CHAPTER VIII.
Yseulte de Valogne, waking the next morning and looking through the little panes of her high window in the roof at the landscape which the red leaves of the Canadian vine framed in crimson, was conscious of a new interest in her life. Some one, she did not know whom, for in her confusion she had not heard his name, had spoken to her with kindness, and that deference to her incipient womanhood which is the sweetest flattery to a very young girl. Othmar, with the grace of his manner, the seriousness and coldness which made him different to the men of his time, and his handsome features, to which an habitual reserve had given that expression of self-control and of melancholy which most attracts her sex, had seemed to her imagination like some gracious knight of old bending to pity her loneliness, and to succour that timidity which was in so much due to her pride and her unwillingness to be regarded with compassion and to her dread lest she should seem to seek attention.
She thought of him with a vague personal interest stronger than any she had felt in her simple and monotonous life, since her childhood on the Ile St. Louis had become to her like an old book of prayer, shut up unused, with the lavender and southern-wood of long dead summers faded and dried inside it. Though she was only sixteen, that childhood seemed so far, so very far, away. It would have appeared to Blanchette and Toinon, with their artificial, excited, blasé little lives, a dull and austere childhood enough, passed beside the infirmities and incapacities of age, and with no other active pleasure than to gather marguerites on the grass islands of the Seine or to hear a Magnificat sung at Notre Dame.
The rooms they lived in had been narrow and dark, their food had been of the simplest, their days regulated with exact and severe precision. But she had been so happy! When her grandmother, with the white hair like spun silk and the thin small hands, on which one great diamond sparkled—sole relic of a splendid past—said, with a smile, ‘C’est bien fait, mon enfant,’ all the universe could have added nothing to her content.
When the old man servant Bénoît had taken her out to the Sainte Chapelle, or the graves at the Abbaye, and had told her tales of how her forefathers had died on the scaffold, in the noyades, on the battle-fields of Jemappes, or in the slaughter of Quiberon, she had known that purest of all pride, which rejoices in the honour and loyalty of the dead who have begotten us. All the air about her had been redolent of fidelity, of courage, of dignity. She had breathed in that fine clear atmosphere of integrity as the transparent dianthus drinks in the sea-water which the sunbeams pierce with vivifying gold. When the Marquise had sometimes taken, out of old sandal-wood coffers, antique brocades, dusky old jewels, faded yellow letters, perhaps a ribbon and a star of some extinct order once worn at Marly or at Amboise, the child had listened with reverent ear and beating heart to the stories which went with the relics and keepsakes, and it had always seemed to her as if some perfume of the past entered her very veins, as its fragrance is poured upwards from the root into the flower. Nor had it been always melancholy, that innocent, tranquil life; gentlemen of the old courtly habits had made their bow humbly in those narrow rooms, and the old gaieté gauloise had laughed sometimes beneath the sad serenity of losses nobly borne. There had been merry days when Bénoît had taken her in one of the boats which crossed the Seine in summer, and had rowed to one of those quiet nooks of which he had the secret, and had landed with her amidst the tall hay grasses, and had set her noonday meal there—a little fruit and roll of bread—watching the poplars quiver in the light, and the women work upon the shore, and the clumsy brown brigs come and go on the broad breast of the river; and she had clasped a great sheaf of may and daisies and kingcups in her arms, and had run hither and thither in a very ecstasy of limbs set free and eyes delighted, and had cried her delight aloud to the old man, who had nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oui, oui, c’est beau,’ but had thought, with a pang at his faithful heart, ‘Si jeunesse savait——.’
Then, whilst she was still a young child, there had fallen across her life the darkness of the ‘année terrible.’ The Marquise de Creusac had been at once too brave and too poor to quit Paris when the wall of iron and of fire had closed in around it. Her sons had died, one at the cavalry charge of Fræschweiler, the other during the siege of Strasburg; she herself never rose from her bed during that ghastly winter, and her last breath left her lips as the Prussians entered Paris. The horror of that time could never wholly pass from the mind of Yseulte. Bénoît had travelled with her to the château of Bois les Rois, and placed her under the roof of her only living relative, Aurore de Vannes, who herself was momentarily saddened and touched by the misfortunes of the country and the loss of many of her kinsmen, and in that chastened mood was kinder to the little friendless fugitive than she might have been at another and less desperate time.
All that time seemed very far away to Yseulte now; to earliest youth, a few years seems like the gap of a century.
Bénoît was dead now, like the mistress he had adored and served, with that loyal service which, in this later time, one class has lost the power to inspire and the other class has lost the capacity to render; but those happy midsummer holidays on the islets of the Seine were always in her mind whenever she felt the touch of the fresh air or smelt the scent of growing leaves. They had spread a fragrance like that of summer all over her memories of childhood. She pitied Blanchette and Toinon, who cared nothing for daisies and kingcups; who tired so soon of their costly playthings; who knew their Trouville and Biarritz by heart, who, when they played at their games, were either peevish or bored, and who looked with all the scorn of fashionable eight-year-olders on a toilette which was a season out of date. Blanchette and Toinon would die without ever having been young; their cousin, who at sixteen was still entirely a child, had to die to the world before she had begun to live.
She leaned out of her window in the chill of the early morning, and she watched the sea mists curl up and drift away before the sun, the mountains come forth slowly from the clouds obscuring them, the light touch and reveal one by one the low white bastides, the grey olive yards, the bosquets of orange and lemon, the fields where the young corn already was spreading, the fantastic buildings which diversified and vulgarised the beauty of the scene, and the grey towers of S. Pharamond sober and severe amidst its ilex woods by contrast with the coquetteries and motley phantasies of its neighbours.
‘I wonder,’ she thought for the hundredth time, ‘if it were only because he pitied me that he talked to me?’