When she walked over the daisied grass that grew about the ruined dovecot, Pascal seemed to pace beside her, and as she leaned over the little brook which finds its way amongst the cresses and the mouse-ear, she fancied she saw the face of her great master Racine reflected in its shallow waters.
Her hostess, though a woman of no great culture, yet was learned enough in the literature of earlier days, and in the associations of her birthplace, to know every legend and name that are attached to the stones and the meadows of Les Hameaux. She was no uncongenial companion to an imaginative girl, for though taciturn, she could have a certain rude eloquence when strongly moved, and to her reverent and unworldly mind 'les Messieurs de Port-Royal' were ever present memories, both saintly and heroic.
CHAPTER XXVII.
He had apportioned the sum needed at a lower figure than his own wishes would have dictated, that it might seem to her more natural as the legacy of Jean Bérarde; it was enough to keep her in such simple ways of life as she had been used to, no more. He told her of it, as of a legacy, the first day that he saw her at Les Hameaux: told it in few words, for all equivocation was painful to him. She never for a moment doubted the truth of the story, and he was touched to see that her first emotion was not relief at the material safety insured to her, but joy that the old man dying had forgiven her.
'If I had only known,' she said through her tears, 'I would have gone back to him! I would have gone back just to have heard him say one kind word for the last!'
The thought that her grandsire had pardoned and remembered her was a philtre of health and strength to her. It brought back all the warmth to her cheeks, all the depth of colour to her eyes; she wept passionately, but from a sweet not harsh sorrow, from gratitude to his memory, from thankfulness that his last thought of her had been one of kindness.
Othmar watched and heard her with an embarrassment which she was too absorbed in her own emotions to notice.
'All the money I shall give her would not suffice to buy one of Nadine's rows of pearls,' he thought. 'Yet what rapture it affords her! A lie! of course it is a lie; and all my Jesuit tutors could never make me credit that a lie could be a good thing, however good its motive. But this lie is innocent if ever there were one innocent, and even if it were a crime the crime would be worth the doing, to set this poor lost sea-bird safe from storm upon a ledge of rock. She would be beaten to death by the waves without some shelter.'
Yet his conscience was not wholly easy as he responded to her warm words of gratitude to himself for having discovered this bequest for her, and answered her many questions as to the island that she loved, the children of Raphael, the dogs, the trees, the boat; all things on Bonaventure were living things to her. However long her life might last, always the clearest and the dearest of her memories would be those sunny childish years in the little isle of fruit and flowers, where for sixteen years the sun had shone and the sea wind blown on her, and the fish and the birds and the beasts been her schoolfellows.