That was good in itself; but a closer appeal was to reach them on the occasion of his second visit. For it was then that he and Yolande met for the first time, and provided in their meeting the basis for a more poignant romance than any which had yet glorified him. Within a week, every wife in Le Prieuré thrilled in the knowledge of a secret fathomed only by herself.
One wet July morning Louis-Marie left the doctor’s door and turned his face for Le Marais, which was a little dedicatory chapel standing under pine woods on the lower slopes of the Montverd. It was there he had first come upon Yolande, the saintly loveliness, craving some boon of the sacred heart; and what better rendezvous could the two afterwards appoint than the little holy shrine which had brought them mutually acquainted with the sweetest of all boons?
As Louis-Marie walked up the village street his heart sang like a bird with joy. It was full of thankfulness to the God of orthodoxy, who was nevertheless the God of nature and of love. How easy and how profitable it was to earn approval in those great eyes! One had only to keep the faith of a little child, to ask no questions, to court no vexing heresies, and be happy. And so to be rewarded for one’s happiness, as witness himself twice blessed. He had done nothing but be good according to his orthodox lights, and for that virtue, which was instinct, here was he glorified in the affection of the loveliest lily of womanhood which had ever blossomed in a by-way of the world. He turned and breathed a laugh in the direction of the unsurmountable peak, hidden now within league-deep folds of mist. What was there to gain which seemed other than trivial in the light of his higher achievement? The mountain was shrunk to a mole-hill under that star, that altitude.
There was no wind; the wet dropped softly, caressingly; the fields were full of flowers. Louis-Marie could interpret the talk between them and the earnest rain. The patches of standing rye were stippled with poppies. He recognised why the supreme artist had touched them in here and there and nowhere else. Sacred love was the understanding love after all; he felt that he had been given the gift of tongues.
He took no sense of depression from the drowning mist. The gloom made the lamp of his heart shine the more friendly, smiling on all things in its consciousness of the ecstatic wings which were waiting up there to flutter to it in a little. He had no doubt of himself, or of his right to hold that lure to them. Perhaps he had no reason to have. He came, for all worldly considerations, of an old and stately family, and he had his orphan’s patrimony—nothing great, but enough to bring him within the bounds of eligibility in the eyes of a poor Chevalier. If he had consented hitherto to make a secret of his suit, it was because he could not find it in his heart to materialise the first virgin rapture of that idyll—to submit it to flesh-and-blood conditions. There was no other reason; or, if one was to be suspected in M. de France’s pride and aloofness, as gossip painted them, he would not admit to himself that he had been influenced by it. But, in any case, propriety, always to him the little thing more than love, without which love itself must lack perfection, demanded its vindication the moment he realised that it was in question; and he was now actually on his way, in fact, to entreat his love’s consent to an appeal to the paternal sanctions.
Half-way down the village street he encountered a young fellow, a friend of his, and one intimately associated with some past ambitions. This was Jacques Balmat, already the most experienced of mountaineers at twenty-two. His dark eager face and bold eyes showed in significant contrast with the girlish pink and blue of the other’s. He held out a handful of pebbles.
Louis-Marie was in no hurry. “For Dr Paccard, Jacques?” he asked, with a smile. The young man nodded his head.
“Some of them are rare enough, monsieur. I risk my life in getting them. But who would win the daughter must court the father.”
There was significance as well as sympathy in his tone. To him, also, there was a peak higher than Mont Blanc’s to attain.
“Very true, Jacques,” said Saint-Péray. “I hope we may both find favour.”