There was the natural longing to keep one’s happiness to oneself just for a little while, and Nicolette decided that it would be better for Bertrand to wait awhile before coming over to the mas, until she herself had had an opportunity of speaking with her father. For the moment she felt that she was walking on clouds, and that it would be difficult to descend to earth sufficiently to deceive both father and Margaï. Nor did she deceive either of them.
“What is the matter with the child?” Jaume Deydier said after midday dinner, when Nicolette ran out of the room singing and laughing in response to nothing at all.
And Margaï shrugged her shoulders. She could not think. Deydier suggested that perhaps Ameyric.... Eh, what? Girls did not know their own hearts until a man came along and opened the little gate with his golden key. Margaï shrugged her shoulders again: this time out of contempt for a man’s mentality. It was not Ameyric of a surety who had the power to make Nicolette sing and laugh as she had not done for many a month, or to bring that glow into her cheeks and the golden light into her eyes. No, no, it was not Ameyric!
Then as the afternoon wore on and the shades of evening came creeping round the corners of the cosy room, Jaume Deydier sat in his chair beside the hearth in which great, hard olive logs blazed cheerfully. He was in a soft and gentle mood. And Nicolette told him all that had happened ... to Bertrand and to her.
Jaume Deydier heard the story of Mme. de Mont-Pahon’s will, and of Rixende’s cruelty, with a certain grim satisfaction. He was sorry for the Comtesse Marcelle—very sorry—but the blow would fall most heavily on old Madame, and for once she would see all her schemes tumbling about her ears like a house of cards.
Then Nicolette knelt down beside him and told him everything. Her walk this morning, her meeting with Bertrand: her avowal of love and offer of marriage.
“It came from me, father dear,” she said softly, “Bertrand would never have dared.”
Deydier had not put in one word while his daughter spoke. He did not even look at her, only stared into the fire. When she had finished he said quietly:
“And now, little one, all that you can do is to forget all about this morning’s walk and what has passed between you and M. le Comte de Ventadour!”
“Father!”
“Understand me, my dear once and for all,” Deydier went on quite unmoved; “never with my consent will you marry one of that brood.”
Nicolette was silent for a moment or two. She had expected opposition, of course. She knew her father and his dearly-loved scheme that she should marry young Barnadou: she also knew that deep down in his heart there was a bitter grudge against old Madame. What this grudge was she did not know, but she had complete faith in her father’s love, and in any case she would be fighting for her happiness. So she put her arms around him and leaned her head against his shoulder, in that cajoling manner which she had always found irresistible.
“Father,” she whispered, “you are speaking about my happiness.”
“Yes,” he said with a dull sigh of weariness, “I am.”
“Of my life, perhaps.”
“Nicolette,” the father cried, with a world of anxiety, of reproach, of horror in his tone.
But Nicolette knelt straight before him now, sitting on her heels, her hands clasped before her, her eyes fixed quite determinedly on his face.
“I love Bertrand, father,” she said simply, “and he loves me.”
“My child——”
“He loves me,” Nicolette reiterated with firm conviction. “A woman is never mistaken over that, you know.”
“A woman perhaps, my dear,” the father retorted gently, and passed a hand that shook a little over her hair: “but you are such a child, my little Nicolette. You have never been away from our mountains and our skies, where God’s world is pure and simple. What do you know of evil?”
“There is no evil in Bertrand’s love for me,” she protested.
“Bah! there is evil in all the de Ventadours. They are all tainted with the mania for show and for wealth. And now that they are bankrupt in pocket as well as in honour, they hope to regild their stained escutcheon with your money——”
“That is false!” Nicolette broke in vehemently, “no one at the château knows that Bertrand and I love one another. A few hours ago he did not know that I cared for him.”
“A few hours ago he knew that his father’s fate was at his door. He is up to his eyes in debt; nothing can save even the roof over his head; his mother, his sister and that old harpy his grandmother have nothing ahead of them but beggary. Then suddenly you come to him with sweet words prompted by your dear kind heart, and that man, tottering on the brink of an awful precipice, sees a prop that will save him from stumbling headlong down. The Deydier money, he says to himself, why not indeed? True I shall have to stoop and marry the daughter of a vulgar peasant, but I can’t have the money without the wife, and so I’ll take her, and when I have got her, I can return to my fine friends in Paris, to the Court of Versailles and all the gaieties, and she poor fool can stay at home and nurse my mother or attend to the whims of old Madame; and if she frets and repines and eats out her heart with loneliness down at my old owl’s nest in Provence, well then I shall be rid of her all the sooner....”
“Father!” Nicolette cried with sudden passionate intensity which she made no attempt to check. “What wrong has Bertrand done to you that you should be willing to sacrifice my happiness to your revenge?”
A harsh laugh came from Jaume Deydier’s choking throat.
“Revenge?” he exclaimed. And then again: “Revenge?”
“Yes, revenge!” Nicolette went on with glowing eyes and flaming cheeks. “Oh, I know! I know! There is a dark page somewhere in our family history connected with the château, and because of that—because of that——”
Her voice broke in a sob. She was crouching beside the hearth at her father’s feet, and for a moment he looked down at her as if entirely taken aback by her passionate protest. Life had always gone on so smoothly at the mas, that Jaume Deydier had until now never realised that the motherless baby whom he had carried about in his arms had become a woman with a heart, and a mind and passions of her own. It had never struck him that his daughter—little Nicolette with the bright eyes and the merry laugh, the child that toddled after him, obedient and loving—would one day wish to frame her destiny apart from him, apart from her old home.
A child! A child! He had always thought of her as a child—then as a growing girl who would marry Ameyric Barnadou one day, and in due course present her husband with a fine boy or two and perhaps a baby girl that would be the grandfather’s joy!
But this girl!—this woman with the flaming eyes in which glowed passion, reproach, an indomitable will; this woman whose voice, whose glance expressed the lust of a fight for her love and her happiness!—was this his Nicolette?
Ah! here was a problem, the like of which had never confronted Jaume Deydier’s even existence before now. How he would deal with it he did not yet know. He was a silent man and not fond of talking, and, after her passionate outburst, Nicolette, too, had lapsed into silence. She still crouched beside her father’s chair, squatting on her heels, and gazing into the fire. Deydier stroked her soft brown hair with a tender hand. He loved the child more than anything in the whole world. To her happiness he would have sacrificed everything including his life, but in his own mind he was absolutely convinced that Bertrand de Ventadour had only sought her for her money, and that nothing but sorrow would come of this unequal marriage—if the marriage was allowed to take place, which, please God, it never would whilst he, Deydier, was alive.... But as he himself was a man whose mind worked with great deliberation, he thought that time and quietude would act more potently than words on Nicolette’s present mood. He was quite sure that at any rate nothing would be gained at this moment by further talk. She was too overwrought, too recently under the influence of Bertrand to listen to reason now. Time would show. Time would tell. Time and Nicolette’s own sound sense and pride. So Deydier sat on in his arm-chair, and said nothing, and presently he asked his girl to get him his pipe, which she did. She lighted it for him, and as she stood there so close to him with the lighted tinder in her hand, he saw that her eyes were dry, and that the glow had died out of her cheeks. He pulled at his pipe in a moody, abstracted way, and fell to meditating—as he so often did—on the past. There was a tragedy in his life connected with those Ventadours. He had never spoken of it to any one since the day of his marriage, not even to old Margaï, who knew all about it, and he had sworn to himself at one time that he would never tell Nicolette.
But now——
So deeply had he sunk in meditation that he did not notice that Nicolette presently went out of the room.
Margaï brought in the lamp an hour later.
“I did not want to disturb you,” she said as she set it on the table, “but it is getting late now.”
“Well?” she went on after awhile, seeing that Deydier made no comment, that his pipe had gone out, and that he was staring moodily into the fire. Even now he gave her no reply, although she rattled the silver on the sideboard so as to attract his attention. Finally, she knelt down in front of the hearth and made a terrific clatter with the fire-irons. Even then, Jaume Deydier only said: “Well?” too.
“Has the child told you anything?” Margaï went on tartly. She had never been kept out of family councils before and had spent the last hour in anticipation of being called into the parlour.
“Why, what should she tell me?” Deydier retorted with exasperating slowness.
“Tiens! that she is in love with Bertrand de Ventadour, and wants to marry him.”
Deydier gave a startled jump as if a pistol shot had rung in his ear, and his pipe fell with a clatter to the ground.
“Nicolette in love with Bertrand,” he cried with well-feigned astonishment. “Whoever told thee such nonsense?”
“No one,” the old woman replied dryly. “I guessed.”
Then as Deydier relapsed into moody silence, she added irritably:
“Don’t deny it, Mossou Deydier. The child told you.”
“I don’t deny it,” he replied gravely.
“And what did you say?”
“That never while I live would she marry a de Ventadour.”
“Hm!” was the only comment made on this by Margaï. And after awhile she added:
“And where is the child now?”
“I thought,” Deydier replied, “that she was in the kitchen with thee.”
“I have not seen her these two hours past.”
“She is not in her room?”
“No!”
“Then, maybe, she is in the garden.”
“Maybe. It is a fine night.”
There the matter dropped for the moment. It was not an unusual thing for Nicolette to run out into the garden at all hours of the day or evening, and to stay out late, and Deydier was not surprised that the child should have wished to be let in peace for awhile. Margaï went back to her kitchen to see about supper, and Deydier lighted a second pipe: a very unusual thing for him to do. At seven o’clock Margaï put her head in through the door.
“The child is not in yet,” she said laconically, “and she is not in the garden. I have been round to see.”
“Didst call for her, Margaï?” Deydier asked.
“Aye! I called once or twice. Then I stood at the gate thinking I would see her go up the road. She should be in by now. It has started to rain.”
Deydier jumped to his feet.
“Raining,” he exclaimed, “and the child out at this hour? Why didst not come sooner, Margaï, and tell me?”
“She is often out later than this,” was Margaï’s reply. “But she usually comes in when it rains.”
“Did she take a cloak with her when she went?”
“She has her shawl. Maybe,” the old woman added after a slight pause, “she went to meet him somewhere.”
To this suggestion Deydier made no reply, but it seemed to Margaï that he muttered an oath between his teeth, which was a very unusual thing for Mossou Jaume to do. Without saying another word, however, he stalked out of the parlour, and presently Margaï heard his heavy footstep crossing the corridor and the vestibule, then the opening and the closing of the front door.
She shook her head dolefully while she began to lay the cloth for supper.
Jaume Deydier had thrown his coat across his shoulders, thrust his cap on his head and picked up a stout stick and a storm lanthorn, then he went down into the valley. It was raining now, a cold, unpleasant rain mixed with snow, and the tramontane blew mercilessly from way over Vaucluse. Deydier muttered a real oath this time, and turned up the road in the direction of the château. It was very dark and the rain beat all around his shoulders: but when he thought of Bertrand de Ventadour, he gripped his stick more tightly, and he ceased to be conscious of the wet or the cold.
He had reached the sharp bend in the road where the stony bridle-path, springing at a right angle, led up to the gates of the château, and he was on the point of turning up the path when he heard his name called close behind him:
“Hey, Mossou Deydier! Is that you?”
He turned and found himself face to face with Pérone, old Madame’s confidential maid—a person whom he could not abide.
“Are you going up to the château, Mossou Deydier?” the woman went on with an ugly note of obsequiousness in her harsh voice.
“Yes,” Deydier replied curtly, and would have gone on, on his way, but Pérone suddenly took hold of him by the coat.
“Mossou Deydier,” she said pitiably, “it would be only kind to a poor old woman, if you would let her walk with you. It is so lonely and so dark. I have come all the way from Manosque. I waited there for awhile, thinking the rain would give over. It was quite fine when I left home directly after dinner.”
Deydier let her talk on. He could not bear the woman, but he was man enough not to let her struggle on in the dark behind him, whilst he had his lanthorn to guide his own footsteps up the uneven road; and so they walked on side by side for a minute or two, until Pérone said suddenly:
“I hope Mademoiselle Nicolette has reached home by now. I told her——”
“You saw Mademoiselle Nicolette?” Deydier broke in harshly, “where?”
“Just above La Bastide, Mossou Deydier,” the woman replied. “You know where she and Mossou le Comte used to fish when they were children. It was raining hard already and I told her——”
But Deydier was in no mood to listen further. Without any ceremony, or word of excuse, he turned on his heel and strode rapidly down the road, swinging his lanthorn and gripping his stick, leaving Pérone to go or come, or stand still as she pleased.
Moodiness and wrath had suddenly given place to a sickening feeling of anxiety. The rain beat straight into his face as he turned his steps up the valley, keeping close to the river bank, but he did not feel either the wind or the rain: in the dim circle of light which the lanthorn threw before him he seemed to see his little Nicolette, grief-stricken, distraught, beside that pool that would murmur insidious, poisoned words, promises of peace and forgetfulness. And at sight of this spectral vision a cry like that of a wounded beast came from the father’s overburdened heart.
“Not again, my God!” he exclaimed, “not again! I could not bear it! Faith in Thee would go, and I should blaspheme!”
He saw her just as he had pictured her, crouching against the large boulder that sheltered her somewhat against the wind and rain. Just above her head the heavy branches of an old carob tree swayed under the breath of the tramontane: at her feet the waters of the Lèze, widening at this point into a pool, lapped the edge of her skirt and of the shawl which had slipped from her shoulders.
She was not entirely conscious, and the wet on her cheeks did not wholly come from the rain. Jaume Deydier was a big, strong man, he was also a silent one. After one exclamation of heart-broken grief and of horror, he had gathered his little girl in his arms, wrapped his own coat round her, and, holding on to the lanthorn at the same time, he set out for home.