‘I am quite happy to dedicate my life to our Mother and her poor,’ she said, in that tone which always awed and silenced Nicole. ‘All that I fear is, not to be worthy. There have been holy women of my race. I may never content them as they watch me from their places at God’s right hand.’
The coarse blunt fashion of speech of her foster-mother, and the crude class-hatreds and political animosities which Nicole had imbibed from her husband often pained and offended the delicacy and the pride of the girl; but the rough woman loved her, was almost the only creature that did love her, save some of the younger children in the convent; and Yseulte bore with her faults with that indulgent affection which is not blind, but patient and ever forgiving.
She spoke in simplicity and sincerity; she had been so drilled to behold her only future in the religious life, that she prayed night and day to be worthy of such election; and if a thrill of longing for unknown freedom, for unimaginable joys, sometimes came over her she loyally stifled it ere it could grow to any strength. From her babyhood she had been taught to consider herself consecrated to the Church, and that knowledge had always kept her a little apart from others, made her more serious, more sensitive, more meditative, than her age usually is.
‘And, to be sure, if there be any up there who do know, it is a crying shame that they do not interfere,’ muttered her foster-mother, only half abashed. But Yseulte did not hear her; she had let the roses lie on her lap, her hands were motionless, her eyes were looking far away, farther than the snow which crowned the distant mountains; she was thinking of that saint by whom her childhood had been sheltered; could it indeed be that so great a love as her grandmother’s had been had perished utterly, had gone whither it knew nothing, saw nothing, had no power to warn or save? If it were so, she was alone indeed. But——
‘Nay, do not think of them,’ said Nicole, roughly; ‘what is dead is dead, my sweet; be it a pig or be it a princess, when the life is out the sense is out with it; it rots, but it does not wake.’
‘Hush!’ said the girl, with a little frown and a sense of pain, as if she had heard some foul irreverence. The dead were all she had to care for; half her young life was passed in thinking of them, in praying for them, in wondering if they approved that which she did. ‘Christ will give you your dower,’ her grandmother had said often to her, a little seven-year-old child, who had vaguely understood that her future was pledged to heaven; and that she must never be fractious, or noisy, or sullen, or give way to appetite or mischief as other children did who were less honoured. It had made her neither affected nor hypocritical; only pathetically doubtful of herself and capable of repressing her naturally buoyant spirits with an incredible patience which was almost heroism, but went always unrewarded.
Faïel was a part of the old world of Bretagne, where the land is green and deeply wooded, and the days are misty and soft and still; it lies inland, and has no sight of the sea; it is traversed by narrow roads sunk down low between moss-grown walls of verdure; it seems all covered up with moss and ferns and boughs; there is always moisture in the air and there are almost always clouds in the sky, but it is a sweet, tender, if mournful country, and in the late-arriving spring becomes a very bower of flowers.
In the heart of this green country the ancient village of Faïel held the equally ancient convent of the Holy Ladies of St. Anne, with its long grey stone walls, its steep shining metal roofs, and its high belfry with its cross of gilded brass towering above the low quaint cottages which crept humbly up beneath it many centuries ago. The foundation owed its origin to Anne of Bretagne herself, and year after year, century after century, undisturbed by wars or revolutions, and unreached by any change of thought or manners the pious ladies of Faïel, in their habits of black and white, had reared the young daughters of the Breton nobility and gentry in the ways of God and in such secular learning as seemed not too profane. The community was severe in its rules and austerely simple in all its customs; but the children were happy if not gay; the green, leafy, silent country was between them and the world, the sisters were kind and gentle, the young girls murmured together, joyously, unreproved, like young swallows chirping under the eaves in midsummer. This holy house in pious Morbihan was wholly unlike those fashionable convents of Paris, and near it, where all the pomps and vanities of the world find their way, and its jealousies and its rivalries fret and fume in miniature mimicry. The Dames de Ste. Anne had all the primitive faiths, the unblemished loyalties, the devout beliefs in tradition of the Middle Ages; they taught the history of France from religious instead of secular records, and the history of the saints from the Golden Legend; they worked silver lilies on white banners, and in their chapel every day a Mass was said for Henri Cinq. Their little maidens became under their hands simple, earnest, grave, and most innocent and truthful creatures, ignorant, no doubt, in many things, but possessing a perfect courage and a beautiful candour; such maidens as in the old days, from the Combât des Trente to Quiberon, had become the wives and mothers of the Breton seigneurie, and had, if need were, defended a castle and headed a sally of men-at-arms in the holy cause of their duke or of their king; women like the arum lilies that covered the damp green earth in their native woods; women whose eyes look at us still, serious and serene, from the gold blazonries of illuminated missals, where their miniatures have been painted beneath their scutcheons and their crowns.
Of these children, when they had passed from the gates of Faïel for the last time, some went to pass all their years in the small secluded châteaux or the dull stone-built towns of the seashore or the interior; some, finding a wider flight, a bolder fate, went into the life of the world and lived that life. But wherever they went, whatever they became, none of them ever wholly forgot Faïel; all of them when they bore children said, as they looked on their little daughters, ‘They shall go to the Dames de Ste. Anne;’ so that generation after generation came to the great Gothic gateway, and passed within and dwelt there for eight or ten peaceful years; and the sisters, though death made changes amidst them, yet seemed always the same.
Yseulte, who was a fanciful child like most of those who have a lonely childhood, used to believe that they were like that woman of the time of Clovis who learned the secret of eternal life from listening to the singing of the forest birds.