MADAME ROBINEAU was tall, angular, thin-lipped and devout, and so far as she indulged in social intercourse, loved to mingle with other angular, thin-lipped and devout ladies who belonged to the same lay sisterhood. She dressed in unrelieved black and always wore on her bosom a bronze cross of threatening magnitude. She prayed in the Cathedral at inconvenient hours, and fasted as rigorously as her Confessor, Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup, himself. Monsieur l’Abbé regarded her as one of the most pious women in Chartres. No doubt she was. But Félise, although a good Catholic in her very simple way, and anxious to win favour by observance of the rules of the solitary household, was wicked enough to wish that her aunt were not quite so pious. In religious matters a wide latitudinarianism prevailed at the H?tel des Grottes. There, with a serene conscience, one could eat meat on Fridays and crack a mild joke at the expense of the good Saint Peter. But neither forbidden flesh nor jocularity on any subject, let alone on a saint’s minor foibles, mitigated the austerities of the perky, wind-swept little house at Chartres. No wonder, thought Félise, Aunt Clothilde had married off a regiment of daughters—four to be exact; it had been an easy matter; she herself would have married any caricature of a man rather than spend her life in an atmosphere so rarefied and so depressing. She pitied her cousins, although, according to her Aunt Clothilde’s pragmatical account, they were all doing splendidly and had innumerable babies. By the end of the first week of her visit, she consolidated an intense dislike to Chartres and everything in it, especially the Cathedral. Now, it may be thought that any one who can shake the fist of disapprobation at the Cathedral of Chartres, is beyond the pale of human sympathy. But when you are dragged relentlessly thither in the icy dark of every winter morning, and the bitter gloom of every winter evening, to say nothing of sporadic attendances during the daytime, you may be pardoned if your ?sthetic perceptions are obscured by the sense of outrage inflicted on your personal comfort. To many generations of men the Cathedral has been a symbol of glories, revelations and eternities. In such slanting shafts of light, mystically hued, the Grail might have been made manifest, the Sacred Dove might have glided down to the Head of the Holy One. . . . But what need to tell of its spiritual wonders and of its mystery, the heart of which it is given to every suffering man to pluck out according to his own soul’s needs? It was a little tragedy that to poor Félise the Cathedral symbolised nothing but an overwhelming tyranny. She hated every stone of it, as much as she hated every shiny plank and every polished chair in her aunt’s frigid salon. Even the streets of Chartres repelled her by their bleakness. They lacked the smiling homeliness of Brant?me; and the whole place was flatter than the Sahara. She sighed for the rocks and hills of Périgord.
She also ate the unaccustomed bread of idleness. Had her aunt permitted, she would delightedly have helped with the house-work. But Madame Robineau, widow of a dealer in grain who, before his death, had retired on a comfortable fortune, lived, according to her lights, at her ease, her wants being scrupulously administered to by a cook and a maid. There was no place in the domestic machine for Félise. Her aunt passed long chilly hours over ecclesiastical embroidery, sitting bolt upright in her chair with a chaufferette beneath her feet. Félise, unaccustomed needlewoman, passed longer and chillier hours (having no chaufferette) either playing with a grey ascetic cat or reading aloud La Croix, the only newspaper allowed to cross the threshold of the house. Now and again, Madame Robineau would drop her thin hands into her lap and regard her disapprovingly. One day she said, interrupting the reading,
“My poor child, how your education has been neglected. You scarcely know how to hold a needle, you can’t read aloud without making faults, and you are ignorant of the elements of our holy religion.”
“My Aunt,” Félise replied, “I know how to manage an hotel.”
“That would be of little use to your husband.”
Félise winced at the unhappy word.
“I am never going to marry, ma tante,” she said.
“You surely do not expect to be admitted into a convent?”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Félise.
“Heaven would forbid,” said Madame Robineau severely, “seeing that you have not the vocation. But the jeune fille bien élevée”—in the mouth of her Aunt Clothilde the familiar phrase assumed a detestable significance, implying, to Félise’s mind, a pallid young creature from whom all blood and laughter had been driven by undesirable virtues—“the jeune fille bien élevée has only two careers offered to her—the convent or marriage. For you, my dear child, it is marriage.”
“Well,” said Félise, with a smile, preparing, to resume the article in the newspaper over which she had stumbled, “perhaps the beautiful prince will come along one of these days.”
But Madame Robineau rebuked her for vain imaginings.
“It is true, what I said, that your education has been neglected. A young girl’s duty is not to look for princes, but to accept the husband chosen by the wisdom of her family.”
“Ma tante,” said Félise demurely, after a pause during which her aunt took up her work again. “If you would teach me how to embroider, perhaps I might learn to be useful in my future home.”
From this and many other conversations, Félise began to be aware of the subtle strategy of Bigourdin. On the plea of providing her with pro-maternal consolation, he had delivered her into the hands of the enemy. This became abundantly clear as the days went on. Aunt Clothilde, incited thereto by her uncle, was opening a deadly campaign in favour of Lucien Viriot. Now, the cathedral, though paralysing, could be borne for a season, and so could the blight that pervaded the house; but the campaign was intolerable. If she could have resented the action of one so beloved as Bigourdin, she would have resented his sending her to her Aunt Clothilde. Under the chaperonage of the respectable Madame Chauvet she had fallen into a pretty trap. She had found none of the promised sympathy. Aunt Clothilde, although receiving her with the affectionate hospitality due to a sister’s child, had from the first interview frozen the genial current of her little soul. The great bronze cross in itself repelled her. If it had been a nice, gentle little cross, rising and falling on a motherly bosom, it would have worked its all-human, adorable influence. But this was a harsh, aggressive, come-and-be-crucified sort of cross, with no suggestion of pity or understanding. The sallow, austere face above it might have easily been twisted into such a cross. It conveyed no invitation to the sufferer to pour out her troubles. Uncle Bigourdin was wrong again. Rather would Félise have poured out her troubles into the portentous ear of the Suisse at the Cathedral.
Her aunt and herself met nowhere on common ground. They were for ever at variance. Madame Robineau spoke disparagingly of the English, because they were Protestants and therefore heretics.
“But I am English, and I am not a heretic,” cried Félise.
“You are not English,” replied her aunt, “because you have a French mother and have been brought up in France. And as for not being a heretic, I am not so sure. Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup thinks you must have been brought up among Freemasons.”
“Ah non, par exemple!” exclaimed Félise indignantly. For, in the eyes of the Church, French Freemasons are dreadful folk, capable of anything sacrilegious, from denying the miracle of Saint Januarius to slitting the Pope’s weasand. So—“Ah! non par exemple!” cried Félise.
Freemasons, indeed! Her Uncle Gaspard, it is true, did not attend church regularly—but yes, he did attend regularly—he went once a year, every Easter Sunday, and he was the best of friends with Monsieur le Curé of their Paroisse. And as for herself, Monsieur le Curé, who looked like a venerable saint in the holy pictures, had always a smile and a ma chère enfant for her whenever they met. She was on excellent terms with Monsieur le Curé; he would no more have dreamed of associating her with Freemasons than of accusing her of being in league with devils.
He was a good, common-sensical old curé, like thousands of the secular clergy in France, and knew how to leave well alone. Questioned by the ecclesiastically environed Abbé Duloup as to the spiritual state of Félise, he would indubitably have answered with serene conviction:—
“If a soul so pure and so candid, which I have watched from childhood, is not acceptable to the bon Dieu, then I know no more about the bon Dieu than I know about the Emperor of Patagonia.”
But Félise, disliking the Abbé Duloup and many of his works, felt a delicacy in dragging her own curé into the argument and contented herself with protesting against the charge of heresy. As a matter of fact, she proclaimed her Uncle Gaspard was not a Freemason. He held in abhorrence all secret political societies as being subversive of the State. No one should attack her Uncle Gaspard, although he had betrayed her so shabbily.
In vain she sought some link with her aunt. Even Mimi, the lean old cat, did not form a bond of union. As a vagrant kitten it had been welcomed years ago by the late good-natured Robineau, and the widow tolerated its continued presence with Christian resignation. Félise took the unloved beast to her heart. From Aunt Clothilde’s caustic remarks she gathered that her four cousins, of whose exemplary acceptance of husbands she had heard so much, had eyed Mimi with the coldness of their mother. She began to thank Providence that she did not resemble her cousins, which was reprehensible; and now and then manifested a lack of interest in their impeccable doings, which was more reprehensible still, and thus stirred up against her the maternal instincts of Madame Robineau.
Relations grew strained. Aunt Clothilde spoke to her with sharp impatience. From her recalcitrance in the matter of Lucien she deduced every fault conceivable. For the first time in her life Félise dwelt in an atmosphere where love was not. She longed for home. She longed especially for her father and his wise tenderness. Because she longed so greatly she could not write to him as a father should be written to; and the many-paged letters into which, at night, she put all her aching little heart, in the morning she blushed at the thought of sending. In spite of his lapse from grace she could not be so disloyal to the beloved Uncle Gaspard. Nor could she distress her suffering angel mother by her incoherent account of things. If only she could see her!
At last, one dreary afternoon, Madame Robineau opened an attack in force.
“Put down that cat. I have to talk to you.”
Félise obeyed and Aunt Clothilde talked. The more she talked, the more stubborn front did Félise oppose. Madame Robineau lost her temper. Her thin lips twitched.
“I order you,” she said, “to marry Lucien Viriot.”
“I am sorry to say anything to vex you, ma tante,” replied Félise valiantly; “but you have not the power.”
“And I suppose your uncle has not the power to command you?”
“In matters like that, no, ma tante,” said Félise.
Aunt Clothilde rose from her straight-backed chair and shook a long, threatening finger. The nail at the end was also long and not very clean. Félise often wondered whether her aunt abhorred a nail-brush by way of mortification.
“When one considers all the benefits my brother has heaped on your head,” she cried in a rasping voice, “you are nothing else than a little monster of ingratitude!”
Félise flared up. She did not lack spirit.
“It is false,” she cried. “I adore my Uncle Gaspard. I would give him my life. I am not ungrateful. It is worse than false.”
“It is true,” retorted Madame Robineau. “Otherwise you would not refuse him the desire of his heart. Without him you would have not a rag to your back, or a shoe to your foot, and no more religion than a heathen. It is to him you owe everything—everything. Without him you would be in the gutter where he fished you from.”
She ended on a shrill note. Félise, very pale, faced her passionately, with a new light in her mild eyes.
“What do you mean? The gutter? My father——?”
“Bah! Your father! Your vagabond, ne’er-do-weel scamp of a father! He’s a scandal to the family, your father. He should never have been born.”
The girl reeled. It was a foul bludgeon blow. Madame Robineau, with quick realisation of folly, checked further utterance and allowed Félise, white, quivering and vanquished, but carrying her little head fiercely in the air, to retire from the scene with all the honours of war.
Madame Robineau was sorry. She had lost both temper and dignity. Her next confession would be an unpleasant matter. Possibly, however, the Abbé Duloup would understand and guess the provocation. She shrugged her lean shoulders. It was good sometimes for hoity-toity damsels to learn humility. So she sat down again, pursing her lips, and continued her embroidered stole until it was the hour of vespers. Contrary to custom, she did not summon Félise to accompany her to the Cathedral. An hour or two of solitude, she thought, not unkindly, would bring her to a more reasonable frame of mind. She went out alone.
When she returned she found that Félise had left the house.
It was a very scared young person that presented herself at the guichet at the railway station and asked for a second class ticket to Paris. She had never travelled alone in her life before. Even on her rare visits to the metropolis of Périgueux, in whose vast emporium of fashion she clothed herself, she was attended by Euphémie or the chambermaid. She felt lost, a tiny, helpless creature, in the great, high station in which an engine letting off steam produced a bewildering uproar. How much she paid for her ticket, thrifty and practised housekeeper that she was, she did not know. She clutched the change from a hundred franc note which, a present from her uncle before leaving Brant?me, she had preserved intact, and scuttled like a little brown rabbit to the door of the salle d’attente.
“Le train de Paris? A quatre heures cinquante,” said the official at the door, as though this palpitating adventure were the commonplace of every minute.
“And that will be?” she gasped.
He cocked an eye at the clock. “In half an hour.”
A train was on the point of starting. There was a scuttle for seats. She felt sure it was the Paris train. From it emanated the magic influence of the great city whither she was bound. A questioned porter informed her it was going in the opposite direction. The Paris express left at four-fifty. The train steamed out. It seemed to Félise as though she had lost a friend. She looked round helplessly, and seeing a fat peasant woman sitting on a bench, surrounded by bundles and children, she ran to her side for protection. It is the unknown that frightens. In the H?tel des Grottes she............