Read Ebook: Moonglade by Cunliffe Owen Marguerite

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Ebook has 1550 lines and 107778 words, and 31 pages

"Pardon me, Madame Marie-Antoinette," Marguerite stammered, "but you ... you see, Laurence is g-going away ... soon!" Here tears of mingled rage and distress began again to run from beneath the heavy, drooping lashes!

An almost imperceptible wave of delicate color rose to the nun's still features and wiped twenty years from them! She, too, had known those great despairs of early youth--far greater ones, perhaps--and it was in an altogether altered voice that she replied.

Marguerite reverently touched a fold of the nun's robe. "I am sorry," she whispered very mournfully; "I am sorry!"

For a moment Laurence had been watching the picture made by the "Gamin" in this unusually contrite mood, looking, in fact, quite like a little saint in the discreet sun-shower beneath the trees that dappled her slim black gown and formed a bright nimbus around her lovely lowered head. Twice she opened her lips to speak, but refrained. Then, courtesying deeply to the nun, she walked demurely indoors, where, however, as soon as she found herself alone, she raced at top speed up the stairs, thinking, as she went: "Better so. Outbursts are--are--vulgar, as Madame Marie-Antoinette has so sapiently remarked, and our poor 'Gamin' is still so very impulsive--so impossible to convince that I'd sooner not try it!"

Where first the wave, in long unrest Rolled from the glamour of the West, Breaks with the voice of Fate along The shores of Legend and of Song.

The sea was beating into unbroken foam at the foot of the towering cliff--an uninterrupted front of granite, quite unscalable except at narrow clefts four and five miles apart, which nobody would attempt except at low water, when a precarious path of shingle is laid bare between that grim rampart and the lip of the tide. A summer storm had raged for two days and nights along this terrible coast, and now, although the leadenness of the sky was thinning here and there to patches of faded turquoise, the waves, still savagely churned by the wind, were piling beds of semi-solid spume far above the ragged margin of the inner Bay of Plenh?el.

The library at Plenh?el is one of the most pleasing places imaginable. Long ago it had been a guard-room, where the officers of the garrison watched the offing from the tunnel-like window-embrasures, and the pikes of halberdiers resounded upon the granite-flagged floor. Some time after the Chouan wars it was transformed into an eminently "living" apartment, paneled in carved oak, book-lined on three sides, and pierced by many tall French windows that open upon a broad balcony of wonderfully wrought stone.

She had been home for good a couple of weeks only, and greeted the convulsions of nature as a treat especially prepared for her; for now and then she clapped her hands and sketched a merry jig-step or two on the polished floor, evidently in applause of so stirring a scene. So absorbed, indeed, was she in her contemplation, her lovely face flattened now against the glass, that she did not hear a door unclose and shut behind her. She was counting aloud for the seventh fateful wave that all true-born ocean folk hold in so profound a respect.

"One, two, three, four, five, six ..." she called, as if summoning the crowning surge in unconquerable impatience.

"Seven!" said a voice immediately at her side, and she whirled about on one toe to find herself confronted by a very tall man who was smiling amusedly.

"Basil!" she exclaimed. "Cousin Basil! Where did you jump from?"

"From the cliff path, which I don't recommend as a peaceful choice of promenade just now," he replied, calmly; but his fine gray eyes, nevertheless, held a suggestion of the pleasing battle he had just fought against the tempest.

"Why didn't you call me?" she reproached, with an adorable pout. "I would have liked so much to come with you."

"Little girls, my cousin," he answered, gravely, "should not be risked on the edge of draughty precipices."

The "Gamin" frowned. She was too young as yet to enjoy being called a little girl, and the riposte came at once.

"Where old gentlemen are safe, younger people may surely go!" she said, mischievously.

"Old gentleman ... hummm ... m! That's rather hard on me, isn't it, dear cousin mine?"

"Hard, why?" she retorted. "How old are you, anyhow?" And, standing on the very points of her tiny slippers, she pointed at his temples with two accusing fingers.

"One, two, three, four, five, six ... silver threads among the bronze," she misquoted.

"And seven!" he coolly admitted, looking smilingly down at her. "Seven or more, what matters? I am thirty-four, you know, my little cousin."

"What matters indeed! You have enough privileges already, without expecting to remain always young."

"Privileges! You surprise me!"

She paused for lack of breath, and once more he laughed.

"Old! Oh, not so very old, after all!" she suddenly contradicted. "Fortunately you are handsome, and very, very tall. Whew ... ew! You are tall! I love that! I despise small men. They're always barking and fussing, like black-and-tans. Don't you think so?"

"Your knowledge is indeed extensive, 'Gamin,'" he praised. "Yet it is scarcely necessary to be a giant in order to possess a kindly temper. I have met--"

"Never mind what you have met," she interrupted. "I know that you are good-tempered, and six foot four inches. That's enough proof of what I said just now."

"Thank you!" he began, dryly. But in one clean bound she cleared the space between the window and a ponderous oaken bench, upon which she perched herself, her feet ten inches from the immense rug covering all the middle of the room. "And now," she stated, "I must be reasonable, and grown-up, and all the rest of it, so that the person who first exhorted me to listen to reason may not find me lacking in that desirable quality."

"Listen!" she admonished. "Do you hear wheels?"

"Wheels?" he questioned, sincerely astonished. "In this storm?"

"And why not? Why shouldn't people travel in a storm when they are not imprisoned, as I am?"

"You are a prisoner?" Prince Basil asked, with amazement.

"This promises to be interesting," Basil remarked. "A gloriously beautiful maiden oppressed by avuncular ogres, and coming all the way from perfidious Albion to charm the natives of ancient Armorica! It sounds very well, when one comes to think of it!"

The "Gamin," who had pulled from the pocket of her white serge frock a handful of hazelnuts, and was joyously cracking them one after another between her short white teeth, laughed and nearly choked herself.

"You have," she asserted, as soon as she could speak, "a funny way of expressing yourself, Cousin Basil. Why don't you add that a handsome Prince Charming came from much farther off yet, to do likewise?"

Marguerite raised her shoulders to the level of her ears, threw a handful of nut-shells in the bronze waste-paper holder at her side, and jumped from her lofty seat.

"It must be nearly eleven," she cried in sudden alarm. "We'll miss it all if we don't go down-stairs now, at once. Come quick."

"Miss what?" the impassive Prince demanded, slowly rising from the deep arm-chair where he had established himself.

But she had already glissaded to the head of the stairs, and it took all he could accomplish with his long legs to overtake her before she had quite succeeded in breaking her pretty nails, in endeavoring to open one of the tall windows giving on the north terrace.

"I'm very strong," she panted. "I've done it lots of times."

Evidently she was very strong, for the window suddenly gave way and, had it not been for Basil's weight, would have knocked her flat. But little did she care for such slight contretemps. With a ringing war-whoop she raced out, her hair--instantly blown from its restraining combs by the whistling blast--streaming in clouds behind her, her skirts flying back from her slim ankles, and danced wildly toward the carven parapet.

Basil, hastily securing the window from the outside, ran after her, afraid that she would really be whirled by the back-draught over the balustrade to the causeway below. He was laughing helplessly at the extraordinary antics of this queer little being who bewitched him, but when he caught up with her he took firm hold upon her arm.

"You imp!" he shouted, for the hurly-burly was such that he could not hear his own voice, nor her reply, for that matter; but it was not a very decorous one, to judge by the roguish sparkle of her eyes. However, she did not shake off his hand, which quite surprised him, and soon they were leaning side by side against a beautiful mediaeval gargoyle hewn from the stone wall of the terrace, and at that moment disgorging the downpour of the morning hours.

Following her excited glance, he saw, away down at the foot of the causeway, a four-in-hand, fiercely beaten by the wind as it labored up the steep incline.

"Oh, look at the horses' manes!" shrieked Marguerite, pointing to the drag, now almost immediately beneath. "They are blown all sideways. Oh dear! How funny!"

Great black clouds were once more piling up in the sky, and as the horses turned into the wide paved space a few enormous drops of rain began to fall.

The Marquis de Plenh?el burst into hearty laughter and glanced indulgently at Basil, standing ready to help the two girls down. The grooms had jumped to the horses' heads, where they now remained, like twin wax figures incapable of movement or expression, under the pelting shower.

Pulling off his long mackintosh and soaked driving-gloves, Plenh?el turned to his cousin:

Basil quietly possessed himself of a very easy chair, and, declining the spirits by a gesture, lighted a cigarette.

"Who and what is that ethereal apparition who is throwing our 'Gamin' into such convulsions of joy?" he asked, lazily following with his eyes a ring of smoke floating toward the caissoned ceiling.

"Hum-um!" "Antino?s" replied, setting down his little glass and drying his mustache on his handkerchief. "A very beautiful person, as you may have seen."

"I did not see. She was cowled like a monk, and, save for a bit of resolute chin and the gleam of an interesting pair of eyes--"

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