The Village Rector | Page 9

all the powers of their contracted minds, obtuse to
everything that was not business or religious faith.

II
VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as
Veronique, but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have
surprised the angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.
At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the
woman she was eventually to become. She was of medium height,
neither her father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was
charming in its graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves
laboriously sought by painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature
herself draws so delicately with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye
of artists in spite of swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould
themselves, inevitably, upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural,
Veronique set these beauties of her form into relief by movements that
were wholly free from affectation. She brought out her "full and
complete effect," if we may borrow that strong term from legal
phraseology. She had the plump arms of the Auvergnat women, the red
and dimpled hand of a barmaid, and her strong but well-shaped feet
were in keeping with the rest of her figure.
At times there seemed to pass within her a marvellous and delightful
phenomenon which promised to Love a woman concealed thus far from
every eye. This phenomenon was perhaps one cause of the admiration
her father and mother felt for her beauty, which they often declared to
be divine,--to the great astonishment of their neighbors. The first to
remark it were the priests of the cathedral and the worshippers with her
at the same altar. When a strong emotion took possession of
Veronique,--and the religious exaltation to which she yielded herself on
receiving the communion must be counted among the strongest
emotions of so pure and candid a young creature,--an inward light
seemed to efface for the moment all traces of the small-pox. The pure
and radiant face of her childhood reappeared in its pristine beauty.
Though slightly veiled by the thickened surface disease had laid there,
it shone with the mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming beneath
the water of the sea when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique was
changed for a few moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then
disappeared again, like a celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes, gifted
with the power of great expansion, widened until they covered the
whole surface of the blue iris except for a tiny circle. Thus the
metamorphose of the eye, which became as keen and vivid as that of an

eagle, completed the extraordinary change in the face. Was it the storm
of restrained passions; was it some power coming from the depths of
the soul, which enlarged the pupils in full daylight as they sometimes in
other eyes enlarge by night, darkening the azure of those celestial orbs?
However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at
Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had
united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish
in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that of
the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who
loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman's
soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an
instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique's lips were
faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure warm
blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little heavy, in the
acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness which is,
according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the indication of an
almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her brow, which
was finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent diadem of
hair, voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color.
From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique's bearing
was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such
deep solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine
and consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the
progress of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the
scope of feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure.
Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the
rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the
Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking
the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that
was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers
which poetized the brown and crumbling sills of