NICOLETTE
BARONESS ORCZY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By BARONESS ORCZY
* * * * *
NICOLETTE
CASTLES IN THE AIR
THE FIRST SIR PERCY
LEAGUE OF THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
FLOWER O’ THE LILY
THE MAN IN GREY
LORD TONY’S WIFE
LEATHERFACE
THE BRONZE EAGLE
A BRIDE OF THE PLAINS
THE LAUGHING CAVALIER
“UNTO CÆSAR”
EL DORADO
MEADOWSWEET
THE NOBLE ROGUE
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
PETTICOAT RULE
* * * * *
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NICOLETTE
A TALE OF OLD PROVENCE
BY
BARONESS ORCZY
_Author of “The First Sir Percy,” “Flower o’ the Lily,” “Lord Tony’s
Wife,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1922,
By George H. Doran Company_
[Illustration]
NICOLETTE. I
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I FADED SPLENDOUR 9
II LE LIVRE DE RAISON 30
III THE HONOUR OF THE NAME 56
IV THE DESPATCH 86
V THE SPIRIT OF THE PAST 100
VI ORANGE-BLOSSOM 117
VII TWILIGHT 145
VIII CHRISTMAS EVE 167
IX THE TURNING POINT 187
X WOMAN TO WOMAN 198
XI GREY DAWN 229
XII FATHER 238
XIII MAN TO MAN 253
XIV FATHER AND DAUGHTER 272
XV OLD MADAME 289
XVI VOICES 309
NICOLETTE
CHAPTER I
FADED SPLENDOUR
Midway between Apt and the shores of the Durance, on the southern slope
of Luberon there stands an old château. It had once been the fortified
stronghold of the proud seigneurs de Ventadour, who were direct
descendants of the great troubadour, and claimed kinship with the Comtes
de Provence, but already in the days when Bertrand de Ventadour was a
boy, it had fallen into partial decay. The battlemented towers were in
ruin, the roof in many places had fallen in; only the square block,
containing the old living-rooms, had been kept in a moderate state of
repair. As for the rest, it was a dwelling-place for owls and rooks, the
walls were pitted with crevices caused by crumbling masonry, the
corbellings and battlements had long since broken away, whilst many of
the windows, innocent of glass, stared, like tear-dimmed eyes, way away
down the mountain slope, past the terraced gradients of dwarf olives and
carob trees, to the fertile, green valley below.
It is, in truth, fair, this land of Provence; but fair with the sad,
subtle beauty of a dream—dream of splendour, of chivalry and daring
deeds, of troubadours and noble ladies; fair with the romance of undying
traditions, of Courts of Love and gallant minstrels, of King René and
lovely Marguerite. Fair because it is sad and silent, like a gentle and
beautiful mother whose children have gone out into the great world to
seek fortunes in richer climes, whilst she has remained alone in the old
nest, waiting with sorrow in her heart and arms ever outstretched in
loving welcome in case they should return; tending and cherishing the
faded splendours of yesterday; and burying with reverence and tears, one
by one, the treasures that once had been her pride, but which the cruel
hand of time had slowly turned to dust.
And thus it was with the once splendid domaine of the Comtes de
Ventadour. The ancient family, once feudal seigneurs who owed alliance
to none save to the Kings of Anjou, had long since fallen on evil days.
The wild extravagance of five generations of gallant gentlemen had
hopelessly impoverished the last of their line. One acre after another
of the vineyards and lemon groves of old Provence were sold in order to
pay the gambling debts of M. le Comte, or to purchase a new diamond
necklace for Madame, his wife. At the time of which this chronicle is a
faithful record, nothing remained of the extensive family possessions,
but the château perched high up on the side of the mountain and a few
acres of woodland which spread in terraced gradients down as far as the
valley. Oh! those woods, with their overhanging olive trees, and
feathery pines, and clumps of dull-coloured carob and silvery,
sweet-scented rosemary: with their serpentine paths on the edge of which
buttercups and daisies and wild violets grew in such profusion in the
spring, and which in the summer the wild valerian adorned with patches
of purple and crimson: with their scrub and granite boulders, their
mysterious by-ways, their nooks and leafy arbours, wherein it was good
to hide or lie in wait for imaginary foes. Woods that were a heaven for
small tripping feet, a garden of Eden for playing hide-and-seek, a land
of pirates, of captive maidens and robbers, of dark chasms and
crevasses, and of unequal fights between dauntless knights and fierce
dragons. Woods, too, where in the autumn the leaves of the beech and
chestnut turned a daffodil yellow, and those of oak and hazel-nut a
vivid red, and where bunches of crimson berries fell from the mountain
ash and crowds of chattering starlings came to feed on the fruit of the
dwarf olive trees. Woods where tiny lizards could be found lying so
still, so still as the stone of which they seemed to form a part, until
you moved just a trifle nearer, and, with a delicious tremor of fear,
put out your little finger, hoping yet dreading to touch the tiny, lithe
body with its tip, when lo! it would dart away; out of sight even before
you could call Tan-tan to come and have a look.
Tan-tan had decided that lizards were the baby children of the dragon
which he had slain on the day when Nicolette was a captive maiden, tied
to the big carob tree by means of her stockings securely knotted around
her wee body, and that the patch of crimson hazel-bush close by was a
pool of that same dragon’s blood. Nicolette had spent a very
uncomfortable half-hour that day, because Tan-tan took a very long time
slaying that dragon, a huge tree stump, decayed and covered with fungi
which were the scales upon the brute’s body; he had to slash at the
dragon with his sword, and the dragon had great twisted branches upon
him which were his arms and legs, and these had to be hacked off one by
one. And all the while Nicolette had to weep and to pray for the success
of her gallant deliverer in this unequal fight. And she got very tired
and very hot, and the wind blew her brown curls all over her face, and
they stuck into her mouth and her eyes and round her nose; and Tan-tan
got fiercer and fiercer, and very red and very hot, until Nicolette got
really sorry for the poor dragon, and wept real tears because his body
and legs and arms had been a favourite resting-place of Micheline’s when
Micheline was too tired for play. And now the dragon had no more arms
and legs, and Nicolette wept, and her loose hair stuck to her eyes, and
her stockings were tied so tightly around her that they began to hurt,
whilst a wasp began buzzing round her fat little bare knees.
“Courage, fair maiden!” Tan-tan exclaimed from time to time, “the hour
of thy deliverance is nigh!”
But not for all the world would Nicolette have allowed Tan-tan to know
that she had really been crying. And presently when the dragon was duly
slain and the crimson hazel-bush duly testified that he lay in a pool of
blood, the victorious knight cut the bonds which held Nicolette to the
carob tree, and lifting her in his arms, he carried her to his gallant
steed, which was a young pine tree that the mistral had uprooted some
few years ago, and which lay prone upon the ground—the most perfect
charger any knight could possibly wish for.
What mattered after that, that old Margaï was cross because Nicolette’s
stockings were all in holes? Tan-tan had deigned to say that Nicolette
had a very good idea of play, which enigmatic utterance threw Nicolette
into a veritable heaven of bliss. She did not know what it meant, but
the tiny, podgy hand went seeking Tan-tan’s big, hot one and nestled
there like a bird in its nest, and her large liquid eyes, still wet with
tears, were turned on him with the look of perfect adoration, which was
wont to bring a flush of impatience into his cheek.
“Thou art stupid, Nicolette,” he would say almost shamefacedly, when
that look came into her eyes, and with a war-whoop, he would dart up the
winding path, bounding over rocks and broken boughs like a young stag,
or swarming up the mountain ash like a squirrel, shutting his manly ears
to the sweet, insidious call of baby lips that called pathetically to
him from below:
“Tan-tan!”
Then, when outside it rained, or the mistral blew across the valley, it
meant delicious wanderings through the interminable halls and corridors
of the old château—more distressed maidens held in durance in
castellated towers, Nicolette and Micheline held captive by cruel,
unseen foes: there were walls to be scaled, prisons to be stormed, hasty
flights along stone passages, discovery of fresh hiding-places, and
always the same intrepid knight, energetic, hot and eager to rescue the
damsels in distress.
And when the distressed damsels were really too tired to go on being
rescued, there would be those long and lovely halts in the great hall
where past Comtes and Comtesses de Ventadour, vicomtes and demoiselles
looked down with silent scorn from out the mildewed canvases and
tarnished gold frames upon the decayed splendour of their ancient home.
Here, Tan-tan would for the time being renounce his rôle of chivalrous
knight-errant, and would stand thoughtful and absorbed before the
portraits of his dead forbears. These pictures had a strange fascination
for the boy. He never tired of gazing on them and repeating to his two
devoted little listeners the tales which for the most part his
grandmother had told him about these dead and gone ancestors.
There was Rambaud de Ventadour, the handsome Comte of the days of the
Grand Monarque, who had hied him from his old château in Provence to the
Court of Versailles, where he cut a gallant figure with the best of that
brilliant crowd of courtiers, stars of greater and lesser magnitude that
revolved around the dazzling central sun. There was Madame la Comtesse
Beatrix, the proud beauty whom he took for wife. They were rich in those
days, the seigneurs of Ventadour, and Jaume Deydier, who was Nicolette’s
ancestor, was nothing but a lacquey in their service; he used to take
care of the old château while M. le Comte and Mme. la Comtesse went out
into the gay and giddy world, to Paris, Versailles or Rambouillet.
’Twas not often the old lands of Provence saw their seigneurs in those
days, not until misfortune overtook them and Geoffroy, Comte de
Ventadour, Tan-tan’s great-grandfather, he whose portrait hung just
above the monumental hearth, returned, a somewhat sobered man, to the
home of his forbears. Here he settled down with his two sons, and here
Tan-tan’s father was born, and Tan-tan himself, and Micheline. But
Nicolette’s father, Jaume Deydier, the descendant of the lacquey, now
owned all the lands that once had belonged to the Comtes de Ventadour,
and he was reputed to be the richest man in Provence, but he never set
foot inside the old château.
Nicolette did not really mind that her ancestor had been a lacquey. At
six years of age that sort of information leaves one cold; nor did she
quite know what a lacquey was, as there were none in the old homestead,
over on the other side of the valley, where Margaï did the scrubbing,
and the washing and the baking, put Nicolette to bed, and knitted
innumerable pairs of woollen stockings. But she liked to hear about her
ancestor because Tan-tan liked to talk about him, and about those
wonderful times when the Comtes de Ventadour had gilded coaches and rode
out on gaily caparisoned horses, going hawking, or chasing, or fishing
in the Durance, the while old Jaume Deydier, the lacquey, had to stay at
home and clean boots.
“Whose boots, Tan-tan?” Nicolette would venture to ask, and a look of
deep puzzlement would for a moment put to flight the laughter that dwelt
in her hazel eyes.
“Thou art stupid, Nicolette,” Tan-tan would reply with a shrug of his
shoulders. “Those of the Comte and Comtesse de Ventadour, of course.”
“All the day ... would he clean boots?” she insisted, in her halting
little lisp. Then, as Tan-tan simply vouchsafed no reply to this foolish
query, she added with a sigh of mixed emotions: “They must have worn
boots and boots and boots!”
After which she dismissed the subject of her ancestor from her mind
because Tan-tan had gone on talking about his: about the Comte
Joseph-Alexis, and the Vicomtesse Yolande, the Marquis de Croze (a
collateral), and Damoysella Ysabeau d’Agoult, she who married the Comte
Jeanroy de Ventadour, and was Lady-in-waiting to Mme. de Maintenon, the
uncrowned Queen of France, and about a score or more of others, all
great and gallant gentlemen or beautiful, proud ladies. But above all he
would never weary of talking about the lovely Rixende, who was known
throughout the land as the Lady of the Laurels. They also called her
Riande, for short, because she was always laughing, and was so gay, so
gay, until the day when M. le Comte her husband brought her here to his
old home in Provence, after which she never even smiled again. She hated
the old château, and vowed that such an owl’s nest gave her the megrims:
in truth she was pining for the gaieties of Paris and Versailles, and
even the people here, round about, marvelled why M. le Comte chose to
imprison so gay a bird in this grim and lonely cage, and though he
himself oft visited the Court of Versailles after that, went to Paris
and to Rambouillet, he never again took his fair young wife with him,
and she soon fell into melancholia and died, just like a song-bird in
captivity.
Tan-tan related all this with bated breath, and his great dark eyes were
fixed with a kind of awed admiration on the picture which, in truth,
portrayed a woman of surpassing beauty. Her hair was of vivid gold, and
nestled in ringlets all around her sweet face, her eyes were as blue as
the gentian that grew on the mountain-side; they looked out of the
canvas with an expression of unbounded gaiety and joy of life, whilst
her lips, which were full and red, were parted in a smile.
“When I marry,” Tan-tan would declare, and set his arms akimbo in an
attitude of unswerving determination, “I shall choose a wife who will be
the exact image of Rixende, she will be beautiful and merry, and she
will have eyes that are as blue as the sky. Then I shall take her with
me to Paris, where she will put all the ladies of the Court to the
blush. But when she comes back with me to Ventadour, I shall love her
so, and love her so that she will go on smiling and laughing, and never
pine for the courtiers and the balls and the routs, no, not for the
Emperor himself.”
Nicolette, sitting on the floor, and with her podgy arms encircling her
knees, gazed wide-eyed on the beautiful Rixende who was to be the very
image of Tan-tan’s future wife. She was not thinking about anything in
particular, she just looked and looked, and wondered as one does when
one is six and does not quite understand. Her great wondering eyes were
just beginning to fill with tears, when a harsh voice broke in on
Tan-tan’s eloquence.
“A perfect programme, by my faith! Bertrand, my child, you may come and
kiss my hand, and then run to your mother and tell her that I will join
her at coffee this afternoon.”
Bertrand did as he was commanded. The austere grandmother, tall and
proud, and forbidding in a hooped gown, cut after the fashion of three
decades ago, which she had never laid aside for the new-fangled modes of
the mushroom Empire, held out her thin white hand, and the boy
approached and kissed it, and she patted his cheek, and called him a
true Ventadour.
“While we sit over coffee,” she said, vainly trying to subdue her harsh
voice to tones of gentleness, “I will tell you about your little cousin.
She is called Rixende, after your beautiful ancestress, and when she
grows up, she will be just as lovely as this picture....”
She paused and raised a lorgnette to her eyes, gazed for a moment on the
picture of the departed Riande, and then allowed her cold, wearied
glance to wander round and down and about until they rested on the
hunched-up little figure of Nicolette.
“What is that child doing here?” she asked, speaking to Micheline who
stood by, mute and shy, as she always was when her grandmama was nigh.
It was Bertrand who replied:
“Nicolette came to ask us to go over to the mas and have coffee there,”
he said, hesitating, blushing, looking foolish, and avoiding Nicolette’s
innocent glance. “Margaï has baked a big, big brioche,” Nicolette chimed
in, in her piping little voice, “and churned some butter—and—and—there’s
cream—heaps and heaps of cream—and——”
“Go, Bertrand,” the old Comtesse broke in coldly, “and you too,
Micheline, to your mother. I will join you all at coffee directly.”
Even Bertrand, the favourite, the _enfant gâté_, dared not disobey when
grandmama spoke in that tone of voice. He said: “Yes, grandmama,” quite
meekly, and went out without daring to look again at Nicolette, for of a
surety he knew that her eyes must be full of tears, and he himself was
sorely tempted to cry, because he was so fond, so very fond of Margaï’s
brioches, and of her yellow butter, and lovely jars of cream, whilst in
mother’s room there would only be black bread with the coffee. So he
threw back his head and ran, just ran out of the room; and as Nicolette
had an uncomfortable lump in her wee throat she did not call to Tan-tan
to come back, but sat there on the floor like a little round ball, her
head buried between her knees, her brown curls all tangled and tossed
around her head. Micheline on the other hand made no attempt to disguise
her tears. Grandmama could not very well be more contemptuous and
distant towards her than she always was, for Micheline was plain, and
slightly misshapen, she limped, and her little face always looked
pinched and sickly. Grandmama despised ugliness, she herself was so very
tall and stately, and had been a noted beauty in the days before the
Revolution. But being ugly and of no account had its advantages, because
one could cry when one’s heart was full and pride did not stand in the
way of tears. So when grandmama presently sailed out of the hall, taking
no more notice of Nicolette than if the child had been a bundle of rags,
Micheline knelt down beside her little friend, and hugged and kissed
her.
“Never mind about to-day, Nicolette,” she said, “run back and tell
Margaï that we will come to-morrow. Grandmama never wants us two days
running, and the brioche won’t be stale.”
But at six years of age, when a whole life-time is stretched out before
one, every day of waiting seems an eternity, and Nicolette cried and
cried long after Micheline had gone.
But presently a slight void inside her reminded her of Margaï’s brioche,
and of the jar of cream, and the tears dried off, of themselves; she
picked herself up, and ran out of the hall, along the familiar corridors
where she had so often been a damsel in distress, and out of the postern
gate. She ran down the mountain-side as fast as her short legs would
carry her, down and down into the valley, then up again, bounding like a
young kid, up the winding track to the old house which her much-despised
ancestor had built on the slope above the Lèze when first he laid the
foundations of the fortune which his descendants had consolidated after
him. Up she ran, safe as a bird in its familiar haunts, up the gradients
between the lines of olive trees now laden with fruit, the source of her
father’s wealth. For while the noble Comtes de Ventadour had wasted
their patrimony in luxury and in gambling, the Deydiers, father and son,
had established a trade in oil, and in orange-flower water, both of
which they extracted from the trees on the very land that they had
bought bit by bit from their former seigneurs; and their oil was famed
throughout the country, because one of the Deydiers had invented a
process whereby his oil was sweeter than any other in the whole of
Provence, and was sought after far and wide, and even in distant lands.
But of this Nicolette knew nothing as yet: she did not even know that
she loved the grey-green olive trees, and the terraced gradients down
which she was just able to jump without tumbling, now that she was six
and her legs had grown; she did not know that she loved the old house
with its whitewashed walls, its sky-blue shutters, and multi-coloured
tiled roof, and the crimson rose that climbed up the wall to the very
window sill of her room, and the clumps of orange and lemon trees that
smelt so sweet in the spring when they were laden with blossom, and the
dark ficus trees, and feathery mimosa, and vine-covered arbours. She did
not know that she loved them because her baby-heart had not yet begun to
speak. All that she knew was that Tan-tan was beautiful, and the most
wonderful boy that ever, ever was. There was nothing that Tan-tan could
not do. He could jump on one leg far longer than any other boy in the
country-side. He could throw the bar and the disc much farther even than
Ameyric who was reckoned the finest thrower at the fêtes of Apt. He
could play bows, and shoot with arrows, and to see him wrestle with some
of the boys of the neighbourhood was enough to make one scream with
excitement.
Nicolette also knew that Tan-tan could make her cry whenever he was
cross or impatient with her, but that it was nice, oh! ever so
nice!—when he condescended to play with her, and carried her about in
his arms, and when, at times, when she had been crying just in play, he
comforted her with a kiss.
But that was all long, long, so very long ago. Tan-tan now was a big
boy, and he never slew dragons any more; and when Nicolette through
force of habit called him Tan-tan, there was always somebody to reprove
her; either the old Comtesse of whom she stood in mortal awe, or Pérone
who was grandmama’s maid, and seemed to hold Nicolette in especial
aversion, or the reverend Father Siméon-Luce who came daily from
Manosque to the château in order to give lessons to Bertrand in all
sorts of wonderful subjects. And so Nicolette had to say Bertrand like
everybody else, only when she was quite alone with him, would she still
say Tan-tan, and slide her small hand into his, and look up at him with
wonder and admiration expressed in her luminous eyes. She took to coming
less and less to the château; somehow she preferred to think of Tan-tan
quietly, alone in her cheerful little room, from the windows of which
she could see the top of the big carob tree to which he used to tie her,
when she was a captive maiden and he would be slaying dragons for her
sake. Bertrand was not really Tan-tan when he was at the château, and
Father Siméon-Luce or grandmama were nigh and talked of subjects which
Nicolette did not understand. The happy moments were when he and
Micheline would come over to the mas, and Margaï would bake a lovely
brioche, and they would all sit round the polished table and drink cups
of delicious coffee with whipped cream on the top, and Bertrand’s eyes
would glow, and he would exclaim: “Ah! it is good to be here! I wish I
could stay here always.” An exclamation which threw Nicolette into a
veritable ecstasy of happiness, until Jaume Deydier, her father, who was
usually so kind and gentle with them all, would retort in a voice that
was harsh and almost cruel:
“You had better express that wish before my lady, your grandmother, my
lad, and see how she will receive it.”
But there were other happy moments, too. Though Bertrand no longer slew
dragons, he went fishing in the Lèze on his half-holidays, and Nicolette
was allowed to accompany him, and to carry his basket, or hold his rod,
or pick up the fish when they wriggled and flopped about upon the
stones. Micheline seldom came upon these occasions because the way was
rough, and it made her tired to walk quite so far, and at the château no
one knew that Nicolette was with Bertrand when he fished. Father
Siméon-Luce was away on parish work over at Manosque, and grandmama
never walked where it was rough, so Bertrand would call at the mas for
Nicolette, and together the two children would wander up the bank of the
turbulent little mountain stream, till they came to a pool way beyond
Jourdans where fish was abundant, and where a group of boulders,
grass-covered and shaded by feathery pines and grim carobs, made a
palace fit for a fairy-king to dwell in. Here they would pretend that
they were Paul and Virginie cast out on a desert island, dependent on
their own exertions for their very existence. Bertrand had to fish, else
they would have nothing to eat on the morrow.
All the good things which Margaï’s loving hands had packed for them in
the morning, were really either the result of mysterious foraging
expeditions which Bertrand had undertaken at peril of his life, or of
marvellous ingenuity on the part of Nicolette. Thus the luscious
brioches were in reality crusts of bread which she had succeeded in
baking in the sun, the milk she had really taken from a wild goat
captured and held in duress amongst the mountain fastnesses of the
island, the eggs Bertrand had collected in invisible crags where
sea-fowls had their nests. Oh! it was a lovely game of “Let’s pretend!”
which lasted until the shadows of evening crept over the crest of
Luberon, and Bertrand would cast aside his rod, remembering that the
hour was getting late, and grandmama would be waiting for him. Then they
would return hand in hand, their shoes slung over their shoulders, their
feet paddling in the cold, rippling stream. Way away to the west the
setting sun would light a gorgeous fire in the sky behind Luberon, a
golden fire that presently turned red, and against which the crests and
crags stood out clear-cut and sharp, just as if the world ended there,
and there was nothing behind the mountain-tops.
In very truth for Nicolette the world did end here; her world! the world
which held the mas that was her home, and to which she would have liked
to have taken Tan-tan, and never let him go again.