Madame de Vannes was, as the world in general would have said, very generous to her; her education was of the best, the clothes provided for her were elegant and suitable, her linen was of the finest, her boots and shoes were the prettiest possible; the Duchesse did everything well that she did at all; but beyond a remark that her hair was too low or too high on her forehead, or that she did not wear the right gloves with the right frock, Yseulte could scarcely recall twenty phrases that she had heard from her august cousin. Now and then the heart of the girl had risen in an impulse of ardour towards liberty, towards independence. She was conscious of more talent than the manner of her education had developed; in a vague way she sometimes fancied the world might hold some place for her, some freedom of effort or attainment; but all the habits of obedience made a cage for her as surely as the laws made one. Her grandmother had written with a hand half paralysed by death to commend her to the care of her relative, and amongst her dying words the command: ‘Obey Aurore as you have obeyed me,’ had been often repeated. Any thought of rebellion was stifled by her sense of duty as soon as it arose.
This morning, as she leaned out of her window she could see the white house of the Sandroz, half a league away, amongst the olive foliage, and what was still more to her, the tiny bell tower of a little whitewashed church, the parish church of S. Pharamond, in whose parish Millo also lay. The one cracked bell sounding feebly for matins recalled her to the present hour, and reminded her that the morrow was the feast day of S. Cecilia to whom the building was dedicated.
‘He will be so vexed if the altar be not dressed,’ she thought. The old priest of Millo was accustomed to look to her for that service. The Duchesse always gave him two thousand francs in gold for his poor at New Year, but there her heed of her vicar ended. Yseulte, who had no gold to give, brought him flowers and boughs for his little, dusky, lonely place, where only a few fishermen and peasants ever knelt, and she sometimes sang at his Offices.
When she remembered the day, she wasted no more time at the window; she drank the cup of milk and ate the roll which the maid appointed to her service brought, and putting on a little hat of fur, went out through the house where even Blanchette and Toinon were still asleep, and only a few of the under servants were stirring.
It was cold, but already grown bright, with sunshine, and the promise of a warm noonday.
The gardens of Millo, with their autumn luxuriance still prolonged, were sparkling with sunbeams and dew-drops; their aloes and cacti pierced with broad sword-blades the blue clear air; the latest roses kissed the earliest camellias; the pink, the amber, the white, the purple, of groves of chrysanthemums, glowed in the parterres; but she did not dare to give them even a glance. No one ever plucked a flower there.
She went quickly through the alleys, and avenues, over the lawns, and under the berceaux, and after walking about a mile came to where the boundary of Millo was fixed by a high wall of closely-clipped arbutus, and only the small iron gate which Othmar had unlocked the previous night gave access to the lands of S. Pharamond, which lay beyond.
‘There will be sure to be something here,’ she thought, as she turned the latch of the gate which he had unthinkingly left open, and passed through the aperture into the thick ilex wood on the other side of the bearberry wall. She was not surprised to find it open, for the gardeners of the two houses often held communication; and she had been constantly permitted by those of S. Pharamond to wander about its grounds and pluck its commoner plants. It was a thing she had done a hundred times in the winters she had passed at Millo.
There were all kinds of plants growing up at Nicole’s bastide; but as she had no money to pay, the child had always felt a delicacy in asking, for them. Her foster-mother would indeed have refused her nothing; but to take as a gift the late-come quatre-saisons rose, or the early-blooming clochettes, which the Sandroz could sell so highly by sending them away in little air-tight tin boxes to Paris, would have appeared to the generous temper of the last of the Valognes a very ungenerous act.
Othmar, who had slept ill, rose early that day. When he had bathed and dressed, he strolled out on to his terrace, where Nadine Napraxine had eaten her strawberries. Though winter, the morning was mild, the sunrise glorious. Through the great gloom of his ilex groves he could see the sparkle of blue waves. It was not the scenery he cared most for; he liked the great windy shadowy plains of eastern Europe, the snow of mountains more sombre and severe than these hyacinth-hued maritime Alps, the gigantic grey walls of Atlantic rollers breaking on rugged rocks of Spain, or Britanny, or Scotland; but he was not insensible to the present beauty which surrounded him, if it were brighter and paler of hue, gayer of tone, softer in character, than the scenes he preferred.