“That’s natural enough,” said Newman. “I have nothing to feel well about. To be very indifferent and very fierce, very dull and very jovial, very sick and very lively, all at once,—why, it rather mixes one up.”
Mrs. Bread gave a noiseless sigh. “I can tell you something that will make you feel duller still, if you want to feel all one way. About Madame de Cintré.”
“What can you tell me?” Newman demanded. “Not that you have seen her?”
She shook her head. “No, indeed, sir, nor ever shall. That’s the dullness of it. Nor my lady. Nor M. de Bellegarde.”
“You mean that she is kept so close.”
“Close, close,” said Mrs. Bread, very softly.
These words, for an instant, seemed to check the beating of Newman’s heart. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at the old woman. “They have tried to see her, and she wouldn’t—she couldn’t?”
“She refused—forever! I had it from my lady’s own maid,” said Mrs. Bread, “who had it from my lady. To speak of it to such a person my lady must have felt the shock. Madame de Cintré won’t see them now, and now is her only chance. A while hence she will have no chance.”
“You mean the other women—the mothers, the daughters, the sisters; what is it they call them?—won’t let her?”
“It is what they call the rule of the house,—or of the order, I believe,” said Mrs. Bread. “There is no rule so strict as that of the Carmelites. The bad women in the reformatories are fine ladies to them. They wear old brown cloaks—so the femme de chambre told me—that you wouldn’t use for a horse blanket. And the poor countess was so fond of soft-feeling dresses; she would never have anything stiff! They sleep on the ground,” Mrs. Bread went on; “they are no better, no better,”—and she hesitated for a comparison,—“they are no better than tinkers’ wives. They give up everything, down to the very name their poor old nurses called them by. They give up father and mother, brother and sister,—to say nothing of other persons,” Mrs. Bread delicately added. “They wear a shroud under their brown cloaks and a rope round their waists, and they get up on winter nights and go off into cold places to pray to the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is a hard mistress!”