"And you as poor--as poor," said the baroness, whose husband was of the new n.o.bility, which is based, as all the world knows, on solid manufacture. "My friend, you cannot afford it."
"I cannot afford to lose _you_" he said, with a sudden gravity, and with eyes which, to the uninitiated, would undoubtedly have conveyed the impression that she was the whole world to him. "Besides," he added, as an after-thought, "it is only sixteen francs."
The baroness threw up her gay brown eyes.
"Just Heaven," she exclaimed, "what it is to be able to inspire such affection--to be valued at sixteen francs!"
Then--for she was as quick and changeable as himself--she turned, and touched his arm with her thickly-gloved hand.
"Seriously, my cousin, I cannot thank you, and you, Colonel Gilbert, for your promptness and your skill. And as to my stupid husband, you know, he has no words; when I tell him, he will only grunt behind his great moustache, and he will never thank you, and will never forget. Never!
Remember that." And with a wave of the riding-whip, which was attached to her wrist, she described eternity.
De Va.s.selot turned with a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders, and busied himself with the girths of his saddle. At the touch and the sight of the buckles, his eyes became grave and earnest. And it is not only Frenchmen who cherish this cult of the horse, making false G.o.ds of saddle and bridle, and a sacred temple of the harness-room. Very seriously de Va.s.selot shifted the side-saddle from the Arab to his own large and gentle horse--a wise old charger with a Roman nose, who never wasted his mettle in park tricks, but served honestly the Government that paid his forage.
The Baroness de Melide watched the transaction in respectful silence, for she too took _le sport_ very seriously, and had attended a course of lectures at a riding-school on the art of keeping and using harness. Her colour was now returning--that brilliant, delicate colour which so often accompanies dark red hair--and she gave a little sigh of resignation.
Colonel Gilbert looked at her, but said nothing. He seemed to admire her, in the same contemplative way that he had admired the moon rising behind the island of Capraja from the Place St. Nicholas in Bastia.
De Va.s.selot noted the sigh, and glanced sharply at her over the shoulder of the big charger.
"Of what are you thinking?" he said.
"Of the millennium, mon ami"
"The millennium?"
"Yes," she answered, gathering the bridle; "when women shall perhaps be allowed to be natural. Our mothers played at being afraid--we play at being courageous."
As she spoke she placed a neat foot in Colonel Gilbert"s hand, who lifted her without effort to the saddle. De Va.s.selot mounted the Arab, and they rode slowly homewards by way of the Avenue de Longchamps, through the Porte Dauphine, and up that which is now the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, which was quiet enough at this time of day. The baroness was inclined to be silent. She had been more shaken than she cared to confess to two soldiers. Colonel Gilbert probably saw this, for he began to make conversation with de Va.s.selot.
"You do not come to Corsica," he said.
"I have never been there--shall never go there," answered de Va.s.selot.
"Tell me--is it not a terrible place? The end of the world, I am told. My mother"--he broke off with a gesture of the utmost despair. "She is dead!" he interpolated--"always told me that it was the most terrible place in the world. At my father"s death, more than thirty years ago, she quitted Corsica, and came to live in Paris, where I was born, and where, if G.o.d is good, I shall die."
"My cousin, you talk too much of death," put in the baroness, seriously.
"As between soldiers, baroness," replied de Va.s.selot, gaily. "It is our trade. You know the island well, colonel?"
"No, I cannot say that. But I know the Chateau de Va.s.selot."
"Now, that is interesting; and I who scarcely know the address! Near Calvi, is it not? A waste of rocks, and behind each rock at least one bandit--so my dear mother a.s.sured me."
"It might be cultivated," answered Colonel Gilbert, indifferently. "It might be made to yield a small return. I have often thought so. I have even thought of whiling away my exile by attempting some such scheme. I once contemplated buying a piece of land on that coast to try. Perhaps you would sell?"
"Sell!" laughed de Va.s.selot. "No; I am not such a scoundrel as that. I would toss you for it, my dear colonel; I would toss you for it, if you like."
And as they turned out of the avenue into one of the palatial streets that run towards the Avenue Victor Hugo, he made the gesture of throwing a coin into the air.
CHAPTER V.
IN THE RUE DU CHERCHE-MIDI.
"Il ne faut jamais se laisser trop voir, meme a ceux qui nous aiment."
It was not very definitely known what Mademoiselle Brun taught in the School of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in the Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris. For it is to be feared that Mademoiselle Brun knew nothing except the world; and it is precisely that form of knowledge which is least cultivated in a convent school.
"She has had a romance," whispered her bright-eyed charges, and lapsed into suppressed giggles at the mere mention of such a word in connection with a little woman dressed in rusty black, with thin grey hair, a thin grey face, and a yellow neck.
It would seem, however, that there is a point where even a mother-superior must come down, as it were, into the market-place and meet the world. That point is where the convent purse rattles thinly and the mother-superior must face hunger. It had, in fact, been intimated to the conductors of the School of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Heart by the ladies of the quarter of St. Germain, that the convent teaching taught too little of one world and too much of another. And the mother-superior, being a sensible woman, agreed to engage a certain number of teachers from the outer world. Mademoiselle Brun was vaguely ent.i.tled an instructress, while Mademoiselle Denise Lange bore the proud t.i.tle of mathematical mistress.
Mademoiselle Brun, with her compressed mouth, her wrinkled face, and her cold hazel eyes, accepted the situation, as we have to accept most situations in this world, merely because there is no choice.
"What can you teach?" asked the soft-eyed mother-superior.
"Anything," replied Mademoiselle Brun, with a direct gaze, which somehow cowed the nun.
"She has had a romance," whispered some wag of fourteen, when Mademoiselle Brun first appeared in the schoolroom; and that became the accepted legend regarding her.
"What are you saying of me?" she asked one day, when her rather sudden appearance caused silence at a moment when silence was not compulsory.
"That you once had a romance, mademoiselle," answered some daring girl.
"Ah!"
And perhaps the dusky wrinkles lapsed into gentler lines, for some one had the audacity to touch mademoiselle"s hand with a birdlike tap of one finger.
"And you must tell it to us."
For there were no nuns present, and mademoiselle was suspected of having a fine contempt for the most stringent of the convent laws.
"No."
"But why not, mademoiselle?"
"Because the real romances are never told," replied Mademoiselle Brun.
But that was only her way, perhaps, of concealing the fact that there was nothing to tell. She spoke in a low voice, for her cla.s.s shared the long schoolroom this afternoon with the mathematical cla.s.s. The room did not lend itself to description, for it had bare walls and two long windows looking down disconsolately upon a courtyard, where a grey cat sunned herself in the daytime and bewailed her lot at night. Who, indeed, would be a convent cat?
At the far end of the long room Mademoiselle Denise Lange was superintending, with an earnest face, the studies of five young ladies.
It was only necessary to look at the respective heads of the pupils to conclude that these young persons were engaged in mathematical problems, for there is nothing so discomposing to the hair as arithmetic.
Mademoiselle Lange herself seemed no more capable of steering a course through a double equation than her pupils, for she was young and pretty, with laughing lips and fair hair, now somewhat ruffled by her calculations. When, however, she looked up, it might have been perceived that her glance was clear and penetrating.
There was no more popular person in the Convent of the Sacred Heart than Denise Lange, and in no walk of life is personal attractiveness so much appreciated as in a girls" school. It is only later in life that _ces demoiselles_ begin to find that their neighbour"s beauty is but skin-deep. The nuns--"fond fools," Mademoiselle Brun called them--concluded that because Denise was pretty she must be good. The girls loved Denise with a wild and exceedingly ephemeral affection, because she was little more than a girl herself, and was, like themselves, liable to moments of deep arithmetical despondency.