The Quest of Glory by Marjorie Bowen (epub e reader txt) đź“–
- Author: Marjorie Bowen
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little lift into a region that knew not melancholy.
He saw one of her servants descending, and on a sudden impulse went down
himself. The house was still full of the tragedy, the modest
establishment disorganized; the doctor and the magistrate’s clerk were
busy in the chamber of the dead man. Luc met the lackey in the doorway,
and a sudden confusion seized him that perhaps the Countess was not in
the coach, or perhaps had not come to see him.
While he hesitated, the servant inquired if he was M. de Vauvenargues.
Luc responded, and added, “If your mistress is in the coach, I will come
and speak to her.”
Then, before the man could answer, he caught sight of the Countess at
the coach window, holding back the stamped leather blind.
Luc, bare-headed and with the sun shining in his loosely curled fine
hair, came to the coach step.
“I found out from M. de Biron where you were lodging,” said Carola, “and
called on my way back to Paris to leave a message for you, Monsieur.”
She spoke in her usual cold, rather precise accents, and her delicate
face was rather sad and tired in expression.
“You were not at the fête last night,” she added. “I wished to present
you to M. Amelot.”
“Madame,” he answered, “I was there, but certainly did not see you.”
The Countess leant a little way from the window of the coach; she had a
gold and scarlet figured scarf round her dark, unpowdered hair.
“What has happened?” she asked. “You look—strange.”
Luc remembered that he had not been to bed that night, and was, despite
his inner exaltation, feeling giddy and weary. Of late he could ill
stand any fatigue; he recalled also the suicide that for the moment he
had completely forgotten.
“A man died this morning,” he answered gravely, “in the room opposite
mine—died by his own hand, Madame.”
“You must be so used to death,” she answered. She looked up at the
house, and straight, as by a kind of instinct, at the drawn heavy
curtains of the painter’s room. “Who was he?” she asked.
“Why should I sadden you?” he answered. “And who the man was, no one
knows.”
“Oh,” she answered quickly, “it does not sadden me at all.” She smiled
wistfully. “But you are very pale, Monsieur le Marquis.”
Luc looked into her clear, ardent brown eyes, that were fixed on him
with an eager and intense expression. A wave of faintness came over him;
he felt impelled to catch at the long embroidered window strap that hung
over the side of the coach door to prevent himself from falling. He
could make no answer.
“This is my message,” said the Countess, rather hurriedly and in a
lowered voice: “I want you to come to my garden to-morrow about four
o’clock. Knock at the door in the Rue Deauville—you remember that it is
the street that runs at the end of the garden. You will know the door,
for the knocker is shaped like a woman’s head.”
Luc caught his breath; he was still feeling dizzy. His look was a
question as to what she meant.
“Do you care to come?” she said. “It is a question of politics.”
“I am very honoured,” he answered formally.
“You can be of use to me,” remarked the Countess. “I shall be grateful
if you will come—but perhaps you are not leaving Versailles so soon?”
“Yes,” he replied, “I was leaving immediately. Of course I will come,
Madame.”
She sighed and leant back in her coach.
“Very well, Monsieur, the Rue Deauville.”
Luc bowed, and the sumptuous coach rolled noisily down the narrow
cobbled street.
Luc stood in the Rue Deauville before a flat, narrow door in the high
wall behind which rose the tall poplars of Carola’s garden.
He took the knocker in his hand and looked at it; it was, as the
Countess had described, a woman’s head, smoothly cast in bronze, and the
face had a reserved yet wild expression, a look of terror and
bitterness.
A soft little wind was blowing, and the sun was extraordinarily bright.
Luc looked up and down the street with an idle, unexplainable reluctance
to knock. He did not care or the rendezvous—he did not even greatly
wish to see Carola; he felt to the full the desire that had more or less
possessed him of late—the desire to be alone and free—even from those
things he loved and admired.
When he at length did knock, the door was opened instantly, and the
Countess stood the other side of the portal. He saluted her gravely, and
passed into the queer, lonely garden.
They stood for a moment side by side between the trunks of the poplar
trees. She wore a light cloak like a man’s riding mantle, and her black
hair was unpowdered.
“I am glad you have come, Monsieur le Marquis,” she said.
“I have come wondering why you asked me, Madame,” he answered.
She led the way to the one seat beneath the wallflowers, and when they
reached it turned and replied—
“I always liked you, I always wanted to serve you. Ambition is so
splendid! You have the makings of a great man.”
Luc coloured and looked at her gravely.
“I too have always been ambitious,” she continued, with a slight
nervousness; “but women tire—and they cannot achieve what men
achieve.” She paused a second, then added hastily, “I can put you on the
path to obtain what you desire.”
Luc had the impression that she was not saying what she really wished,
but was confused by some agitation into, contrary to her wont, using
evasive words.
“You leave me at a loss, Madame,” he answered, with a gentle dignity. “I
only understand that you condescend towards me, and for that I am
proudly grateful.”
Carola glanced quickly at the firm yet sensitive and delicate lines of
his profile—for he did not look towards her as he spoke. She seated
herself, but he remained standing.
“Since I was a young girl I have moved among Courts,—France, Austria,
Russia,”—she said, “and I have made the acquaintance of some powerful
people.” She pressed to her lips a little handkerchief embroidered with
gold thread. “One is in the house now—I want you to meet him. He has, I
know, a post for you, if you will accept it.”
The Marquis answered earnestly
“I only wish for some scope in which to work, Madame—the humblest
position, if it will but allow me the bare chance of—some achievement.”
Carola suddenly held out her hand.
“I wish I knew you a little better!” she cried, with sudden passion. “I
may be making a blunder, Monsieur!” Luc glanced at her in surprise.
“I think you know all there is to know of me,” he replied, with a slight
smile. Indeed, his life had been so simple, so open in outward action,
that she might, by the simplest inquiries from M. de Biron, have
elicited all of it and his character too.
“We none of us know each other.” Her outstretched hand rested on his
plain basket sword-hilt. “You might surprise me a hundred ways, and I
you. When you are absent from me, so many things I should like to say
rise in my mind; when you come, you bring a barrier with you that makes
speech impossible.”
Luc’s hazel eyes darkened; with his ungloved right hand he raised hers
from the steel shell of his sword.
“You see, Monsieur,” she added proudly, “that I admit to thinking of
you.”
She rose, leaving her hand in his. They were of a height, and he looked
straight into her face, which was fully illuminated by the strong beams
of the sun. He could see the fine lines round her large, misty eyes, the
red powder rubbed into her cheeks, and the veins showing under the dark
skin of the hollow temples and thin throat. Her thick lashes and slender
brows were artificially darkened; the sun showed the bluish look of the
pencil round the heavy lids. He noticed that her hand was very cold in
his.
“You are different indeed!” she exclaimed, with a certain bitterness.
“Different?” he asked.
She withdrew her hand.
“From all of them!” She appeared to be struggling with some excitement
or agitation. “What is in your mind? Where are you going? What do you
mean to do? You will have to use the world as you find it—like every
one else.”
Luc smiled.
“I am so exactly the same as every one else, Madame,” he said, in a
deprecating tone. “I am just struggling for some little sphere in which
I can let my soul spread its wings—I have that restlessness to achieve
something which many better men lack,” he added, thinking of his father
and Joseph; “yet I dare not profane it, for it is the highest thing I
know.” He fixed his eyes on her gravely, and she moved towards the
wallflowers, away from him.
“I wish I had left you alone,” she said.
Luc flushed swiftly.
“Have you found me so ungrateful?”
“You have nothing to be grateful for,” she replied, narrowing her eyes
on him. “I only fear that some day you may come to dislike me.”
She had not said or done anything to destroy the mental image he
cherished of a slightly mysterious creature, fiery and pure, disdainful
of the world and at heart tender and a little sad; he therefore smiled
at her words, which he thought showed her ignorance of his conception of
her, and looked at her with his serene, enthusiastic glance, before
which her dark eyes fell.
“You are very sure of your own creeds,” she said irrelevantly, “and
narrow too, at the best—I think.”
He admitted to not following her thought, and she answered his admission
by a half-scornful, half-terrified little laugh.
“Do you really not understand me?” she asked.
Luc felt a sudden beat at his heart, as if his life was about to fulfil
its most splendid promise; his eyes were dazzled by her face, which
seemed to him to be suddenly illuminated from within and transfigured.
Her actual presence and his cherished vision of her were for that moment
fused in one; he saw her robe edged with flame, and her head crowned
with points of light, and her eyes of a steady and immortal brilliance.
“Is it possible?” he said. “Is it possible?”
“You know if it is or no,” she answered, and took a sudden step towards
him with her head high.
To his unfaltering gaze she was as unsubstantial as the sunbeams about
her and as mysterious as the living flowers growing in the dusty old
wall.
“I cannot believe it,” said Luc—“that this is going to happen to me!”
“Hush!” she whispered, “hush!”
If he had put out his hand he could have touched her, but he made no
movement, and she paused when there was a foot between them.
“Won’t you speak to me?” he said. “Tell me how much I may dare?”
She never ceased to gaze at him.
“You know—everything,” she answered. “Why need we speak?”
“I know nothing,” murmured Luc, “and I am afraid to guess.”
“Afraid!” echoed Carola. “I too am afraid, bitterly afraid.”
She turned her eyes from him and sank on to the seat with her head bent.
Luc stepped impulsively towards her.
“I
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