‘Oh, Blanchette!’ said Yseulte de Valogne, with a look of pain, as she tried to silence her little tormentor, whose words she only vaguely heard as she stood lost in the golden mists of an incomparable dream.
‘Vrai!’ said the cruel little child. ‘Nobody can think what he can see in you. It is Madame Napraxine whom he loves.’
Yseulte coloured with sudden anger, and a look of severity and sternness came on her youthful face, while its happy wistful eyes lost their light and grew cold:
‘You must not say these things, Blanchette,’ she said sternly; ‘you may laugh at me as you like, but you must respect M. Othmar.’
The red deepened in her cheeks as she spoke, and realised that she had the right to defend his name thus. She was thinking in herself as she did so: ‘If it were true, if I thought it were true, I would bury myself in the convent for ever.’
The quick little mind of Blanchette divined the direction of her thoughts, and dearly as the child loved to do mischief and to torment, she loved her own pleasure and gain better. She had no wish for this beau mariage to be broken off, as she foresaw from it endless diversion, gifts, and bonbons for herself.
‘Othmar will give us each at least a medallion with diamonds on the back,’ she reflected; and she was conscious, too, that if the marriage fell through by any doing of hers, her mother would be unsparing in her punishment, of which not the least portion would be banishment to Bois de Roy; for Blanchette adored her spring-time in Paris, her summer months at Deauville and Homburg and Biarritz, her wagers on the petits chevaux, her exploits in the water, and the many whispers of scandals and naughty witticisms which she caught, when apparently engrossed with her toy balloon or her ball, behind the chairs of her mother and other great ladies on the sand by the sea or under the trees of the fashionable inland baths.
With a rapid remembrance of all that she herself would lose if there were no grand wedding at which she would assist at the Madeleine or S. Philippe du Roule, she threw her arms about her cousin with her most coaxing câlinerie: ‘It was only my fun,’ she whispered; ‘ pray don’t tell any one, chérie. It was years and years ago that they laughed about Madame Napraxine; of course, it is you he loves now. Why should he marry you if he did not? He could marry anywhere, anybody,—mamma says so. And you are handsome, if you would only think it! Mamma says when you shall have been married a week, and have all your jewels you will be superb.’
Her cousin’s face flushed more warmly till it was the hue of those Charles Raybaud roses which she had used to pack for Nicole. Her heart beat in that tumult of emotion, of joy, and of vague, most sweet, fear, in which she had lived for the last twenty-four hours. She thought: ‘Why, if he did not care for me, why, indeed, should he seek me?’
It seemed marvellous to her that it should be so, but she could not doubt it.