‘Of course you may shut her perforce in a religious house; so might you shut her in a coffin. To be sure, the one murder is legal and the other would not be so,’ he said, with some ill-humour, the night after Othmar noticed his young cousin with her long black gloves, her stately curtsy, her sash à l’enfant, and her beautiful figure, which had the slimness of a child and the promise of a goddess.
‘I believe you are almost in love with her yourself,’ said the Duchess.
‘I wonder no one else is wholly,’ he answered, with petulance; and he wrote to his jeweller in the Rue de la Paix for a locket, a girl’s locket; something with pearls. He thought even a Mother Superior could hardly object to pearls.
Yseulte, all unconscious of the perilous honour projected for her by her cousin’s lord, passed the whole day up at the little church, arranging the flowers which Othmar had given her in the morning, and others which his men, by his orders, had brought thither in the forenoon. She was happier than she had been since her grandmother had died. A warm human interest had come suddenly into the monotony and solitude of her existence. She worked at the decoration of the little place with ardour and delight. She had never before possessed such flowers as these; the woods had yielded all those which had ever decked the altar of the chapel at Faïel. She had only seen such gorgeous blossoms as these in the glass-house at Millo, where she would no more have dreamed of gathering them than of wearing her cousin’s diamonds.
‘He shall see how beautiful it looks to-morrow,’ she thought with each blossom that she added, each leaf she touched. That he would come she never doubted; a promise, ever such a little one, was so sacred to herself that for any pledge to be forgotten would have seemed to her quite impossible.
The old vicar came and went, the sacristan and the housekeeper stood and chattered and told her for the hundredth time all their household troubles; the gay sunshine streamed in past the open door and through the dulled grey glass of the small windows, a goat trotted up the aisle and nibbled at the bay boughs which she had tied together. The morning passed like a pleasant dream; it seemed not December to her but May. She was but a child, and for once the weight of her future fell off her young shoulders. She laughed,—softly, because she sat on the altar steps,—but she laughed. ‘God is so good,’ she thought, in the simple sincerity of her glad gratitude.
‘You will let me sing, my reverend, at all the offices?’ she said to the old man when she had finished her welcome labours and stood with him within the stone porch whilst the sun was setting.
‘Surely, my child,’ he said willingly. ‘It does me good to hear your voice, and I think it must even be pleasant to the angels too.’
She went happily along the uneven little path which led down the hill under great olive trees and warm evening sunset skies to Millo. Her feet went so rapidly that the maid whose duty it was to attend her out of doors could ill keep pace with her. Her heart was so light; she had the vision of the beautiful flowers always before her eyes, of the altar which she had made like a garden. It mattered nothing to her that when she entered the house she was met by a reprimand, that she found her simple supper cold, that her little cousins were malicious, quarrelsome, unkind; all those were trifles. She bore them with perfect patience, and with never a word of harsh reply; and she went to her bed and slept soundly, dreaming of roses and lilies, and S. Cecilia, and of a world of angels who leaned on the sunbeams as on golden spears, and looked down on her and smiled.
She was up long before the first gleam of coming day lightened the eastward seas. No one ever forbade her going to the church as often as she chose; they deemed it in unison with her future vocation. She had attached herself to this rude, lonely, little place in the winters which she had passed there under the charge of Nicole Sandroz. Her cousin had said once that it would be better if she attended instead the offices of the house chapel, but she had not insisted, and the child, who had a certain obstinacy in her affections, had persevered in her loyalty to the parish church under its silvery mist of olives.