Adeline Tells of the Convent and the Locked Room — The Romance of the Forest

Some weeks on, the abbey has become a household. La Motte hunts and fishes in the mornings and sits in gloomy silence in the afternoons, and only Adeline can sometimes draw him out of it. Peter buys supplies in Auboine and leaves the town by a route away from the abbey, so La Motte stops expecting pursuit. Madame La Motte now sees the ruin as a refuge and spends her time teaching Adeline, who runs the household, reads by the river and writes a poem to the visions of fancy. Madame has long wondered how Adeline came to be on the heath, and Adeline, calmer now, agrees to tell her.

Adeline is the only child of Louis de St. Pierre, a chevalier of small fortune. Her mother died when she was seven, and her father put her in a convent and left Paris. At twelve she was moved to a second convent, where she learned that he meant her to take the veil. The Lady Abbess tried terror and then flattery, Adeline refused, and her father threatened vengeance. When he suddenly relented and came to fetch her, she was overjoyed and thanked him, and he answered in a harsh voice, "Return, then, to your convent." She did not think he meant it, but the answer chilled her. He drove her through the bright streets of Paris, which she took for a world of friends, and on to a lone house on a heath. Two grim men sat down to supper with them, no woman was to be seen, and her bedroom window was barred. That night she dreamed of her father holding up a mirror in which she was bleeding, and heard a voice say, "Depart this house, destruction hovers here."

The next morning her father had gone to Paris and her door was locked, and she was told she would live as well as if she were free. At night she wedged a chair under the handle, heard a knock at the house door, quarrelling voices below, and once her own name. Later men tried her lock and forced at the door, cursing, and went away. Then two men came in through a closet door she had not noticed, seized her, and she fainted. She woke to voices below and was led downstairs to a stranger, La Motte. Adeline believes her father was involved but, or says she believes, he did not intend her death. Madame La Motte asks what motive there could be for cruelty so unprofitable, and the question stops there, because Adeline's mind shrinks from it. The telling draws the two women closer. It does not explain why her father delivered her to that house.