The old grandmother, by name Reine Chabot, owned and farmed a few acres of good land near Les Hameaux, in the rich vale of Chevreuse. To Othmar, who had saved her boy in body and soul, she would have given body and soul herself. She was a hale and strong woman, of simple habits and of noble mind. She was a recluse, but not a morbid one, and her ways and manner of life were similar to those which Damaris had been used to on the island of Bonaventure. To her he resolved to confide the girl's charge during her convalescence, or for so long as she might need a home. He went himself down to the farm, and, almost before he had spoken, his request was granted and received as an honour.
The dark, stern eyes of the aged woman were soft with moisture as she joined her brown hands on his, and said with fervour:
'All that I have is yours to command. Did you not do for me and mine that which was beyond all praise or price?'
'I have found two people who accept my motives as honest ones,' thought Othmar. 'I shall surely find no more. To expect belief in any action that has no personal object at the bottom of it is a folly that nobody but a boy should commit. The child believes in me because she is at the age of faith and of innocence; and the woman believes me because she adores me and does not look any further; but nobody else will be so quick in faith.'
The farmhouse, called the Croix Blanche, was a stout seventeenth-century building, which had escaped injury during the great war by some miracle, and was as lonely in its situation as though it had been five hundred instead of fifteen miles from Paris. In such a retreat he thought this checked and bruised sea-bird might find as safe a nest for a season of rest as the lark found there in the long grass of its meadows. Rural quietude, pure air, good care, and the balm which lies for poetic temperaments in the mere sense that the country silences are around them, would do all that was needed, he fancied, to restore the natural buoyancy and strength of her constitution, and thither he directed the nuns to take her one afternoon when the shadows grew long over the grass pastures and quiet woods of that smiling and pastoral country which stretches around the ruins of what was once Port-Royal des Champs.
She was in that state of weakness blended with the delicious sense of returning health which makes life seem like a dream, and all its scenes pass like dream-pictures. She was filled with a vague sense of perfect faith and peace, and all that he did for her she accepted unquestioningly as undoubted good.
When she saw the low grey-stone farmhouse covered with its climbing roses, its wooden outhouses buried under elder and poplar trees, its grass lands lying warm in the glow of the afternoon sun, she stretched out her thin hands to it all as to a friend, and tears of pleasure swam in her eyes.
'It is the country,' she said under her breath with delight.
All the sweet pungent smell of the turned earth where a labourer dug in it, all the fresh glad scent of growing leaves and ripening fruits and grasses browning in the sun, all the familiar sounds, a watch-dog's bark, a blackbird's song, the hum of bees in the rose bloom, the distant call of a corncrake in the meadows—they were all dear and welcome like the voices of friends long unheard. It was the country: all the strength and the warmth and the force of her youth seemed to rush back into her veins with the sight and the sounds of it.
For the first time since she had left the island she laughed.