‘Not found!’ cried Eustacie. ‘No, for she shall never go!’
‘There!’ lamented Nanon—‘so she agitates herself, when it is but spoken of. And surely she had better make up her mind, for there is no other choice.’
‘Nay, Nanon,’ said M. Gardon, ‘wherefore should she part with the charge that God has laid on her?’
Eustacie gave a little cry of grateful joy. ‘Oh, sir, come nearer! Do you, indeed, say that they have no right to tear her from me?’
‘Surely not, Lady. It is you whose duty it is to shield and guard her.’
‘Oh, sir, tell me again! Yours is the right religion. Oh, you are the minister for me! If you will tell me I ought to keep my child, then I will believe everything else. I will do just as you tell me.’ And she stretched out both hands to him, with vehement eagerness.
‘Poor thing! This is no matter of one religion or another,’ said the minister; ‘it is rather the duty that the Almighty hath imposed, and that He hath made an eternal joy.’
‘Truly,’ said Nanon, ashamed at having taken the other side: ‘the good pasteur says what is according to nature. It would have gone hard with me if any one had wished to part me from Robin or Sara; but these fine ladies, and, for that matter, BOURGEOISES too, always do put out their babes; and it seemed to me that Madame would find it hard to contrive for herself—let alone the little one.’
‘Ah! but what would be the use of contriving for myself, without her?’ said Eustacie.
If all had gone well and prosperously with Madame de Ribaumont, probably she would have surrendered an infant born in purple and in pall to the ordinary lot of its contemporaries; but the exertions and suffering she had undergone on behalf of her child, its orphanhood, her own loneliness, and even the general disappointment in its sex, had given it a hold on her vehement, determined heart, that intensified to the utmost the instincts of motherhood; and she listened as if to an angle’s voice as Maitre Gardon replied to Nanon—