or they grow in; the mouth gets thin or the cheeks get broad; the very lines alter somehow, and we cannot alter that; and then to make oneself up is as much trouble as to build a house, and the house has to be built anew every day! — it is horribly hard — and yet one has compensations, revenges; it is not those children whom men care to look at though they are fresh as roses; at least not usually. Alain, I suppose, does — what can he mean by giving her a medallion?’
While these thoughts ran through her mind, she was staring hard at Yseulte through her eyeglass, as though they had never met before then. The girl had coloured scarlet at the epithet ‘immodest,’ but it had made her a little angry, with the righteous indignation of innocence. Respect kept her mute, but her face spoke for her.
‘Alain was right; she is really handsome,’ reflected the Duchesse.
She was herself only eight-and-twenty, but in the world as on the racecourse it is the pace that kills; and before she had passed through all those arduous processes which she had rightly compared to building a house anew every day, she knew very well that she looked cruelly old, though after two o’clock in the day she was still one of the great beauties of France.
She had been immersed in pleasures, pastimes, and excitements from the day of her marriage; she had lived in a crowd, she had gambled not a little, and she had had certain intrigues, of whose dangers she had at times a vivid and anxious consciousness, for the Duc was indifferent but not base, and might any day be roused if he came to be aware that men laughed at him more than he liked. As a rule, she and he understood each other very well, and tacitly condoned each other’s indiscretions; but there might come a time when he would break that convenient compact, as she felt disposed now to resent his admiration of her young cousin. On the whole, perhaps, she mused, she had been wrong to do so; she would let the girl keep his present; he might, if she provoked him, insist that Raymond de Prangins should leave Millo. All these reflections occurred to her during that one minute in which her eyeglass watched the indignation rise in Yseulte’s face.
‘Have you seen M. de Vannes alone?’ she resumed, with a sharpness in her voice, due rather to her own sense of the girl’s beauty than to her knowledge of her husband’s admiration for it.
‘Now and then,’ said Yseulte without hesitation. ‘He has come into the schoolroom — —’
‘For a lesson in A B C, I suppose? — or a cup of Brown’s green tea?’ said the Duchesse contemptuously. ‘Well, he may conter ses fleurettes ailleurs. I should have thought he had had better taste than to begin in his own house: however,’ she continued, interrupting herself, as she remembered that she was suggesting, ‘I do not suppose it is you who are to blame. But another time, ask my permission before you accept anything from anybody. I will not deprive you of the Duc’s gift. He is in a manner your cousin — your guardian — of course he meant very kindly, but another time remember to come to me. You will tell the Duc that I said so.’
‘Good heavens!’ she was thinking, ‘who would have supposed that Alain had a taste for a creature like that, half a saint and half a baby? To be sure, her eyes are superb, and the throat and bosom — what beautiful lines they have; why did they send her here? She shall go back next week. The wickedness of the thing would charm him; the nearer it was to a crime, the more of a clou it would be. To play Faust under the respectable shade of Brown’s teapot and the big dictionaries would be sure to enthral him, out of its very drollery — men are made like that.’
Then a remembrance of S. Pharamond passed over her, and she said aloud, with an unkind sarcasm in her voice:
‘Perhaps you have other friends beside M. de Vannes? Pray tell me if you have. I fully appreciate the effects of the education which the Dames de Ste. Anne have given you.’
Yseulte coloured scarlet, and the Duchesse’s eyes scanned her face as Blanchette’s had done, without mercy.
‘Pray tell me,’ she continued, with a chill dignity, which was in sharp contrast with the sarcasm and railing of her previous manner. ‘You will be so good as to remember that I stand in the place of your mother; your indiscretions are not alone painful to me, but compromising to me. Is it true that you are intimate with Otho Othmar?’
‘He has been kind to me,’ murmured Yseulte, an agony at her heart and the hot tears standing in her eyes. She did not understand enough of the world to justify herself by the fact that the offender had been presented to her by her cousin herself; nor, if she had done so, would the position she stood in towards Madame de Vannes have allowed her to use such a justification without apparent impertinence. For eight years she had owed everything to the Duchesse.
‘Kind to you!’ echoed her cousin, ‘a most fortuitous phrase, but not one that young girls can employ except to their own ridicule and injury. Pray how has he been kind to you? has he given you a locket?’
Yseulte might easily have told a lie; no one knew of the casket, no one could tell of it; she loved it more dearly than anything she had ever possessed. But she had been taught in her childhood that falsehood was cowardice, and the courage of the de Valogne was in her; therefore she answered, with an unsteady voice indeed, but with entire truthfulness, ‘He has given me a very beautiful box, it is made of ivory and painted, it came yesterday — —’
Madame de Vannes burst into another laugh, which jarred on the child’s ear:
‘Really,’ she cried, relapsing into the manner most natural to her, ‘you begin well! Othmar and my husband! and you are not quite sixteen yet, and we all thought you such a little demure saint in your grey clothes! Send the casket to me. You cannot receive presents in that way. From your cousin, passe encore, but from a man like Othmar — you might as well go and sup with him at Bignon’s. Good heavens! What are Schemmitz and Brown about that they have let you meet him? Where have you seen him? how have you become intimate with him?’
Yseulte had become very pale. She had done her duty; done what honour, truth, obedience, and gratitude all required; but it had cost her a great effort, and she would lose the casket.
‘I have only seen him three times,’ she said, with her colour changing; and she went on to tell the story of her visit to his gardens, of his conversation with her on the seashore, of the priest’s soutane, and of their meeting at the house of Nicole. It was a very simple inoffensive little story, but it hurt her greatly to tell it; cost her
quite as much as it would have done Madame de Vannes to unfold all her manifold indiscretions in full confession before a conseil de famille.
‘He has been very kind to me,’ she said timidly, as she finished her little tale, ‘and if — if — if you would only let me keep the casket and take it to Faïel?’
The Duchesse laughed once more:
‘You do not care to keep the Duc’s locket — how flattering to him! Really, fillette, you are sagacious betimes; I would never have believed you such a cunning little cat! Did you learn all that at the convent? you convent-girls are more rusées than so many rats! Othmar, of all men of the world! My dear, you might as well wish for an emperor. There is not a marriageable woman in Europe who does not sigh for Othmar! He is so enormously rich! There is no one else rich like that; all the other financiers have a tribe of people belonging to them. “The family” is everywhere, at Paris, at Vienna, at Berlin, at London, and have as many branches as the oak; but Othmar is absolutely alone — for old Baron Fritz does not count — he is absolutely alone, that is what is unique in him. Whoever marries him will be the most fortunate woman in Europe. Yes, I say it advisedly, it is fortune that is power nowadays; our day is over; we do not even lead society any longer.’
The colour had rushed back into Yseulte’s face; the Duchesse’s words tortured her as only a very young and sensitive creature can be tortured by an indelicate and cruel suspicion. ‘I never thought, I never meant,’ she murmured. ‘You know, my cousin, I am dedicated to the religious life; you cannot suppose that I — I — —’ The words choked her.
‘Ne pleurnichez pas, de grâce!’ said the Duchesse impatiently. ‘I have no doubt you have taken all kinds of impossibilities into your head, girls are always so foolish; but you may be sure that the gift of the casket means nothing — nothing. Othmar is always giving away, right and left; most very rich men are mean, but he is not. It was a wrong thing, an impertinent thing, for him to do, and it must be returned to him instantly; but if you imagine you have made any impression upon him, I can assure you you are very mistaken, he only thinks of Nadine Napraxine.’