The Comtesse Marcelle said nothing more, only a deep flush rose to her wan cheeks, and to hide it from the scathing eyes of her motherin-law she buried her face in her hands. Micheline’s heart was torn between the desire to run and comfort her mother and her fear of grandmama’s wrath if she did so. Instinctively she looked behind her, and then gave a gasp. Nicolette was standing in the window embrasure, her hands clasped in front of her; Micheline could not conjecture how much she had heard of the conversation that had been carried on on the terrace this past quarter of an hour. The girl’s face wore a strange expression of detachment as if her spirit were not here at all; her eyes seemed to be gazing inwardly, into her own soul.
“Nicolette,” Micheline exclaimed.
Nicolette started, as if in truth she were waking from a dream.
“I was just thinking,” she said quietly, “that it is getting late; I must be going. Margaï will be anxious.”
She stepped over the window sill on to the terrace, and threw her arms round Micheline who was obviously struggling with insistent tears. Then she went over to the table, where the two ladies were sitting. She dropped the respectful curtsy which usage demanded from young people when taking leave of their elders. The Comtesse Marcelle extended a friendly hand to her, which Nicolette kissed affectionately, but old Madame only nodded her head with stately aloofness: and Nicolette was thankful to escape from this atmosphere of artificiality and hostility which gave her such a cruel ache in her heart.
Micheline offered to accompany her part of the way home, but in reality the girl longed to be alone, and she knew that Micheline would understand.
Nicolette wandered slowly down the dusty road. She had purposely avoided the pretty descent down the terraced gradients through the woods; somehow she felt as if they too must be changed, as if the malignant fairy had also waved a cruel wand over the shady olive trees, and the carob to which captive maidens, long since passed away, were wont to be tethered whilst gallant knights slew impossible dragons and tinged the grass with the monster’s blood. Surely, surely, all that had changed too! Perhaps it had never been. Perhaps childhood had been a dream and the carob tree was as much a legend as the dragons and the fiery chargers of old. Nicolette had a big heart-ache, because she was young and because life had revealed itself to her whilst she was still a child, showed her all the beauty, the joy, the happiness that it could bestow if it would; it had drawn aside the curtain which separated earth from heaven, and then closed them again leaving her on the wrong side, all alone, shivering, pining, longing, not understanding why God could be so cruel when the sky was so blue, His world so fair, and she, Nicolette, possessed of an infinite capacity for love.
Whilst she had sat at the spinet and sung “lou Roussignou” she had gazed abstractedly through the open window before her, and seen that exquisite being, all lace and ribbons and loveliness, wielding little poison-darts that she flung at Bertrand, hurting him horribly in his pride, in his love of the old home: and Nicolette, whose pretty head held a fair amount of shrewd common sense, marvelled what degree of happiness the future held for those two, who were so obviously unsuited to one another. Rixende de Peyron-Bompar, petulant, spoilt, pleasure-loving, and Tan-tan the slayer of dragons, the intrepid Paul of the Paul et Virginie days on the desert island. Rixende, the butterfly Queen of a Paris salon, and Bertrand, Comte de Ventadour, the descendant of troubadours, the idealist, the dreamer, the weak vessel filled to the brim with all that was most lovable, most reprehensible, most sensitive, most certainly doomed to suffer.
If only she thought that he would be happy, Nicolette felt that she could go about with a lighter heart. She had a happy home: a father who idolised her: she loved this land where she was born, the old mas, the climbing rose, the vine arbour, the dark cypresses that stood sentinel beside the outbuildings of the mas. In time, perhaps, loving these things, she would forget that other, that greater love, that immeasurably greater love that now threatened to break her heart.
How beautiful the world was! and how beautiful was Provence! the trees, the woods, Luberon and its frowning crags, the orange trees that sent their intoxicating odour through the air. Already the sun had hidden his splendour behind Luberon, and had lit that big crimson fire behind the mountain tops that had seemed the end of the world to Nicolette in the days of old. The silence of evening had fallen on these woods where bird-song was always scarce. Nicolette walked very slowly: she felt tired to-night, and she never liked a road when terraced gradients through rows of olive trees were so much more inviting. The road was a very much longer way to the mas than the woods. Nicolette paused, debating what she should do. The crimson fire behind Luberon had paled to rose and then to lemon-gold, and to right and left the sky was of a pale turquoise tint, with tiny clouds lingering above the stony peaks of Luberon, tiny, fluffy grey clouds edged with madder that slowly paled.