Her hunting-coats were marvels of embroidery on atlas
and smooth cloth; but her smartest velvet and brocade she kept for the
sunny mornings, when, with hooded peregrine on wrist, she sallied forth
intent on slaughter, Angela, Papillon, and De Malfort for her _cortege_, an
easy-paced horse to amble over the grass with her, and the Dutch falconer
to tell her the right moment at which to slip her falcon's hood.
The nuns at the Ursuline Convent would scarcely have recognised their
quondam pupil in the girl on the grey palfrey, whose hair flew loose under
a beaver hat, mingling its tresses with the long ostrich plume, whose
trimly fitting jacket had a masculine air which only accentuated the
womanliness of the fair face above it, and whose complexion, somewhat too
colourless within the convent walls, now glowed with a carnation that
brightened and darkened the large grey eyes into new beauty.
That open-air life was a revelation to the cloister-bred girl. Could this
earth hold greater bliss than to roam at large over spacious gardens,
to cross the river, sculling her boat with strong hands, with her niece
Henriette, otherwise Papillon, sitting in the stern to steer, and scream
instructions to the novice in navigation; and then to lose themselves in
the woods on the further shore, to wander in a labyrinth of reddening
beeches, and oaks on which the thick foliage still kept its dusky green; to
emerge upon open lawns where the pale gold birches looked like fairy trees,
and where amber and crimson toadstools shone like jewels on the skirts of
the dense undergrowth of holly and hawthorn? The liberty of it all, the
delicious feeling of freedom, the release from convent rules and convent
hours, bells ringing for chapel, bells ringing for meals, bells ringing
to mark the end of the brief recreation--a perpetual ringing and drilling
which had made conventual life a dull machine, working always in the same
grooves.
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