In the large, idle, careless household there was a general exchange of congratulations and étrennes, and a pleasant tumult of good wishes and merriment. Blanchette and Toinon danced about before a pyramid of bonbons and costly playthings, and the Duchesse, descending at her usual hour, two o’clock, gave and received a multitude of felicitations, gifts, and visits. ‘The most tedious day of the whole three hundred and sixty-five,’ she said pettishly, giving her cheek to the touch of her children’s pale little lips.
In the many occupations and ennuis of the day no one heard or knew anything of Othmar’s present. At noon some bouquets of roses and some orchids, laid on a plate of old cloisonné enamel, were brought in his name to Madame de Vannes, but she knew nothing of her cousin’s casket. Meanwhile nothing could hurt Yseulte. The contempt with which her little cousins received the gifts she had made for them in the convent, the oblivion to which she was consigned by every one, the carelessness with which the Duchesse received her timidly-offered good wishes, the severity with which the governesses forbade her to go out in such weather to see Nicole or attend Mass in the little church, the unconcealed ill-temper with which Alain de Vannes flung her a word of greeting—none of these things had any power to wound her; she scarcely perceived them; she was lifted up into a world all her own. Unnoticed in the general branle-bas of the day, she passed the hours, when she was not at Mass in the chapel, locked safely in her own room, before her treasure, in a rapt happiness, in a wonder of ecstasy, which were so intense that she feared they were cardinal sins.
The weather was cold, some snow had even fallen, and the north winds blew, making all the chilly foreigners gathered on those shores shiver and grumble like creatures defrauded of their rights; but all the grey, cheerless, misty landscape, and the fog upon the sea, appeared more beautiful to her than they had ever done before in its sunshine. From her window she looked at the towers of S. Pharamond, and on her table—all her own—was the ivory casket.
The Duchesse de Vannes, waking in the forenoon after the Jour de l’An, cross, peevish, sleepy, and yet sleepless, which is, in itself, the most irritating and dispiriting of all human conditions, and morbidly conscious that, as her little daughter had said, she was beginning to baisser un peu, was in a mood of natural resentment against all creation in general and the human race in particular, and quite ready to vent her ill-humour on the first object which offered itself. That first object was one of the little prim notes by which her children’s instructresses were wont to communicate any terrible event in the schoolroom, or any entreaty for guidance when Mademoiselle Blanchette had insisted on riding the wooden horses at a village fair, or Mademoiselle Toinon had dressed herself up in the smallest groom’s clothes. ‘Ne m’ennuyez pas; vous savez vos devoirs’ was the only reply they ever received; but the good women continued to write the notes as a relief to their consciences. They wrote one now, signed in their joint names, humbly entreating to be informed if it were the pleasure of Madame la Duchesse that Mdlle. de Valogne should receive presents of which the donor was unknown. Mdlle. de Valogne was in possession of a new and very valuable locket; they believed also that she was in the habit of going to the gardens of S. Pharamond; they had deemed it their duty to acquaint Madame la Duchesse, &c., &c.
Blanchette, with the most innocent face in the world, had said to them, ‘I have seen the big pearl locket of Yseulte! Oh, vrai! When I am as old, I will not hide my handsome things as she does. Who gave it her? Who do you think could give it to her? She is friends with that gentleman at S. Pharamond—the one that is as rich as M. de Rothschild. I think he gave it her! Do you tell mamma.‘
Blanchette guessed very shrewdly that her father had given the locket; but she was too wary to offend him. Blanchette was like the little cats who steal round and round to their mouse by devious paths unseen. She had alarmed the governesses, and the prim note was the consequence.
When the Duchesse read it, she flung it away in a corner. ‘Tas d’imbéciles,’ she said, contemptuously; then said to one of her maids, ‘Request Mdlle. de Valogne to come hither.’
Yseulte was presented in a fortuitous moment as the whipping-boy on whom could be spent all that useless irritation which she could not spend on the real offenders, her ineffective chloral, her increasing wrinkles, and the indifference of Raymond de Prangins.
‘Mamma is always cross,’ the wise little Blanchette had reflected. ‘She is always angry, even for nothing. That great baby will get a lecture, and she will be sure to say it was papa; she always tells the truth—such a simpleton!—and papa will hate her for ever and for ever!’
Then Blanchette made a pied de nez all by herself in her little bedroom: when you were a child you could not have many things your own way, but you could spoil other people’s things very neatly with a little pat here, a little poke there, if you looked all the while like your picture by Baudry, an innocent cherub with sweet smiling eyes, who could not have made a pied de nez to save your life. Blanchette had already acquired the knowledge that this was how the world was most easily managed.