“Revenge?” he exclaimed. And then again: “Revenge?”
“Yes, revenge!” Nicolette went on with glowing eyes and flaming cheeks. “Oh, I know! I know! There is a dark page somewhere in our family history connected with the château, and because of that—because of that——”
Her voice broke in a sob. She was crouching beside the hearth at her father’s feet, and for a moment he looked down at her as if entirely taken aback by her passionate protest. Life had always gone on so smoothly at the mas, that Jaume Deydier had until now never realised that the motherless baby whom he had carried about in his arms had become a woman with a heart, and a mind and passions of her own. It had never struck him that his daughter—little Nicolette with the bright eyes and the merry laugh, the child that toddled after him, obedient and loving—would one day wish to frame her destiny apart from him, apart from her old home.
A child! A child! He had always thought of her as a child—then as a growing girl who would marry Ameyric Barnadou one day, and in due course present her husband with a fine boy or two and perhaps a baby girl that would be the grandfather’s joy!
But this girl!—this woman with the flaming eyes in which glowed passion, reproach, an indomitable will; this woman whose voice, whose glance expressed the lust of a fight for her love and her happiness!—was this his Nicolette?
Ah! here was a problem, the like of which had never confronted Jaume Deydier’s even existence before now. How he would deal with it he did not yet know. He was a silent man and not fond of talking, and, after her passionate outburst, Nicolette, too, had lapsed into silence. She still crouched beside her father’s chair, squatting on her heels, and gazing into the fire. Deydier stroked her soft brown hair with a tender hand. He loved the child more than anything in the whole world. To her happiness he would have sacrificed everything including his life, but in his own mind he was absolutely convinced that Bertrand de Ventadour had only sought her for her money, and that nothing but sorrow would come of this unequal marriage—if the marriage was allowed to take place, which, please God, it never would whilst he, Deydier, was alive.... But as he himself was a man whose mind worked with great deliberation, he thought that time and quietude would act more potently than words on Nicolette’s present mood. He was quite sure that at any rate nothing would be gained at this moment by further talk. She was too overwrought, too recently under the influence of Bertrand to listen to reason now. Time would show. Time would tell. Time and Nicolette’s own sound sense and pride. So Deydier sat on in his arm-chair, and said nothing, and presently he asked his girl to get him his pipe, which she did. She lighted it for him, and as she stood there so close to him with the lighted tinder in her hand, he saw that her eyes were dry, and that the glow had died out of her cheeks. He pulled at his pipe in a moody, abstracted way, and fell to meditating—as he so often did—on the past. There was a tragedy in his life connected with those Ventadours. He had never spoken of it to any one since the day of his marriage, not even to old Margaï, who knew all about it, and he had sworn to himself at one time that he would never tell Nicolette.
But now——
So deeply had he sunk in meditation that he did not notice that Nicolette presently went out of the room.
Margaï brought in the lamp an hour later.
“I did not want to disturb you,” she said as she set it on the table, “but it is getting late now.”