The Dream Part 3

"Is that all you need?"

"Yes, thanks."

With a quick glance she had a.s.sured herself that nothing more was wanting; the needles were supplied with the different golds, the red, the green, and the blue; there were spools of every shade of silk; the spangles were ready; and the twisted wires for the gold lace were in the crown of a hat which served as a box, with the long fine needles, the steel pincers, the thimbles, the scissors, and the ball of wax. All these were on the frame even, or on the material stretched therein, which was protected by a thick brown paper.

She had threaded a needle with the gold thread. But at the first st.i.tch it broke, and she was obliged to thread it again, breaking off tiny bits of the gold, which she threw immediately into the pasteboard waste-basket which was near her.

"Now at last I am ready," she said, as she finished her first st.i.tch.

Perfect silence followed. Hubert was preparing to stretch some material on another frame. He had placed the two heavy ends on the chantlate and the trestle directly opposite in such a way as to take lengthwise the red silk of the cope, the breadths of which Hubertine had just st.i.tched together, and fitting the laths into the mortice of the beams, he fastened them with four little nails. Then, after smoothing the material many times from right to left, he finished stretching it and tacked on the nails. To a.s.sure himself that it was thoroughly tight and firm, he tapped on the cloth with his fingers and it sounded like a drum.

Angelique had become a most skilful worker, and the Huberts were astonished at her cleverness and taste. In addition to what they had taught her, she carried into all she did her personal enthusiasm, which gave life to flowers and faith to symbols. Under her hands, silk and gold seemed animated; the smaller ornaments were full of mystic meaning; she gave herself up to it entirely, with her imagination constantly active and her firm belief in the infinitude of the invisible world.

The Diocese of Beaumont had been so charmed with certain pieces of her embroidery, that a clergyman who was an archaeologist, and another who was an admirer of pictures, had come to see her, and were in raptures before her Virgins, which they compared to the simple gracious figures of the earliest masters. There was the same sincerity, the same sentiment of the beyond, as if encircled in the minutest perfection of detail. She had the real gift of design, a miraculous one indeed, which, without a teacher, with nothing but her evening studies by lamplight, enabled her often to correct her models, to deviate entirely from them, and to follow her own fancies, creating beautiful things with the point of her needle. So the Huberts, who had always insisted that a thorough knowledge of the science of drawing was necessary to make a good embroiderer, were obliged to yield before her, notwithstanding their long experience. And, little by little, they modestly withdrew into the background, becoming simply her aids, surrendering to her all the most elaborate work, the under part of which they prepared for her.

From one end of the year to the other, what brilliant and sacred marvels pa.s.sed through her hands! She was always occupied with silks, satins, velvets, or cloths of gold or silver. She embroidered chasubles, stoles, maniples, copes, dalmatics, mitres, banners, and veils for the chalice and the pyx. But, above all, their orders for chasubles never failed, and they worked constantly at those vestments, with their five colours: the white, for Confessors and Virgins; the red, for Apostles and Martyrs; the black, for the days of fasting and for the dead; the violet, for the Innocents; and the green for fete-days. Gold was also often used in place of white or of green. The same symbols were always in the centre of the Cross: the monograms of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary, the triangle surrounded with rays, the lamb, the pelican, the dove, a chalice, a monstrance, and a bleeding heart pierced with thorns; while higher up and on the arms were designs, or flowers, all the ornamentation being in the ancient style, and all the flora in large blossoms, like anemones, tulips, peonies, pomegranates, or hortensias.

No season pa.s.sed in which she did not remake the grapes and thorns symbolic, putting silver on black, and gold on red. For the most costly vestments, she varied the pictures of the heads of saints, having, as a central design, the Annunciation, the Last Supper, or the Crucifixion.

Sometimes the orfreys were worked on the original material itself; at others, she applied bands of silk or satin on brocades of gold cloth, or of velvet. And all this efflorescence of sacred splendour was created, little by little, by her deft fingers. At this moment the vestment on which Angelique was at work was a chasuble of white satin, the cross of which was made by a sheaf of golden lilies intertwined with bright roses, in various shades of silk. In the centre, in a wreath of little roses of dead gold, was the monogram of the Blessed Virgin, in red and green gold, with a great variety of ornaments.

For an hour, during which she skilfully finished the little roses, the silence had not been broken even by a single word. But her thread broke again, and she re-threaded her needle by feeling carefully under the frame, as only an adroit person can do. Then, as she raised her head, she again inhaled with satisfaction the pure, fresh air that came in from the garden.

"Ah!" she said softly, "how beautiful it was yesterday! The suns.h.i.+ne is always perfect."

Hubertine shook her head as she stopped to wax her thread.

"As for me, I am so wearied, it seems as if I had no arms, and it tires me to work. But that is not strange, for I so seldom go out, and am no longer young and strong, as you are at sixteen."

Angelique had reseated herself and resumed her work. She prepared the lilies by sewing bits of vellum on certain places that had been marked, so as to give them relief, but the flowers themselves were not to be made until later, for fear the gold be tarnished were the hands moved much over it.

Hubert, who, having finished arranging the material in its frame, was about drawing with pumice the pattern of the cope, joined in the conversation and said: "These first warm days of spring are sure to give me a terrible headache."

Angelique's eyes seemed to be vaguely lost in the rays which now fell upon one of the flying b.u.t.tresses of the church, as she dreamily added: "Oh no, father, I do not think so. One day in the lively air, like yesterday, does me a world of good."

Having finished the little golden leaves, she began one of the large roses, near the lilies. Already she had threaded several needles with the silks required, and she embroidered in st.i.tches varying in length, according to the natural position and movement of the petals, and notwithstanding the extreme delicacy and absorbing nature of this work, the recollections of the previous day, which she lived over again in thought and in silence, now came to her lips, and crowded so closely upon each other that she no longer tried to keep them back. So she talked of their setting out upon their expedition, of the beautiful fields they crossed, of their lunch over there in the ruins of Hautecoeur, upon the flagstones of a little room whose tumble-down walls towered far above the Ligneul, which rolled gently among the willows fifty yards below them.

She was enthusiastic over these crumbling ruins, and the scattered blocks of stone among the brambles, which showed how enormous the colossal structure must have been as, when first built, it commanded the two valleys. The donjon remained, nearly two hundred feet in height, discoloured, cracked, but nevertheless firm, upon its foundation pillars fifteen feet thick. Two of its towers had also resisted the attacks of Time--that of Charlemagne and that of David--united by a heavy wall almost intact. In the interior, the chapel, the court-room, and certain chambers were still easily recognised; and all this appeared to have been built by giants, for the steps of the stairways, the sills of the windows, and the branches on the terraces, were all on a scale far out of proportion for the generation of to-day. It was, in fact, quite a little fortified city. Five hundred men could have sustained there a siege of thirty months without suffering from want of ammunition or of provisions. For two centuries the bricks of the lowest story had been disjointed by the wild roses; lilacs and laburnums covered with blossoms the rubbish of the fallen ceilings; a plane-tree had even grown up in the fireplace of the guardroom. But when, at sunset, the outline of the donjon cast its long shadow over three leagues of cultivated ground, and the colossal Chateau seemed to be rebuilt in the evening mists, one still felt the great strength, and the old sovereignty, which had made of it so impregnable a fortress that even the kings of France trembled before it.

"And I am sure," continued Angelique, "that it is inhabited by the souls of the dead, who return at night. All kinds of noises are heard there; in every direction are monsters who look at you, and when I turned round as we were coming away, I saw great white figures fluttering above the wall. But, mother, you know all the history of the castle, do you not?"

Hubertine replied, as she smiled in an amused way: "Oh! as for ghosts, I have never seen any of them myself."

But in reality, she remembered perfectly the history, which she had read long ago, and to satisfy the eager questionings of the young girl, she was obliged to relate it over again.

The land belonged to the Bishopric of Rheims, since the days of Saint Remi, who had received it from Clovis.

An archbishop, Severin, in the early years of the tenth century, had erected at Hautecoeur a fortress to defend the country against the Normans, who were coming up the river Oise, into which the Ligneul flows.

In the following century a successor of Severin gave it in fief to Norbert, a younger son of the house of Normandy, in consideration of an annual quit-rent of sixty sous, and on the condition that the city of Beaumont and its church should remain free and uninc.u.mbered. It was in this way that Norbert I became the head of the Marquesses of Hautecoeur, whose famous line from that date became so well known in history. Herve IV, excommunicated twice for his robbery of ecclesiastical property, became a noted highwayman, who killed, on a certain occasion, with his own hands, thirty citizens, and his tower was razed to the ground by Louis le Gros, against whom he had dared to declare war. Raoul I, who went to the Crusades with Philip Augustus, perished before Saint Jean d'Acre, having been pierced through the heart by a lance. But the most ill.u.s.trious of the race was John V, the Great, who, in 1225, rebuilt the fortress, finis.h.i.+ng in less than five years this formidable Chateau of Hautecoeur, under whose shelter he, for a moment, dreamed of aspiring to the throne of France, and after having escaped from being killed in twenty battles, he at last died quietly in his bed, brother-in-law to the King of Scotland. Then came Felician III, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem barefooted; Herve VII, who a.s.serted his claims to the throne of Scotland; and still many others, n.o.ble and powerful in their day and generation, down to Jean IX, who, under Mazarin, had the grief of a.s.sisting at the dismantling of the castle. After a desperate siege, the vaults of the towers and of the donjon were blown up with powder, and the different constructions were set on fire; where Charles VI had been sent to rest, and to turn his attention from his vagaries, and where, nearly two hundred years later, Henri IV had pa.s.sed a week as Gabrielle D'Estress. Thenceforth, all these royal souvenirs had pa.s.sed into oblivion.

Angelique, without stopping the movement of her needle, listened eagerly, as if the vision of these past grandeurs rose up from her frame, in proportion as the rose grew there in its delicate life of colour. Her ignorance of general history enlarged facts, and she received them as if they were the basis of a marvellous legend. She trembled with delight, and, transported by her faith, it seemed as if the reconstructed Chateau mounted to the very gates of heaven, and the Hautecoeurs were cousins to the Virgin Mary.

When there was a pause in the recital she asked, "Is not our new Bishop Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur, a descendant of this noted family?"

Hubertine replied that Monseigneur must belong to the younger branch of the family, as the elder branch had been extinct for a very long time.

It was, indeed, a most singular return, as for centuries the Marquesses of Hautecoeur and the clergy of Beaumont had been hostile to each other. Towards 1150 an abbot undertook to build a church, with no other resources than those of his Order; so his funds soon gave out, when the edifice was no higher than the arches of the side chapels, and they were obliged to cover the nave with a wooden roof. Eighty years pa.s.sed, and Jean V came to rebuild the Chateau, when he gave three hundred thousand pounds, which, added to other sums, enabled the work on the church to be continued. The nave was finished, but the two towers and the great front were terminated much later, towards 1430, in the full fifteenth century.

To recompense Jean V for his liberality, the clergy accorded to him, for himself and his descendants, the right of burial in a chapel of the apse, consecrated to St. George, and which, since that time, had been called the Chapel Hautecoeur. But these good terms were not of long duration. The freedom of Beaumont was put in constant peril by the Chateau, and there were continual hostilities on the questions of tribute and of precedence. One especially, the right of paying toll, which the n.o.bles demanded for the navigation of the Ligneul, perpetuated the quarrels. Then it was that the great prosperity of the lower town began, with its manufacturing of fine linen and lace, and from this epoch the fortune of Beaumont increased daily, while that of Hautecoeur diminished, until the time when the castle was dismantled and the church triumphed. Louis XIV made of it a cathedral, a bishop's palace was built in the old enclosure of the monks, and, by a singular chain of circ.u.mstances, to-day a member of the family of Hautecoeur had returned as a bishop to command the clergy, who, always powerful, had conquered his ancestors, after a contest of four hundred years.

"But," said Angelique, "Monseigneur has been married, and has not he a son at least twenty years of age?"

Hubertine had taken up the shears to remodel one of the pieces of vellum.

"Yes," she replied, "the Abbot Cornille told me the whole story, and it is a very sad history. When but twenty years of age, Monseigneur was a captain under Charles X. In 1830, when only four-and-twenty, he resigned his position in the army, and it is said that from that time until he was forty years of age he led an adventurous life, travelling everywhere and having many strange experiences. At last, one evening, he met, at the house of a friend in the country, the daughter of the Count de Valencay, Mademoiselle Pauline, very wealthy, marvellously beautiful, and scarcely nineteen years of age, twenty-two years younger than himself. He fell violently in love with her, and, as she returned his affection, there was no reason why the marriage should not take place at once. He then bought the ruins of Hautecoeur for a mere song--ten thousand francs, I believe--with the intention of repairing the Chateau and installing his wife therein when all would be in order and in readiness to receive her. In the meanwhile they went to live on one of his family estates in Anjou, scarcely seeing any of their friends, and finding in their united happiness the days all too short. But, alas! at the end of a year Pauline had a son and died."

Hubert, who was still occupied with marking out his pattern, raised his head, showing a very pale face as he said in a low voice: "Oh! the unhappy man!"

"It was said that he himself almost died from his great grief,"

continued Hubertine. "At all events, a fortnight later he entered into Holy Orders, and soon became a priest. That was twenty years ago, and now he is a bishop. But I have also been told that during all this time he has refused to see his son, the child whose birth cost the life of its mother. He had placed him with an uncle of his wife's, an old abbot, not wis.h.i.+ng even to hear of him, and trying to forget his existence. One day a picture of the boy was sent him, but in looking at it he found so strong a resemblance to his beloved dead that he fell on the floor unconscious and stiff, as if he had received a blow from a hammer. . . .

Now age and prayer have helped to soften his deep grief, for yesterday the good Father Cornille told me that Monseigneur had just decided to send for his son to come to him."

Angelique, having finished her rose, so fresh and natural that perfume seemed to be exhaled from it, looked again through the window into the sunny garden, and, as if in a reverie, she said in a low voice: "The son of Monseigneur!"

Hubertine continued her story.

"It seems that the young man is handsome as a G.o.d, and his father wished him to be educated for the priesthood. But the old abbot would not consent to that, saying that the youth had not the slightest inclination in that direction. And then, to crown all, his wealth, it is said, is enormous. Two million pounds sterling! Yes, indeed! His mother left him a tenth of that sum, which was invested in land in Paris, where the increase in the price of real estate has been so great, that to-day it represents fifty millions of francs. In short, rich as a king!"

"Rich as a king, beautiful as a G.o.d!" repeated Angelique unconsciously, in her dreamy voice.

And with one hand she mechanically took from the frame a bobbin wound with gold thread, in order to make the open-work centre of one of the large lilies. After having loosened the end from the point of the reel, she fastened it with a double st.i.tch of silk to the edge of the vellum which was to give a thickness to the embroidery. Then, continuing her work, she said again, without finis.h.i.+ng her thought, which seemed lost in the vagueness of its desire, "Oh! as for me, what I would like, that which I would like above all else----"

The silence fell again, deep and profound, broken only by the dull sound of chanting which came from the church. Hubert arranged his design by repa.s.sing with a little brush all the perforated lines of the drawing, and thus the ornamentation of the cope appeared in white on the red silk. It was he who first resumed speaking.

"Ah! those ancient days were magnificent! n.o.blemen then wore costumes weighted with embroidery. At Lyons, material was sometimes sold for as much as six hundred francs an ell. One ought to read the by-laws and regulations of the Guild of Master Workmen, where it is laid down that 'The embroiderers of the King have always the right to summon, by armed force if necessary, the workmen of other masters.' . . . And then we had coats of arms, too! Azure, a fesso engrailed or, between three fleurs-de-lys of the same, two of them being near the top and the third in the point. Ah! it was indeed beautiful in the days of long ago!"

He stopped a moment, tapping the frame with his fingers to shake off the dust. Then he continued:

"At Beaumont they still have a legend about the Hautecoeurs, which my mother often related to me when I was a child. . . . A frightful plague ravaged the town, and half of the inhabitants had already fallen victims to it, when Jean V, he who had rebuilt the fortress, perceived that G.o.d had given him the power to contend against the scourge. Then he went on foot to the houses of the sick, fell on his knees, kissed them, and as soon as his lips had touched them, while he said, 'If G.o.d is willing, I wish it,' the sufferers were healed. And lo! that is why these words have remained the device of the Hautecoeurs, who all have since that day been able to cure the plague. . . . Ah! what a proud race of men!

A n.o.ble dynasty! Monseigneur himself is called Jean XII, and the first name of his son must also be followed by a number, like that of a prince."

He stopped. Each one of his words lulled and prolonged the reverie of Angelique. She continued, in a half-singing tone: "Oh! what I wish for myself! That which I would like above all else----"

Holding the bobbin, without touching the thread, she twisted the gold by moving it from left to right alternately on the vellum, fastening it at each turn with a st.i.tch in silk. Little by little the great golden lily blossomed out.

Soon she continued: "Yes, what I would like above all would be to marry a prince--a prince whom I had never seen; who would come towards sunset, just before the waning daylight, and would take me by the hand and lead me to his palace. And I should wish him to be very handsome, as well as very rich! Yes, the most beautiful and the wealthiest man that had ever been seen on the earth! He should have superb horses that I could hear neighing under my windows, and jewels which he would pour in streams into my lap, and gold that would fall from my hands in a deluge when I opened them. And what I wish still further is, that this prince of mine should love me to distraction, so that I might also love him desperately. We would then remain very young, very good, and very n.o.ble, for ever!"

Hubert, leaving his work, had approached her smilingly; whilst Hubertine, in a friendly way, shook her finger at the young girl.

"Oh, what a vain little creature! Ah! ambitious child, you are quite incorrigible. Now, you are quite beside yourself with your need of being a queen. At all events such a dream is much better than to steal sugar and to be impertinent. But really, you must not indulge in such fancies.

It is the Evil One who prompts them, and it is pride that speaks, as well as pa.s.sion."