CHAPTER X.
It was a tiny church which bore the name of S. Cecilia at S. Pharamond, and was perched on an olive-covered knoll, with the rolling woods of the château d’Othmar at its base and the gardens of Millo on its right. Nicole Sandroz and a few other families of the petite culture gathered there on Sundays and holy days; but the great people of Millo, with their household, had their own private chapel, and the friends to whom Othmar had lent his house had never troubled themselves to find their way to the little whitewashed, wind-blown sanctuary and the lowly presbytery that leaned up against its south wall.
Othmar himself, who had a score of ecclesiastics in a score of places looking to him for support, had hardly known that this little church and its old purblind peasant-born curé were upon the confines of his estate. He had paid every year a large sum for the maintenance of S. Pharamond, as for that of each of his houses and estates, but he had never examined the details of the expenditure. The advantage of an immense fortune is that you can leave all such matters to your secretaries. He paid them more heed than many would have done because of the views he entertained on the duties of saving other people from temptation; but S. Pharamond, with all its luxuries, elegancies, gardens, carriages, and conservatories, was only to him as a mere cottage, a mere toy. He had, indeed, almost forgotten that he had owned it, until, beating up the Bay of Genoa in a storm-tossed and almost disabled vessel, he had suddenly remembered that somewhere on this coast which slid away in the dusk to the westward he had a harbour and a quay all his own if he chose to go thither.
The little church was ugly, poor, and had been built since the Revolution; all that redeemed it was a great climbing rose which covered the whole of its front, and was even flinging audacious branches upwards to the cross upon the roof. In summer the rose made the little plain square place a glory of pink bloom. Inside, there were a few deal benches, a few bad prints, a humble little altar, and some pewter candlesticks; the presbytery was equally as bare.
The old vicar lived with one servant as old as himself; he toddled out amongst the farms, and was scouted and scowled at by some of the peasants, petted and welcomed by others. He did no harm, and was quite happy if one of his parishioners gave him a basket of figs or a dish of seakale; he could almost have counted his flock on his fingers. The men about there were very radical and hard-headed; they were all small proprietors, who cursed Millo and S. Pharamond all the year round, though neither the villa nor the château did them the slightest harm. On the contrary, the stewards of both the Duc de Vannes and Othmar had orders to give away any rare seeds, aid in any irrigation-works, or contribute to any need that there might be in the neighbourhood. But the Duc was a duke and peer of France, and Othmar was an archimillionaire; the petite culture hated the sight of their gilded bronze gates and their glittering high-pitched roofs.
‘It is for you that we pay taxes!’ snarled one of them once to the Duc de Vannes, who laughed and answered:
‘Oh, my friend, if we compared notes I think you would find that it is I who pay them for you and yours. I have not the slightest objection to do so, only do not let us misrepresent matters.’
But they did not want logic, and they hated the steep shining roofs and the gates with the gilded scroll work. What they did not hate was Yseulte de Valogne; all countess though she was, they pardoned her that defect because she had always remained for them la pétiote de Nicole. They understood that she was to be sacrificed to the pride of her relatives; that because she was poor, so poor, she was to be refused all the joys of her youth and her sex and surrendered to the Church that she might not offend the grandeur of her family by making a portionless marriage. This, which they had learned, with many exaggerations of its enormity from Nicole and from the servants of Millo, gave her the halo of a martyr in their eyes; she was sacrificed to the noblesse, and that fact was enough to make her sacred to them even though she belonged to the detested order herself, and had not a little of its hauteur. Besides, her tenderness to their old people, the little gifts she made at the convent and brought to their little ones and their women, her intrepidity in cases of sickness in those winters when she was alone at Millo—a mere child, but with the courage of giants, as Nicole loved to tell—all these, joined to her personal elegance, which made her as unlike themselves as the orchids in Othmar hothouses were unlike the sweet peas and the lavender growing under their peach trees, had combined to make of the last Comtesse de Valogne the idol of petite culture which, with few exceptions, loathed and execrated the brilliant idlers who rode and drove out of the gates of Millo, and carried their light laughter, their painted fans, their blazing jewels, their grace and their luxuries, out on to the illuminated terraces, under the palms and the araucarias, amidst the lamps and the music, regardless of the people in the distant huts and houses on the surrounding hills who, rising to their work, as they went to their beds, swore savagely against them with all the unchanged rancorous class-hatred of the Terror still alive in them and unsatisfied.