The Duchesse laughed, much amused: ‘ You ought decidedly to have taken the veil; you will be a religieuse manquée! At your age I thought of nothing but of my balls and my bouquets, and of the costumes they gave me, and of the officers of the Guides—Alain was in the Guides, he was very good-looking at that time. I must say Othmar and you are like no lovers in the world that I have ever known.’
However, she gave her permission, and Yseulte went to the ancient stonebuilt fortress-like house of Faïel, where the quiet corridors were filled with the smell of dried herbs from the nuns’ distillery and the little grey figures of the children played noiselessly under the leafless chestnut avenues of the tranquil gardens.
It was all so welcome to her after the babble of Blanchette, the tumult of congratulation, the succession of compliments, the perpetual sense of being exhibited and examined, discussed and depreciated; but it did not change her thoughts very much, for even in her prayers her wondrous change of fate always seemed with her, and she found that even amongst her pious and unworldly Dames de Ste. Anne the betrothed of Count Othmar was received as a very different being to the dowerless Yseulte de Valogne; and something of that bitterness which so often came to her lover reached her through all her guilelessness. Even Nicole, also, embracing her with ardour and tenderness, with the tears running down her brown cheeks, and pleading for the right to send her pétiote the orange-blossoms and the lilies-of-the-valley for her bridal-dress, yet amidst her joyful tears and tearful joy had not forgotten to whisper: ‘And, dis donc, ma mignonne, you will say a word now to the Count Othmar to get my husband the municipal concession to put up the steam mill? It will make our fortune, my angel, and I know what a happiness that will be to you!’
‘A fortune! Money, money! It seems all they think of in the world!’ the child reflected sadly. ‘What can Nicole and Sandroz want with more money? They are very well off, and they have no children, no relations even; and yet all they think about is laying by one napoleon on the top of another! It is horrible! Even the Mother Superior has never said to me how good he is, how kind, how generous; she only says that I am fortunate because he is so rich! They make me feel quite wicked. I want to tell them how mean they are! Why am I so much better and greater in their sight because I am going to become rich too? I thought they cared for none of those things. But our Reverend Mother asks me for a new altar service as Blanchette asked me for a turquoise necklace! I understand why he is always a little sad. He thinks no one cares for him, for himself.’
And, after many days and nights of most anxious thought and most entreating prayer, she gathered up all her courage and wrote a little letter to Othmar, the only one which she had ever addressed to him; she was afraid it was a strange thing to do, and one perhaps unmaidenly, but she could not resist her longing to say that one thing to him, and so she wrote:
‘Monsieur,—I do not know whether I ought to say it, and I hope you will forgive me if it be wrong to say so, but I have thought often since I hear and see so much of your great wealth that perhaps—perhaps—you may imagine it is that which I care for; but indeed I do not; if you were quite poor, very poor to-morrow, it would be just the same to me, and I should be just as happy. I do pray you to believe this.
‘Yours, in affection and reverence,
’Yseulte.’
She had hesitated very long before she ventured to sign herself so, but in the end it seemed to her that it could not be very wrong as it stood: she owed him both affection and reverence—even the Mother Superior herself would say so.
She enclosed the little note in a letter to her cousin the Duchesse, knowing that otherwise it would not be allowed to pass the convent walls. When Madame de Vannes received it she looked at it with suspicion.
‘If it should be any nonsense about Nadine Napraxine?’ she thought with alarm; ‘if it should be any folly that would break the marriage?’