I was silent, for I now knew that the prudent Angelique was completely the mistress of our dangerous secret.
"Well has propinquity done its work!" thought I.
I found the Countess Ninon very amusing (though fond of recurring with sorrowful recollections to her first love, a Scottish captain in the Irish Dragoons of Lord Clare, who had fallen in battle somewhere); and notwithstanding the little vanities incident to her years, sex, and country, her conversation was instructive. Thus, while attending her and her niece in their walks, &c., I listened with pleasure to her anecdotes of the court of Louis XIV., and even of that of Louis XIII., which she had gleaned from her mother.
At night, when the perfumed wax-candles were lighted in her boudoir, and I was busy with my skeins of silk, while she and Angelique plied their needles on the embroidery for that Right Reverend Father, the Bishop of St. Malo, she would tell us many a strange old story of the Breton wars between Guy of Thouars and Philip Augustus; of the enchanted sea-ducks that were neither fish nor flesh, but grew between the planks of ships that sailed in Breton waters; of the toad-stones that were found in the mountains, and proved a sovereign remedy for all manner of poisons; of the terrors of the Black Forest of Hunandaye; of the buried cities of Is and Douarnenez; of the ghosts that shrieked in the ancient vaults that lie between Rieux and Redon, and the subterranean torrent of St. Aubyn du Cormier.
She knew also many strange and wild legends of the great stones that stud all the land so thickly from Lorient to Quiberon—rising out of lonely heaths that are covered with holly and thistles, like that great block which marks, near Morlaix, where a peasant was devoured by the Moon, for blaspheming her. She told of the dreadful shipwrecks the Point of Raz had witnessed; of the Bay of the Dead, and the island of Sein, a melancholy sandholm, whereon neither grass nor trees will grow, and which was, of old, the abode of Celtic witches, who sold fair winds or foul to the Breton mariners.
I remember being particularly struck with a strange story which she related of the famous Ninon de L'Enclos, who is said to have preserved her beauty until she numbered ninety years.
We were seated in her boudoir. It was the fourth evening of my obnoxious masquerading. The eternal piece of embroidery for the bishop was finished at last, and Angelique was busy with the soft, silky, and luxuriant black hair of Jacqueline, which she had unloosed, and was pinning up for the night, before a large mirror, while I sat on a tabourette at some distance, contemplating with secret joy and admiration the beauty of one I loved so much, and envying her soubrette, a service which I could neither imitate nor perform.
It would seem as if the beautiful girl felt some coquettish joy in the contemplation of herself, for after a pause she said to her aunt—
"Tell me honestly, my dear aunt, am I as pretty as you could wish?"
"Quite so, Jacqueline."