He understood; he was moved to a sudden anger, which penetrated even his intense preoccupation. He had meant to do this poor child a kindness, and he had only done her great harm.
Yseulte had turned away, and had gone rapidly through the orange-trees towards the house.
‘She is not happy?’ said Othmar to her foster-mother, whose tongue, once loosed, told him with the eloquence of indignation of all the sorrows suffered by her nursling. ‘And they will make her a nun, Monsieur!’ she cried; ‘a nun! That child, who is like a June lily. For me, I say nothing against the black and grey women, though Sandroz calls them bad names. There are good women amongst them, and when one lies sick in hospital one is glad of them; but there are women enough in this world who have sins and shame to repent them of to fill all the convents from here to Jerusalem. There are all the ugly ones too, and the sickly ones and the deformed ones, and the heart-broken; for them it is all very well; the cloister is home, the veil is peace, they must think of heaven, or go mad; it is best they should think of it. But this child to be a nun!—when she should be running with her own children through the daisies—when she should be playing in the sunshine like the lambs, like the kids, like the pigeons!’ ——
Othmar heard her to the end; then without answer he bade her good-day, and descended the sloping grass towards his house.
‘They say he has a million a year,’ said Nicole to herself, as she looked after him. ‘Well, he does not seem to be happy upon it. The lads that bring up the rags on their heads from the ships look gayer than he, all in the stench and the muck as they are, and never knowing that they will earn their bread and wine from one day to another.’
She kicked a stone from her path, and hurried after her nursling.
Othmar went quickly on to his own woods. ‘They could not even let her have that toy,’ he thought with an emotion, vague but sincere, outside the conflict of passion, wrath, and mortification which Nadine Napraxine had aroused in him. He saw the sudden happiness, so soon veiled beneath reserve and timidity, which had shone on the girl’s face as she had first seen him under the orange boughs. He saw her beautiful golden eyes misty with the tears she had had too much courage to shed; he saw her slender throat swell with subdued emotion as she had approached him and said shyly, ‘I would have kept it all my life.’
All her life,—in the stone cell of some house of the Daughters of Christ or the Sisters of St. Marie!
‘To love is more, yet to be loved is something,’
he thought. ‘What treasures for one’s heart and senses are in her—if one could only care!’