Читать книгу A Sheaf of Bluebells - Baroness Orczy - Страница 24

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The project being still immature, Fernande had wandered out into the garden with the intention of thinking out its preliminary details; she was not attuned to Laurent’s society just then. In her heart she knew that he disapproved of her plan; that his jealousy—which at all times was on the qui-vive—would flare up at the first bond of harmony which she would succeed in effecting with Ronnay de Maurel. Indeed, she would have need of all her sharp wits and her feminine wiles to bring the two brothers together again and yet to avert a quarrel more deadly than the first.

For the moment she was intent on her work, and not prepared to listen to Laurent’s tender reproaches. The weeds were many, and despite the earliness of the year had already become rank. She had been humming a little ditty quietly to herself: “Et ron et ron! petit Pataplon! Il était une bergère!” But now, when she heard Laurent’s footsteps on the path behind her, the song died upon her lips. She made pretence not to hear his coming, nor did she turn her head in his direction until he called her name:

“Fernande!”

Even then she appeared too busy to do more than respond quite calmly: “Yes, Laurent. Is that you?”

Then, as he remained silent, and seemed to have come to a halt immediately beside her, she continued serenely:

“I am sorry if you want me to come for a walk just now. I must finish clearing this piece of hedge. Will you go and get a hoe and lend me a helping hand?”

“I will in a moment,” he replied, “but not just yet. I must speak to you, Fernande—just for a few minutes.... Will you turn to me and put down those tools a while? Upon my soul, it is passing serious ... Fernande!” he reiterated more earnestly, seeing that with strange obstinacy the young girl still kept her head resolutely bent to her work.

But at his insistence she threw down her tools and straightened her young figure. “What is it?” she queried as she faced him, with a mocking glance in her blue eyes.

He took her hand, which for just the space of a second she tried to free from his grasp.

“Fernande,” he said in a tender tone of appeal, “you are not angry with me, are you?”

“Angry? You foolish Laurent!” she retorted gently. “Why should I be angry?”

“You did not mean all that you said at table?” he insisted.

“What did I say?”

“You implied by your words that ... that it was not within my rights to control your actions.”

“Well,” she asked, holding her tiny head a little to one side, and giving him an arch look of coquetry from beneath her long lashes, “is it?”

“Fernande,” he entreated.

“Well, what is it?”

“You don’t know how you hurt me, when you speak so flippantly. If you only knew how every word from your dear lips sinks into my heart! The cruel words make it ache so that I could cry out with the pain ... and one sweet word from you makes me so happy that I would not exchange this earth for the most glorious corner of paradise.”

“Dear, foolish Laurent!” she sighed. Indeed, her heart was, as usual, inexpressibly touched by his ardour. She could see that his eyes were moist with unshed tears. She allowed him to take both her hands and to draw her nearer to him; she did not protest when anon his arm stole round her waist, and he buried his face against her shoulder. Indeed, she felt a wonderful fondness at this moment for the companion of her youth, the playmate of her childhood in the far-off days in England, when they were all poor and wretched together and had only each other to cling to, to trust, to look to for solace and for sympathy. She felt his burning kiss upon her neck, and with her small hand she stroked his hair and patted his cheek with a tender, almost maternal gesture.

The day was fast drawing in. The softness of the night—of a spring night laden with the fragrance of opening buds and ripening blossom—wrapped the sweet tangle of young growth in its embrace. The lilac and the hawthorn were weighted with April rain, overhead the branches of a young lime quivered in the evening breeze ere it sent down a shower of scented drops upon the two young people who were clinging to one another in the pure embrace of budding love. The mating birds in the branches of the old elms had already gone to rest; from far away came the monotonous croaking of frogs and the soft call of the wood-pigeons from the tangled woodland close by.

“Fernande,” reiterated Laurent with growing intensity, “you do love me, do you not?”

And nothing could have been more tender, nothing more serene than her reply, and the kiss wherewith she just touched his hair:

“Of course I love you, dear Laurent. You have so often asked me that. Why do you ask again?”

“Because I want to make sure of you, Fernande,” he retorted vehemently, as both his arms closed round her now. “I want to make sure,” he reiterated passionately. “I would give my soul to know what goes on behind that exquisite, white forehead of yours. Oh, of course you are a child: you don’t understand—you cannot—the torture which the serenity of your blue eyes inflicts on me at moments like this, when I long to kiss you and yet feel that your sweet lips will not answer to mine with the same thrill of passion which has gone nigh to searing my soul.”

“Dear Laurent,” murmured Fernande with tender indulgence. She disengaged herself quite gently from his arms, and then coolly divested herself of her gardening apron.

“There,” she said gaily, “it is too dark to go on weeding. We’ll go for a walk, dear cousin, an you have a mind. Dear, foolish Laurent! I believe you are ready to cry! Why, on such a lovely spring evening as this I feel as if I could run singing and shouting through the woods! Come with me to the lake. I feel sure the fairy pigeons will be cooing to-night, and the white dove rise from its watery prison, never to be captured again. You know the legend, dear cousin, do you not? Old Matthieu told it me in his quaint, halting way. Come to the lake and I’ll tell it you. Perhaps we’ll see the white pigeon. If we do, it means that we have found lasting happiness....”

“More like we’ll only hear the grey ones,” he rejoined with a sigh. “Yes, I know the legend of the fairy pigeons—but they are not like to foretell happiness for any of us just now.”

“Father is very anxious,” she mused.

“So are we all. We are arming the countryside as fast as we can, but we have so little money ... so few opportunities for drilling the raw village lads in the use of arms, so little place wherein to keep our stores. Fouché’s spies are everywhere. One does not know whom one can trust. Oh, if we had La Frontenay and Ronnay de Maurel’s wealth at our disposal, King Louis would be back in France ere the leaves which are now unfolding have fallen from the trees.”

“You shall have both. That is to be my affair.”

“But....”

“Nay!” she broke in a little impatiently; “but methought you had the cause of our King at heart. Are you going to allow petty jealousy to stand in the way of success?”

“I would give my life for our cause, Fernande,” he retorted firmly. “You know that. But,” he added, with one of those sudden waves of passion which had the power through their very might to raise a responsive thrill in the young girl’s heart, “God help me! I do believe that if I had to choose ’twixt my duty to my King and my love for you, I would forget everything for the sake of my love.”

Darkness was closing in around them, and they wandered together through the broken-down monumental gates of the park, in the stone ornaments of which thrushes and finches had built their nests. An intoxicating scent of lilac was in the air; Laurent’s arm was round his beloved, and she leaned against his shoulder. The gathering gloom lent him courage; he poured into Fernande’s shell-like ear the full phial of his impassioned eloquence, and for once it seemed to him as if she responded with all the fervour of her young soul. The danger which encompassed him, the duty which he set out to fulfil, the spirit of self-sacrifice which caused him to give up a life of ease and of pleasure for stern adherence to his ideals—all helped to render him dear to Fernande; and when, leaving the park behind them, they wandered in the woods, where at their feet the dead leaves of yester year made a soft carpet whereon they walked, and where overhead soft, almost imperceptible twitter of birds proclaimed the spring of the year, Laurent suddenly raised her face to his and mutely asked for that first kiss which would transform a girl’s tenderness into a woman’s love.

She looked up into his eyes and thought him handsome and brave, and when his lips at last sought hers, she gave caress for caress with all the selflessness born of springtime, of youth, of a passionate yearning for happiness.