The Chaplet of Pearls, Charlotte M. Yonge [good beach reads TXT] 📗

my child! leave her to her enemies!--never! never! Hold your tongue, Perrine! I will not hear of such a thing!'

'But, Madame, hear reason. She will pass for one of Simonette's!'

'She shall pass for none but mine!--I part with thee, indeed! All that is left me of thy father!--the poor little orphaned innocent, that no one loves but her mother!'

'Madame--Mademoiselle, this is not common sense! Why, how can you hide yourself? how travel with a baby on your neck, whose crying may betray you?'

'She never cries--never, never! And better I were betrayed than she.'

'If it were a boy---' began Perrine.

'If it were a boy, there would be plenty to care for it. I should not care for it half so much. As for my poor little lonely girl, whom every one wishes away but her mother--ah! yes, baby, thy mother will go through fire and water for thee yet. Never fear, thou shalt not leave her!'

'No nurse can go with Madame. Simonette could not leave her home.'

'What needs a nurse when she has me?'

'But, Madame,' proceeded the old woman, out of patience, 'you are beside yourself! What noble lady ever nursed her babe?'

'I don't care noble ladies--I care for my child,' said the vehement, petulant little thing.

'And how--what good will Madame's caring for it do? What knows she of infants? How can she take care of it?'

'Our Lady will teach me,' said Eustacie, still pressing the child passionately to her heart; 'and see--the owl--the ring-dove--can take care of their little ones; the good God shows them how--He will tell me how!'

Perrine regarded her Lady much as if she were in a naughty fit, refusing unreasonably to part with a new toy, and Nanon Rotrou was much of the same mind; but it was evident that if at the moment they attempted to carry off the babe, the other would put herself into an agony of passion, that they durst not call forth; and they found it needful to do their best to soothe her out of the deluge of agitated tears that fell from her eyes, as she grasped the child so convulsively that she might almost have stifled it at once. They assured her that they would not take it away now--not now, at any rate; and when the latent meaning made her fiercely insist that it was to leave her neither now nor ever, Perrine made pacifying declarations that it should be just as she pleased--promises that she knew well, when in that coaxing voice, meant nothing at all. Nothing calmed her till Perrine had been conducted away; and even then Nanon could not hush her into anything like repose, and at last called in the minister, in despair.

'Ah! sir, you are a wise man; can you find how to quiet the poor little thing? Her nurse has nearly driven her distracted with talking of the foster-parents she has found for the child.'

'Not found!' cried Eustacie. 'No, for she shall never go!'

'There!' lamented Nanon--'so she agitates herself, when it is but spoken of. And surely she had better make up her mind, for there is no other choice.'

'Nay, Nanon,' said M. Gardon, 'wherefore should she part with the charge that God has laid on her?'

Eustacie gave a little cry of grateful joy. 'Oh, sir, come nearer! Do you, indeed, say that they have no right to tear her from me?'

'Surely not, Lady. It is you whose duty it is to shield and guard her.'

'Oh, sir, tell me again! Yours is the right religion. Oh, you are the minister for me! If you will tell me I ought to keep my child, then I will believe everything else. I will do just as you tell me.' And she stretched out both hands to him, with vehement eagerness.

'Poor thing! This is no matter of one religion or another,' said the minister; 'it is rather the duty that the Almighty hath imposed, and that He hath made an eternal joy.'

'Truly,' said Nanon, ashamed at having taken the other side: 'the good _pasteur_ says what is according to nature. It would have gone hard with me if any one had wished to part me from Robin or Sara; but these fine ladies, and, for that matter, BOURGEOISES too, always do put out their babes; and it seemed to me that Madame would find it hard to contrive for herself--let alone the little one.'

'Ah! but what would be the use of contriving for myself, without her?' said Eustacie.

If all had gone well and prosperously with Madame de Ribaumont, probably she would have surrendered an infant born in purple and in pall to the ordinary lot of its contemporaries; but the exertions and suffering she had undergone on behalf of her child, its orphanhood, her own loneliness, and even the general disappointment in its sex, had given it a hold on her vehement, determined heart, that intensified to the utmost the instincts of motherhood; and she listened as if to an angle's voice as Maitre Gardon replied to Nanon--

'I say not that it is not the custom; nay, that my blessed wife and myself have not followed it; but we have so oft had cause to repent the necessity, that far be it from me ever to bid a woman forsake her sucking child.'

'Is that Scripture?' asked Eustacie. 'Ah! sir, sir, tell me more! You are giving me all--all--my child! I will be--I am--a Huguenot like her father! and, when my vassals come, I will make them ride with you to La Rochelle, and fight in your cause!'

'Nay,' said Maitre Gardon, taken by surprise; 'but, Lady, your vassals are Catholic.'

'What matters it? In my cause they shall fight!' said the feudal Lady, 'for me and my daughter!'

And as the pastor uttered a sound of interrogative astonishment, she continued--

'As soon as I am well enough, Blaise will send out messages, and they will meet me at midnight at the cross-roads, Martin and all, for dear good Martin is quite well now, and we shall ride across country, avoiding towns, wherever I choose to lead them. I had thought of Chantilly, for I know M. de Montmorency would stand my friend against a Guisard; but now, now I know you, sir, let me escort you to La Rochelle, and do your cause service worthy of Nid de Merle and Ribaumont!' And as she sat up on her bed, she held up her little proud head, and waved her right hand with the grace and dignity of a queen offering an alliance of her realm.

Maitre Gardon, who had hitherto seen her as a childish though cheerful and patient sufferer, was greatly amazed, but he could not regard her project as practicable, or in his conscience approve it; and after a moment's consideration he answered, 'I am a man of peace, Lady, and seldom side with armed men, nor would I lightly make one of those who enroll themselves against the King.'

'Not after all the Queen-mother had done!' cried Eustacie.

'Martyrdom is better than rebellion,' quietly answered the old man, folding his hands. Then he added 'Far be it from me to blame those who have drawn the sword for the faith; yet, Lady, it would not be even thus with your peasants; they might not follow you.'

'Then,' said Eustacie, with flashing eyes, 'they would be traitors.'

'Not to the King,' said the pastor, gently. 'Also, Lady, how will it be with their homes and families--the hearths that have given you such faithful shelter?'

'The women would take to the woods,' readily answered she; 'it is summer-time, and they should be willing to bear something for my sake. I should grieve indeed,' she added, 'if my uncle misused them. They have been very good to me, but then they belong to me.'

'Ah! Lady, put from you that hardening belief of seigneurs. Think what their fidelity deserves from their Lady.'

'I will be good to them! I do love them! I will be their very good mistress,' said Eustacie, her eyes filling.

'The question is rather of forbearing than of doing,' said the minister.

'But what would you have me do?' asked Eustacie, petulantly.

'This, Lady. I gather that you would not return to your relations.'

'Never! never! They would rend my babe from me; they would kill her, or at least hide her for ever in a convent--they would force me into this abhorrent marriage. No--no--no--my child and I would die a hundred deaths together rather than fall into the hands of Narcisse.'

'Calm yourself, Lady; there is no present fear, but I deem that the safest course for the little one would be to place her in England. She must be heiress to lands and estates there; is she not?'

'Yes; and in Normandy.'

'And your husband's mother lives? Wherefore then should you not take me for your guide, and make your way--more secretly than would be possible with a peasant escort--to one of your Huguenot towns on the coast, whence you could escape with the child to England?'

'My _belle-mere_ has re-married! She has children! I would not bring the daughter of Ribaumont as a suppliant to be scorned!' said Eustacie, pouting. 'She has lands enough of her own.'

'There is no need to discuss the question now,' said M. Gardon, gravely; for a most kind offer, involving much peril and inconvenience to himself, was thus petulantly flouted. 'Madame will think at her leisure of what would have been the wishes of Monsieur le Baron for his child.'

He then held himself aloof, knowing that it was not well for her health, mental or bodily, to talk any more, and a good deal perplexed himself by the moods of his strange little impetuous convert, if convert she could be termed. He himself was a deeply learned scholar, who had studied all the bearings of the controversy; and, though bound to the French Reformers who would gladly have come to terms with the Catholics at the Conference of Plassy, and regretted the more decided Calvinism that his party had since professed, and in which the Day of St. Bartholomew confirmed them. He had a strong sense of the grievous losses they suffered by their disunion from the Church. The Reformed were less and less what his ardent youthful hopes had trusted to see them; and in his old age he was a sorrow-stricken man, as much for the cause of religion as for personal bereavements. He had little desire to win proselytes, but rather laid his hand to build up true religion where he found it suffering shocks in these unsettled, neglected times; and his present wish was rather to form and guide this little willful warm-hearted mother--whom he could not help regarding with as much affection as pity--to find a home in the Church that had been her husband's, than to gain her to his own party. And most assuredly he would never let her involve herself, as she was ready to do, in the civil war, without even knowing the doctrine which grave and earnest men had preferred to their loyalty.

He could hear her murmuring to her baby, 'No, no, little one, we are not fallen so low as to beg our bread among strangers.' To live upon her own vassals had seemed to her only claiming her just rights, but it galled her to think of being beholden to stranger Huguenots; and England and her mother-in-law, without Berenger, were utterly foreign and distasteful to her.

Her mood was variable. Messages