Madame de Salgues, who had been silent hitherto, now spoke in a gracious tone. “If you are to hear this woman at all, Clémence, it appears to me that you could not do so in a manner less open to objection. Go, my dear niece, if you wish it.”
“I am at your service, Stéphanie,” Clémence said smiling; and she rose to leave the room. As she passed the chair of her aunt she kissed her hand with a grateful look; and the old lady responded kindly, “I hope you will enjoy yourself, my dear.” She had been greatly touched, though she had said nothing, by the quietness with which Clémence had given up what was evidently her own and her husband’s wish, in deference to her feelings.
“I must own, mon ami,” Clémence said to Ivan, who joined her while she was making her simple toilet, “I think it is a pity the Czar should go to a meeting such as Stéphanie expects this to be.”
“Why so, if it please you, my princess?” asked Ivan, rather surprised.
“Because,” she answered, “the children will all be gazing at the great people instead of listening to what Madame de Krudener is saying to them. Besides, it is bad for them—is it not?—to think themselves objects of attention. The less the religion of children is noticed and talked about the better.”
“Oh, you need not fear. The presence of half-a-dozen gentlemen, in a large public room, will be scarcely observed by the children; and who is to tell them that one of them is the Czar? You don’t know, Clémence,” he added with a change of tone, “how his heart yearns over the little ones. In England, no sight pleased him so well as the annual gathering of the charity children under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. And I have seen him myself in Dresden, when he lodged in the Bruhl Palace, come out in the evening to watch the children playing in the gardens, which he would not allow to be closed against them. Three little princesses—‘daughters of Russia’—are sleeping in the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky at St. Petersburg, and God never gave him a son.”
But Stéphanie’s impatient voice was heard in the passage, so, after a tender little farewell to Clémence, Ivan escorted the ladies to a fiacre, and saw them depart.
The room where the meeting was held was crowded when they arrived. However, Coralie saw her cousin and Clémence seeking a place, and persuaded the governess who had charge of her party to make room for them. Clémence at first regretted this, for the girls began to chatter amongst themselves about their dress and other trifles in a way well calculated to put to flight all serious impressions.
Meanwhile she looked with much interest on the face and figure of the person about whom Ivan had told her so much. Perhaps on the whole she was disappointed: the worn and haggard features had in her eyes no charm save one, the charm of intense earnestness and utter sincerity. The thought passed through her mind, “That is a woman from whom I might learn much as a teacher, but I could never trust her as a guide.” One thing, however, she learned that day—that the Pietists neither thought lightly of sin themselves, nor induced others to think lightly of it. The “Gray Sister of Hearts” (so Clémence remembered Ivan’s calling Madame de Krudener) denounced in scathing accents just those sins of which the world thinks least—the sins of childhood. Conceit, selfishness, disobedience, forgetfulness of God, were exposed in terms that Clémence might have thought exaggerated, had she not remembered that the poison-seed is the poison-plant in embryo. Never before had she felt so thoroughly—
“That the most childish sin a child can do
Is yet a sin which Jesus never did
When Jesus was a child, and yet a sin
For which he came in lowly pain to die.”