Читать книгу The Burning Glass - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 8

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M. De Mora had gone. Julie, leaning from the window, had seen the carriage lumber over the cobbles on the way to Bagnères. She felt, indeed, that her heart went with it; never had the familiar room seemed so cramped, so dull. The place she had lived in and loved for nearly ten years seemed suddenly hateful to her. She flung herself into one of the low chairs by the window and leant her head back against the gilt pedestal that held the marble bird. She sat there, silent, motionless, sunk in a weary repose that was the reaction from her nervous excitement. She felt sick and shivering, and her fancy saw the future in most terrible colours. She beheld herself separated from M. de Mora for ever, abandoned again to that dreadful loneliness of the soul from which his warm love had rescued her so completely.

With a sense of agony she recalled her bleak, starved youth in the gloomy Chateau of Champrond, the drudge, the outcast and object of suspicion and dislike, the dreary year at Lyons, still alone, apart; the change to Paris—still the same spites and jealousy, the same dependency, the same slavery; then the quarrel with Madame du Deffand that had set her free—the joy of liberty, the friendship of M. D'Alembert; and then the paradise M. de Mora's love had opened to her. If that ended, what had she left? She shuddered to her soul at the prospect of this black loneliness; she felt as if she could hardly restrain herself from rising and going after her lover, and telling him that they never would be separated—was it not madness that they should be?

Why did she not go with him, defying every one—women had done such things? But he did not love her in that fashion; he wanted her in honour, proudly. Almost she wished that he had asked her to leave everything for him. Her lip curled as she thought of the relief of the Comte d'Albon if she should thus cut herself off from the world.

Ah! they need not have troubled about her, begged her to be silent for the sake of her mother's memory, consulted in secret about her legal rights. Never had she cared, never would she care, for either the name or the fortune. It was not in her to disturb the family that had cast her out; never had she even considered those aspects of her case that gave her some right to claim herself to be demoiselle D'Albon. And those who believed that it was respect for her mother's memory that kept her silent were mistaken. Her attitude was merely a proud indifference to all questions of self-interest, an absorption in her own engrossing emotions.

The door softly opened and a gentle step sounded on the polished floor. Julie moved her head impatiently and stared out of the window at the blank front of the house opposite. She did not wish for any interruption, especially this interruption. In the full tide of her happiness she had been more than usually kind to M. D'Alembert; then, as she became more absorbed in M. de Mora, indifferent to him; now, in the grief and agitation that she must conceal from him, he irritated her—his presence, his constant interest, became a fret that was almost insupportable.

She tapped her foot nervously as she heard him tiptoeing across the room.

'You are not well?' came his thin, anxious, tenor voice.

Julie had to look round.

'Mon ami,' she said, struggling to be patient, 'am I ever well?'

The great man peered at her eagerly.

'But you looked so white—so fatigued! I heard you coughing as I came up the stairs,' he cried.

Julie laid a fever-hot hand on his wrist as he stood over her; her lips quivered, but she strove to command herself.

'I have been saying good-bye to M. de Mora—well, not good-bye, but he goes soon, and he is so ill and so dear—it—disturbed me.'

'I should be grieved as yourself if anything happened to M. de Mora!' exclaimed the philosopher in all good faith.

Julie's slender foot again beat on the floor. This fatuous blindness, in some perverse way, vexed her; it seemed hardly credible that D'Alembert could really be ignorant of the passion that was consuming her. It was true that she had made every effort to conceal it from him, but her success irritated her, perhaps slightly disgusted her with herself.

'Mon ami,' she said, as gently as she could, 'as you say, I am not very well—leave me awhile.'

D'Alembert gave her a look of wistful adoration and retreated to the red ottoman. In his anxiety not to obtrude on her, he absently picked up the book M. de Mora had taken from the acacia table and left among the damask cushions.

Julie winced to see him in her lover's place and handling the object M. de Mora had last touched.

Her glance was almost cruel as it swept over the unconscious little man. Had she been in any other mood she would have seen what a piteous figure he was, with his big head and small, frail body, his air of shrinking timidity, his utter absorption in her and her affairs, his complete submission to her wishes—above all, his absolute trust in her fidelity to their platonic friendship. As it was, she merely thought: 'Ciel, is it possible that a man can be so blind, so infatuated?' And wearily turned her head away again and stared at the strip of June sky showing above the gray houses opposite.

D'Alembert glanced at her timidly; he had a plain, frail-looking face, deeply lined and colourless, but his ingenuous expression of modest goodness gave him an appearance of nobility.

Even poorer than Julie, since he had never accepted so much from friends, this man, who was, after Voltaire, the most celebrated in Europe, was dressed, almost shabbily, in the plainest of brown suits, with nothing fine about him but the quality of his neat linen.

He had had two great passions in his life—geometry and Julie de Lespinasse.

For many years the first had been forgotten in the second. He was entirely fascinated by the enchanting woman whose friendship had been the sunshine of his life; it was his pride to please her. His friends had smiled to see the great philosopher running errands like a lackey. Lately, he had been elected perpetual secretary of the Academy, a post that carried with it an apartment in the Louvre, but D'Alembert had instantly refused to leave the humble chamber in the rue Saint-Dominique.

Presently he glanced deprecatingly at the clock on the chimney-piece.

'Shall we not dine?' he suggested humbly.

'I cannot eat,' replied Julie.

'Mon Dieu, but you are ill

A fit of coughing checked her answer.

'Will you see Lorry—take some medicine?'

Julie struggled to control herself.

'I do well enough,' she gasped. 'Take your dinner, my good D'Alembert.'

'Nay,' he said mournfully. 'I have no appetite when you will not eat.'

She could have shrieked at this obstinate devotion. Terribly did she long to be alone. Following out her train of thought, she said,—

'Grand Dieu, but it is dull, this apartment—like a prison! You are mad not to take the room in the Louvre.'

'And leave you!' cried D'Alembert in pained amazement.

'Ah,' she replied with gentle irony, 'you are too fond—I am not worthy of it—I am always ill—and full of whims.'

The great man smiled tenderly; he glanced at the book in his hands.

'L'Essai sur la Tactique,' he read out. 'Ah, what a number of copies have been smuggled over! You like it?'

'I have not read it,' answered Julie with great weariness.

D'Alembert fluttered over the pages.

'You met him—this de Guibert?'

'Yes—at Watelet's fête.'

'You liked him?'

'Yes, he is very charming—different from others—a soldier above all, I think. He said he would come here, but I have not seen him yet.'

'It seems he is very occupied; Paris talks of nothing else. They say he is to save the country. Eh, well, I must read his book,' added D'Alembert placidly, without a shade of jealousy.

'His personality makes his success, I think,' said Julie. 'He is very attractive, not handsome, but seductive and young. Oh, del, young as the gods!'

M. D'Alembert was too sweet-natured and too sure of Julie to find any sting in these words.

'Ah, yes, young,' he repeated mildly. 'But,' he added, ever loyal to his friends, 'he is not so young as M. de Mora.'

'No,' said Julie, 'but—'

She checked herself—she hardly knew what this 'but' implied, what the sharp distinction was that she had drawn between M. de Mora and M. de Guibert. They seemed to her as the poles apart. She frowned, puzzled, a little disturbed.

'M. de Guibert is a soldier,' she added slowly, as if seeking for the solution of some difficulty.

'So is M. de Mora,' replied the philosopher instantly.

Julie was silent. She had never thought of her lover as a soldier, though he had been in the Spanish army since almost a child, and had attained a higher rank than the Colonel of Corsicans.

'M. de Guibert has seen so much active service,' she added at length.

'M. de Mora's health has handicapped him,' answered M. D'Alembert, who wondered why she was making so much of a small point.

'Ah!' cried Julie sharply. That was the difference, the difference between sickness and health. She thought of her lover's face as she had last seen it, and the remembrance of M. de Guibert's radiant personality became an offence.

She rose quickly, with a return of her late irritation. 'Oh, mon Dieu, what a day!' she shivered. 'There is no colour anywhere!'

'But it is spring,' protested M. D'Alembert.

'I,' said Julie de Lespinasse, 'am cold to the heart.'

'Shall we not dine now?' suggested the philosopher timidly.

Her strained nerves gave way. She turned on him in a little gust of forlorn passion.

'Have I not said I will not eat? I am ill—I am tormented!'

She swept past him towards her bedroom door. But M. D'Alembert could not let her go like this.

'I will call Madame Saint Martin,' he said, putting himself in her way.

Julie turned haggard eyes on him.

'Do you imagine a chamber-woman can cure my ills?' she asked.

Then at the swift look of pain that crossed his face, instant remorse moved her. She held out her hands to him with a charming gesture of penitence.

'Mon ami, forgive me. I had not any right—but if you knew how unhappy I am—how unhappy!'

This cry, which came with the terrible sincerity of a child's lament against destiny, stirred and startled M. D'Alembert to the heart.

'But why are you so unhappy, Julie?' he asked ingenuously.

She was at once irritated again. The blindness of this devoted friend seemed to her sheer fatuity; perversely, she blamed him for that faith in her that rendered him so unconscious of the truth of her trouble.

'Why am I unhappy?' she echoed, turning restlessly away again. 'You know what I have had to make me unhappy—what tigers I have had to deal with.'

He knew at once that she referred to her family. No one could understand better the agonies of her position. No one had ever extended to her a tenderer sympathy than this foundling who had been abandoned on the steps of Saint-Jean-le-Rond by his mother, the beautiful Comtesse de Tencin, and who, of noble birth on both sides, had always been, like Julie, poor, nameless, outcast.

But the evil days are past,' he said gently.

'Mon ami, they are never past for me,' replied Julie, with conviction. 'The Vichy and the D'Albon will never cease to hate me.'

She could not tell him how the rumour of her proposed marriage had roused this latent fear and hatred, and how she had been doubly stabbed, both by the action of her brother and the steady opposition of the Fuentès family.

'They think that I shall claim the title of Demoiselle D'Albon,' was all she could say. 'Eh, well, I have some right.'

M. D'Alembert could not think why she should dwell on a subject so painful and so seldom mentioned, nor could he connect it in any way with her grief for the departure of M. de Mora.

She saw his bewilderment and it further increased her nervous vexation.

'Leave me,' she implored. 'I must rest—I must think.'

'Julie—you are not going to take opium?' he exclaimed.

'And if I do?'

'But you have promised!'

'It is the one thing that calms me. I suffer and I can resist no longer.'

'But this drug destroys you,' protested M. D'Alembert, in despair.

Julie hesitated, shivered, and turned away from her bedroom door. She was ashamed of her weakness, but she longed for the sedative. Her head ached, her chest was full of pain, and every nerve in her body seemed ajar.

'Dine in your room,' she said coldly to M. D'Alembert. 'I can eat nothing to-day.'

'Then neither will I,' he replied anxiously.

She moved restlessly up and down the room, her flowing skirts billowing with her graceful movements. His goodness exasperated her; she felt herself unworthy of his devotion, and was fretted by his care.

'Mon Dieu!' she thought desperately. 'How did I come to give him the right to watch me?'

The philosopher, well-schooled in her moods, and lately used to the bursts of impetuous passion, the apathy, the coldness that were the results of her infatuation for M. de Mora, again took up M. de Guibert's book and began once more to speak of the author. M. de Guibert was the topic of the day, and M. D'Alembert could not believe that Julie should be uninterested in the man who had taken Paris by storm, and who was hailed by the entire Encyclopaedia as their most brilliant recruit.

But this subject was a fresh offence to poor Julie. She did not want to hear of the success of the gorgeous young soldier.

'He is too much Fortune's favourite,' she said, and thoughts of M. de Mora made her accent bitter.

'I think he justifies his fame,' replied M. D'Alembert, with the generosity of greatness.

But Julie was almost painfully clear-sighted, even when her stormy emotions were around her. Fine instincts are not to be deceived, and where she was indifferent she could read character with exquisite exactitude. She had judged accurately enough the man whom she had met at 'Le Moulin Joli' for all the enchantment of the lovely May night.

'He dazzles people with his personal gifts—he is born to be great,' she said. 'He will always have his own way—he takes the colour of his time, and will be generally admired—but I doubt if he has capacity to love or to suffer.'

'Then he is indeed fortunate,' replied D'Alembert, with a slightly wry smile.

'Did I not say so?' cried Julie. 'But, mon Dieu I do not know—an empty life!'

'I do not think one could say that of M. de Guibert. He has as many gallantries as any man in Paris—and always Madame de Montsauge.'

'Ah, la, la!' cried Julie impatiently. 'What is any of that but emptiness?'

She sank into a low bergère by the fireplace, leaning back in an attitude of complete exhaustion.

Her tender grace, her fragrant charm were very apparent as she lay there inert, in the ebb of her emotion.

M. D'Alembert looked with humble and utter love at the long figure, the small head, the tired face, the slender hands and feet, the whole person so delicate and exquisite, betraying in every line a rare character, both fine and passionate, capricious and over-sensitive, yet so intensely lovable.

Her broad lids drooped, her head sunk into the cushions.

With a little sigh of relief, M. D'Alembert tip-toed from the room and went to ask for his frugal and delayed meal.

As soon as the door had closed, Julie sprang up with feverish energy, hurried into her bedroom, and fetched the opium.