She had really studied in these years of her residence there, and each month put something worth having into the storehouse of her intelligent mind. She was as immeasurably removed from the Sabine Delburg of convent days as light from darkness, and her companion had often been Monsieur le Curé, an enchanting Jesuit priest, who had the care of the souls of Héronac village. A great cynic, a pure Christian and a man of parts--a distant connection of the original family--Gaston d'Héronac had known the world in his day; and after much sorrow had found a hermitage in his own village--a consolation in the company of this half-French, half-American heiress, who had incorporated herself with the soil. He was now seventy years of age and always a gentleman, with few of the tiresome habits of the old.
What joy he had found in opening the mind of his young Dame d'Héronac!
It was frankly admitted that there were to be no discussions upon religion.
"I am a pagan, _cher père_," Sabine had said, almost immediately, "leave me!--and let me enjoy your sweet church and your fisherfolks' faith. I will come there every Sunday and say my prayers--_mes prières à moi_--and then we can discuss philosophy afterwards or--what you will."
"Religion is not of dogma. The paganism of Dame Sabine is as good in the sight of le bon Dieu as the belief of Jean Rivée, who knows that his boat was guided into the harbor on the night of the great storm by the Holy Virgin, who posed Herself by the helm. Heavens! yes--it is God who judges--not priests."
It can be easily understood that with two minds of this breadth, Père Anselme and Sabine Howard became real friends.
The Curé, when he read with her the masters of the _dix-septième_ and the _dix-huitième_ had a quaintly humorous expression in his old black eye.
"Not for girls or for priests--but for _des gens du monde_," he said to her one day, on putting down a volume of Voltaire.
"Of what matter," Sabine had answered. "Since I am not a girl, _cher maître_, and you were once not a priest, and we are both _gens du monde--hein_?"
His breeding had been of enormous advantage to him, enabling him to refrain from asking Sabine a single question; but he knew from her ejaculations as time went on that she had passed through some furnace during her eighteenth year, and it had seared her deeply. He even knew more than this; he knew almost as much as Simone, eventually, but it was all locked in his breast and never even alluded to between them.