She decided that it would be unwise to send it to Othmar without knowing what it said, so she broke the little seal very carefully and read it. Something in it touched her as she perused the simple words, written so evidently with a hand which trembled and a heart that was full. She sealed it again and despatched it to its destination. ‘Poor little simpleton,’ she thought, ‘why did she take the trouble to say that? She will not make him believe it!’
But he did believe it.
It was because she made the belief possible to him that the child had seemed to him like a young angel who brought healing on her wings; and the love which did not venture to avow itself, but yet was visible in every one of these timid sentences, went to his heart with sweetness and unconscious reproach. He wrote back to her:
‘I believe you, and I thank you. You give me what the world cannot give nor command.’
And he added words of tenderness which, if they would have seemed cold to an older or a less innocent recipient, wholly contented her, and seemed to her like a breath from heaven.
The fortnight soon passed, and after its quiet days at Faïel, filled with the sounds so familiar to her of the drowsy bells, the rolling organ swell, the plaintive monotonous chaunts and prayers, the pacing of slow steps up and down long stone passages, the grinding of the winch of the great well in the square court, she felt calmed and strengthened, and not afraid when the Mother Superior spoke of all the responsibilities of her future.
To her, marriage was a mystic, spiritual union; all she knew of it was gathered from the expressions borrowed from it to symbolise the union of Christ and His saints. She went to it with as religious and innocent a faith as she would have taken with her to the cloister had they sent her there. If any human creature can be as pure as snow, a very young girl who has been reared by simple and pious women is so. Even the Duchesse de Vannes felt a vague emotion before that absolute ignorance of the senses and of the passions of life.
‘It is stupid,’ she said to herself. ‘But it is lovely in its way. I can fancy a man likes to destroy it—slowly, cruelly—just as a boy pulls off butterflies’ wings.’