Читать книгу Moonglade - Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen - Страница 5

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If the tongue’s a consuming fire,

Then judging by the consternation

The written syllables inspire,

A letter is a conflagration.

“I’m sure you must be mistaken. It cannot be possible!”

Madame Gervex, Marguerite’s governess and companion, turned her perplexed, good-natured face toward the gray-haired land-steward who had begun his labors at Plenhöel in the time of the present Marquis’s father. They were standing together on the far end of a lower side terrace overlooking the green silver of the bay, to-day in one of its most charming and innocent moods. There was scarcely a ripple to be seen: a mere fringe of dainty foam hemmed the rising tide as it lazily fretted up the narrow pebbly beach. A cable-length or so beyond that lace-like border a large float rode at anchor, and Marguerite, Laurence, Basil, and “Antinoüs” were alternately to be descried taking glorious headers from its snowy planking into the placid depths.

“Impossible, Madame Hortense? And why impossible, if you please?” Sulian Quentin asked, with some asperity. “You are so soft-hearted and innocent yourself that you can’t think anybody is made otherwise! Now I tell you—” And he emphasized each separate word with a smart tap of two fingers of his right hand on the hard, open palm of his left. “I tell you that this fine Demoiselle from over the Channel is well worth watching. Sweet as honey when she speaks to you, but her linings have been dipped in gall, just the same. Bitter! Madame Hortense! Bitter she is to the very core, and envious and mean, and capable of anything that’s not straight. I, Sulian Quentin, tell you this, and you’d do well to take my word for it!”

“But, Monsieur Sulian!” interrupted Madame Hortense.

“There’s no Monsieur Sulian about it. D’you imagine that I’ve navigated for fifteen years before taking hold of things here for defunct Monsieur le Marquis, without learning how to keep my eyes open? Bah! I’ve seen in my time many sorts of female quality, brown and red and blond and black, pretty and otherwise, clever and stupid, good, bad, and worse, but just such a piece as this one—!” He left his indictment incomplete, perhaps for lack of expressions fitted to his listener’s ears, and allowed his long arms to fall to his sides in a discouraged manner.

“But,” Hortense Gervex began again—“but what in the world made you take such a dislike to Mademoiselle Seton, Monsieur Sulian? She’s doing you no harm!”

“Yes, believe that and drink water!” he derisively retorted. “Look at her now, do, just to oblige me!” He was angrily pointing downward, and Hortense Gervex bent over the coping to see what he meant.

Plenhöel and Marguerite were swimming shoulder to shoulder toward the open sea, with that calm, regular stroke which is so telling for long-distance work. On the float Basil’s tall form showed clear as wax against the pale shimmer of the water, and, with her back turned to him, sat Laurence, on the very edge of the planking, her feet dipping in the sea, her hair falling around her mantle-wise and trailing behind her. Suddenly she turned, swung herself up on the float, and stood before him, her arms uplifted to raise above her head the shining mass of her tresses, her perfect figure displayed to its best advantage by a bathing-dress of pure white cashmere that clung very lovingly; and there was something so challenging in her statuesque pose that the term of “professional beauty,” naïvely applied to her a fortnight or so before by Marguerite, took on, indeed, a newer and more expressive meaning.

“The minx!” grumbled the old steward, elbow to elbow with Madame Hortense. “Oh, she’ll net him, never fear—and to think that our Marquis, always so malin, alert, and wide awake, does not notice her manœuvers! As to Mademoiselle ‘Gamin’—” He paused, blew out the air from his chest with a sigh like a Triton’s, and resumed: “She’s too young, thank the Saints, to perceive such wickedness, and yet she’s sharp as a needle, and some day she’ll see, and then!”

“Well what? What will she see some day, you old mischief? What will happen some day, according to you? After all, isn’t the Prince free to marry whom he chooses? Isn’t he rich enough for two? Why shouldn’t he have a beautiful wife if he likes to? Have you any personal objection to offer, Monsieur Sulian?”

Astounded by this abrupt style of address, so entirely foreign to gentle, kindly Madame Hortense, Sulian Quentin turned to her, his self-advertised eyes wide open.

“D’you mean to tell me,” he impressively pronounced, “that you’d approve of this one for him?”

Madame Hortense glanced meditatively in the direction of the float. “What have I got to approve or disapprove of in such a matter?” she said in a tone that went far toward answering his question. “Who are we, anyhow, to judge our masters?”

Quentin gave a short laugh. “Who indeed? Who are we, indeed? We who have served them loyally for year after year this long, long time; served them, and loved them, too! Yes, loved them as if they were our own children: defunct Monsieur le Marquis, and Madame la Marquise, and our present Monsieur le Marquis and Mademoiselle ‘Gamin.’”

“But what have they got to do with it?” asked Madame Hortense, beginning to feel utterly bewildered.

Quentin went back a step and glared at her.

“You’re a bat—a real genuine bat!” he said, contemptuously, “that’s all I’ve got to say. Daylight is nothing to you, so you might as well go on traveling in darkness all your days! Oh, have it your own way! Don’t think again; it would be idle; but still let me compliment you on your sharpness, ma bonne dame. Nothing to them!... Nothing to them! That’s a good one!”

He raised his arms far above his head in impotent protestation to an unkind Heaven, and, turning raspingly on his heel, left her without further ceremony to digest his cynical advice.

During Marguerite’s convent days Hortense Gervex had lived at Plenhöel as a very superior sort of housekeeper, looking, together with Quentin, after the Marquis’s interests, and keeping the château continually ready to receive him in the intervals of his trips to known and sometimes unknown portions of the globe. Years before, when widowed at twenty by the premature drowning of her husband, a fine young sailorman in command of a coasting steamer, she had come to Plenhöel as companion and reader to “Antinoüs’s” mother. She was now fifty-five, extremely well preserved, and very comely, with her thick blond hair, slightly frosted with silver above the temples, her wholesome face, and calm, blue-green eyes; and she literally adored the “Gamin.”

After Quentin’s departure she remained for a few moments more, watching the bathers frolicking in the wavelets below. Marguerite and her father were swimming back now, and presently ran foul of a school of porpoises playing “follow-my-leader” with the utmost gaiety. Madame Hortense saw Marguerite dive suddenly and come up immediately behind a big, shining fellow, whom she playfully slapped on the side. Girl and fish disappeared together in a quick smother of foam; then the fair head, darkened by immersion to a golden brown, emerged again and followed in the wake of the paternal one.

“Ah, my little mermaid!” murmured Madame Hortense. “Ma jolie petite sirène! Is what that scamp of Quentin hints at truly possible?”

Her affectionate eyes followed the thought to the float, and their expression slowly hardened. Laurence was still standing before Basil in the same provocative attitude, still busy with her splendid hair, twisting and untwisting it, as though to wring it dry. The hidden sun had just made up his mind to peep through his veil of pearly vapors, and a primrose glow of delicious warmth suffused the two figures. In that revealing light Madame Hortense became suddenly aware of the science that had presided over the making of Miss Seton’s costume, in spite of all its maidenly whiteness. The young girl’s illuminated silhouette all at once seemed terribly shocking to her in its Venus-like beauty—(Vénus sortant de l’onde)—and with a short exclamation she too turned on her heel and, running up the steps to the esplanade, rapidly entered the château. Her brows were knit and the flame of indignation shone warlike in her eyes.

The way to her own domain led past the suite of rooms occupied by Laurence, and with perfect deliberation she opened the door of the boudoir off the sleeping-apartment and entered.

This suite, comprising a bed, dressing and bath room, besides the boudoir in question, was designated by the household as la volière; for the whole plan of decoration was based upon bird life. It had been a fantasy of a Marquise de Plenhöel, arriving as a bride there from the Court of Versailles, to evolve for her own personal use this dainty retreat, so completely at variance with the grim fortress on the coast of Finisterre. She had been of a gay and witty spirit, had this pretty Marquise, and this was testified by the ingenuity with which these embellishments had been planned.

From the exquisite lampas covering the walls, where flights of winged things seemed alive amid branches of pale brocaded roses and apple-blossoms, from the curtains and portières of like material, the beautifully medallioned and painted ceilings, the pink-marble fireplaces and faintly gilded cornices, down to the very carpets, lounges, and chairs, birds and flowers were repeated in every imaginable hue and tint. Carved, embroidered, painted, and chiseled, the feathered tribes hovered between garlands of bloom as admirably preserved as if the hands of the artists had but just put the finishing touches to their gracious task. The inspirer of it all had died on the guillotine in 1794, but her pastel portrait hanging in the boudoir smiled the imperishable smile of an all-conquering loveliness and charm.

Her azure gaze, so proud and high-bred beneath the powdered and diamond-dewed waves of her coiffure, riveted Madame Hortense’s attention, as it always did when her duties called her to that portion of the State Apartments. She paused before the cupid-wreathed flame, and gazed at the slender waist in the silk-and-lace corselet of a Court toilette; at the slim hands clasped over the nacre sticks of a point d’Argentan fan; at the trail of jasmine intermingled with strands of great pearls, crossing like the ribbon of some Order from the right shoulder to the left ride of the cloth-of-silver girdle, and she sighed profoundly.

“Ah! quelle pitié!” she whispered, “quelle pitié!” Then, struck by a sudden thought, she bent swiftly forward. “How Marguerite resembles her!” she resumed, half aloud. “I had never noticed that before.” And a shade of fear darkened her own eyes for an instant. But she had not come to indulge in vain contemplations and vague forebodings. So, straightening herself, she cast a quick look about the room. Inside one of the window-places a Louis XVI. desk of celadon-green wood, inlaid preciously with more birds and flowers, had been left open. On the velvet-covered writing-board lay, in unpleasant contrast, one of those eminently durable and business-like blotting-books for which the world is indebted to England. Covered in pigskin, it displayed the large, flat monogram, L. S., in visibly extra-solid silver, while a fountain-pen of similar usefulness and practicality had been uncapped, in dangerous proximity to the softly faded lining of the desk.

If ever there existed a scrupulously honest and loyal woman, Madame Hortense was that one. Yet without any hesitation whatsoever she stepped to the window and resolutely opened the blotting-book. Between the rough leaves there was nothing save a few clear sheets of lavender-gray note-paper bearing the same letters, L. S., in violet and gold, and Madame Hortense let the covers fall together with some abruptness. She glanced into the immaculate depths of a beribboned basket near by, and was on the point of passing on into the adjacent bedroom when the violent stain made by a crimson-morocco volume on the pale loveliness of the room made her stop and take up the eye-offending object. “Scott’s Poems, by Scott. For a good little girl,” was the enlightening device she read on the fly-leaf, writ in an angular and manful, if not masculine, hand, and this was signed, “From Aunt Elizabeth.” Madame Hortense lacked perhaps a keen sense of humor, but yet she laughed, and was about to thrust the double absurdity out of sight when it slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor, flying open as it fell, and flinging half a dozen sheets of the lavender-gray paper in as many different directions.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” quoth Madame Hortense in three different tones, quickly picking them up. “So that’s the letter-box, eh?”

She was a trifle short-sighted, and, holding the loose pages close to her eyes, began to read. She knew English very well, and followed without the least trouble the small, neat lines of script that were disposed to slant diagonally down the sheets toward the outer corners, and as she read her kindly features gradually altered into something almost approaching a tragic mask. When she reached the last word of two copious epistles she confided them once more to Scott’s care, replaced his poems on the table where she had found them, and left the room with a curiously stiff gait, suggesting the Statue du Commandeur in “Don Juan.”

“So,” she thought, stalking wrathfully away, “Milady has a lover ... an English lover—created by Divine Providence expressly for her, excepting that he is not rich—an officer in the Life Guards, poor fellow!” Pausing for an instant, she leaned against the stair banister to reflect the better.

“Also,” she went on, mentally commenting, “she has a confidant—a cousin ... he is in the Scots Guards—to whom she tells all her little plots! Parfaitement! Mademoiselle Seton is well provided so far. Add to this a millionaire Russian Prince anxious to become her prey, it seems, and an American youth also possessed of vast wealth, but, alas, untitled, who likewise is in love with her, and we have the situation clear as mud. A very pretty situation indeed! Quentin is really no fool!”

She shook her head dismally, disarranging thereby the spick-and-span neatness of her undulated bandeaux crowned by a bow of creamy lace, and sought her own rooms, resolved to watch minutely the sorry game that—chance somewhat assisting—had just been revealed, and which presented many hitherto undreamed-of but very dangerous possibilities.

She who was here to watch over little motherless Marguerite at once began to heap a thousand undeserved reproaches upon herself for what she termed her unpardonable negligence, and felt indeed that in the last half-hour she had become a sadder if a wiser woman.