They were lovely—these girls—each in a different fashion. The elder, tall, slender, dark-haired, haughty, with the complexion of a peach; the younger, soft and fair, with locks that hung like silken skeins upon a neck of snow, and eyes of that dark changeful sheen that is either gray, or black, or blue, as you seek to look into their depths.
Hers were the plump white fingers that pulled the delicate rose-leaves with which this cup was filled, till the air of that gloomy room was fresh with the odours of a garden after evening rain.
Mathilde, her dark, proud sister, loved lilies best, and set them in a jewelled vase. That vase perished in the great calamity that fell upon the house, and the silver cup was among the few relics that were saved. Alas! the beautiful, imperious Mathilde perished also in those evil times.
Yes, this beautiful creature, whose coming seemed to lighten the dim room in the old château with its hangings of amber damask, its gilded panels framed with long slips of looking-glass; its satin chairs, its quaint carved cabinets, filled with rare knick-knacks of ivory carvings, jade-stones, jewelled daggers, boxes of filligree, and rare cups of porcelain, like great opals, gleaming with strange lights that paled the pearls with which their rims were set. There were tables and tripods too, bearing bronzes and Oriental jars filled with scented woods and spices; but it was over this silver cup that the sweet glowing face of Sara Dormeur bent, as she stood watching for her lover's fluttering signal amidst the trees that belted the sloping parterre, beyond the broad stone balcony on which the windows opened.
For the father, Anton Dormeur, was averse to young Dufarge, who though he belonged to a Protestant family among the tanners of Alais, was a man of the people, without that connection with the old nobility which the Huguenots cherished, even though they suffered continually by the laws that king and nobles put in force against them.
The Protestants were loyal to the caste which yet refused to own them, though they were of the best blood in France, or owned them secretly and in fear, lest to be identified with the heretics might bring fire and sword upon themselves.
Thus old Dormeur forbade Sara to have any more to say to Dufarge, but encouraged the lover of his eldest girl, a man of twice her age, the grim and saturnine Bartholde, by birth seigneur of an estate near Lozère, where, however, he lived only on sufferance, for the title had been abated after the persecutions following the Edict of Nantes, and though Bartholde was rich, he had abandoned both title and the display that belonged to it.
His was just such an alliance as the stately reserved manufacturer might have been supposed to choose for his eldest daughter, and, indeed, after they were married he would go and stay for days together at his son-in-law's house—a place less gloomy for him now that the light had gone out of his own; for Sara, having pleaded in vain, fled with her lover to the north and there they were married. After this they hoped and believed that the old man would relent. He never relented, or at least never to their knowledge. As his sweet fair daughter knelt to him, her golden hair streaming about her, her hands held up in supplication, he denounced her in words taken from Holy Scripture, and would have struck her but that the young husband stood with earnest eyes and folded arms, he having knelt in vain, or, as he said, bent his pride to his love for his sweet wife's sake.
So Sara Dufarge went out cursed, undowered, and an orphan, from the old house, and Père Dormeur was left desolate indeed.
Yet amidst the gloom that settled on his life, and the hard unyielding determination which resisted any attempts on the part of her sister to bring him to receive his disowned daughter again, the manufacturer had frequent struggles with his pride and obstinacy. They were scarcely acknowledged even to himself. He thought he could trample the suggestions of nature under foot, and he succeeded in so far as to suffer in silence, and to make no sign of yielding, nor of admitting the possibility of foregoing his resentful purpose.