It was a tiny church which bore the name of S. Cecilia at S.
Pharamond, and was perched on an olive-covered knoll, with the rolling
woods of the château d'Othmar at its base and the gardens of Millo on
its right. Nicole Sandroz and a few other families of the _petite
culture_ gathered there on Sundays and holy days; but the great people
of Millo, with their household, had their own private chapel, and the
friends to whom Othmar had lent his house had never troubled
themselves to find their way to the little whitewashed, wind-blown
sanctuary and the lowly presbytery that leaned up against its south
wall.
Othmar himself, who had a score of ecclesiastics in a score of places
looking to him for support, had hardly known that this little church
and its old purblind peasant-born curé were upon the confines of his
estate. He had paid every year a large sum for the maintenance of S.
Pharamond, as for that of each of his houses and estates, but he had
never examined the details of the expenditure. The advantage of an
immense fortune is that you can leave all such matters to your
secretaries. He paid them more heed than many would have done because
of the views he entertained on the duties of saving other people from
temptation; but S. Pharamond, with all its luxuries, elegancies,
gardens, carriages, and conservatories, was only to him as a mere
cottage, a mere toy. He had, indeed, almost forgotten that he had
owned it, until, beating up the Bay of Genoa in a storm-tossed and
almost disabled vessel, he had suddenly remembered that somewhere on
this coast which slid away in the dusk to the westward he had a
harbour and a quay all his own if he chose to go thither.
The little church was ugly, poor, and had been built since the
Revolution; all that redeemed it was a great climbing rose which
covered the whole of its front, and was even flinging audacious
branches upwards to the cross upon the roof. In summer the rose made
the little plain square place a glory of pink bloom. Inside, there
were a few deal benches, a few bad prints, a humble little altar, and
some pewter candlesticks; the presbytery was equally as bare.
The old vicar lived with one servant as old as himself; he toddled out
amongst the farms, and was scouted and scowled at by some of the
peasants, petted and welcomed by others. He did no harm, and was quite
happy if one of his parishioners gave him a basket of figs or a dish
of seakale; he could almost have counted his flock on his fingers. The
men about there were very radical and hard-headed; they were all small
proprietors, who cursed Millo and S. Pharamond all the year round,
though neither the villa nor the château did them the slightest harm.
On the contrary, the stewards of both the Duc de Vannes and Othmar had
orders to give away any rare seeds, aid in any irrigation-works, or
contribute to any need that there might be in the neighbourhood. But
the Duc was a duke and peer of France, and Othmar was an
archimillionaire; the _petite culture_ hated the sight of their gilded
bronze gates and their glittering high-pitched roofs.
'It is for you that we pay taxes!' snarled one of them once to the
Duc de Vannes, who laughed and answered:
'Oh, my friend, if we compared notes I think you would find that it is
I who pay them for you and yours. I have not the slightest objection
to do so, only do not let us misrepresent matters.'
But they did not want logic, and they hated the steep shining roofs
and the gates with the gilded scroll work. What they did not hate was
Yseulte de Valogne; all countess though she was, they pardoned her
that defect because she had always remained for them _la pétiote de
Nicole_. They understood that she was to be sacrificed to the pride of
her relatives; that because she was poor, so poor, she was to be
refused all the joys of her youth and her sex and surrendered to the
Church that she might not offend the grandeur of her family by making
a portionless marriage. This, which they had learned, with many
exaggerations of its enormity from Nicole and from the servants of
Millo, gave her the halo of a martyr in their eyes; she was sacrificed
to the _noblesse_, and that fact was enough to make her sacred to them
even though she belonged to the detested order herself, and had not a
little of its hauteur. Besides, her tenderness to their old people,
the little gifts she made at the convent and brought to their little
ones and their women, her intrepidity in cases of sickness in those
winters when she was alone at Millo--a mere child, but with the
courage of giants, as Nicole loved to tell--all these, joined to her
personal elegance, which made her as unlike themselves as the orchids
in Othmar hothouses were unlike the sweet peas and the lavender
growing under their peach trees, had combined to make of the last
Comtesse de Valogne the idol of _petite culture_ which, with few
exceptions, loathed and execrated the brilliant idlers who rode and
drove out of the gates of Millo, and carried their light laughter,
their painted fans, their blazing jewels, their grace and their
luxuries, out on to the illuminated terraces, under the palms and the
araucarias, amidst the lamps and the music, regardless of the people
in the distant huts and houses on the surrounding hills who, rising to
their work, as they went to their beds, swore savagely against them
with all the unchanged rancorous class-hatred of the Terror still
alive in them and unsatisfied.
'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 Soeur 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
sanctity 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.
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!----