I.
THE FIRST MORNING.
In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old château that might have been the château of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be passed. Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine, was Lunéville, the Lunéville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hénault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise. Within a few leagues was Lunéville, but the echo of its mots and madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air, did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the vesper bells chimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.
The château of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray, lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered walls—walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her presence, was a young girl of sixteen—and if women sometimes darken lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!
Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years about her, while she sat on the broken steps, now brushing the water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty, useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the rose-sprays beside her.
"Favette! where are your dreams?"
Favette, the young naïad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.
"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Léon! how you frightened me!"
And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her treasures gathered from the woods—of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays—falling from her lap on to the turf in unheeded disorder.
"I frightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me, then?"