The Quest of Glory, Marjorie Bowen [reading an ebook .txt] 📗
- Author: Marjorie Bowen
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moonlit lake.
“Waste time!” repeated the other; “you use extraordinary words. How can
one waste what is so endless, so wearisome?”
Luc paused, with his hand on the pale, glimmering door. His impulse was
to leave without more words, but as he looked at the other man the
circumstances of his first knowledge of him, and the sumptuous beauty of
this spoilt favourite of fortune, moved him to further speech; curiosity
and a certain almost passionate contempt stirred him. For this man was
not like M. de Richelieu; he redeemed himself with no gaiety or wit or
energy, but seemed too proud or too supine to make the least effort to
please or even to comprehend others.
“How old are you?” asked Luc abruptly.
“Twenty-seven,” was the answer, given in a kind of haughty surprise.
“And tired of life!” smiled the Marquis. “Is there anything in the world
you have not enjoyed to satiety? is there anything under heaven you are
not weary of?”
The other answered with deep melancholy.
“You are quite right, Monsieur, there is nothing that can give me the
least pleasure; I find everything very miserable and stale.”
“Yet,” said Luc, thinking of the black coffin, “probably you are afraid
of death.”
The cynic crossed himself with a trembling hand and paled perceptibly.
“How dare you use that word?” he cried. “Have I not said that I will not
hear it? But those who believe are saved,” he added, with more animation
than he had yet shown, “and I am saved, for I believe. No one can say
that I am not a religious man.”
“You hang between loathing of life and fear of damnation, then,”
returned Luc, marvelling. “Monsieur, I very greatly pity you that your
superstitions bring you no greater comfort.”
“Superstitions?”
“I take it you are a Christian,” said the Marquis calmly. The other
shrank back from him.
“And you?” he asked.
“I follow a creed that enables me to smile at death and hell-fire,” said
Luc simply.
“An atheist!” murmured the stranger. “Well, you are damned,” he added
with a sullen satisfaction. He crossed himself again and muttered a few
words of a prayer. “There are too many of you in France,” he continued,
“and now I think you begin to creep into the Court.”
“We speak of matters too deep, Monsieur, for our acquaintance,” answered
the Marquis.
“An atheist!” repeated the other. “How can God’s blessing be upon us
with such corrupting France?”
The grossness and superstition of this man’s slavish religion fired Luc
to a sudden fine wrath.
“It is such as you, Monsieur, who corrupt Court and city and nation,” he
said quietly; “such as you, dulled by luxury, enervated by ease, afraid
of death, afraid of life, staled by amusement and frivolity, cynical of
any good in others, contemptuous of honour and glory—it is such as you
who cause the people to curse the nobility—yea, even to shake them in
their loyalty; it is such as you who have no right to serve the King
with your weary flatteries; it is such as you who are not needed in this
our splendid France.”
“I—not needed?”
“I speak as a soldier and plainly. I am no older than you, Monsieur, and
not of your doubtless great position, but I have seen things—seen men
live and die with no hope or reward save the glory of serving the King
of France.”
Luc’s grey eyes lost their dreaminess as he thought of the young monarch
who was his lodestar.
“Little can I offer His Majesty but an unstained sword; but that is more
worthy of his acceptance than anything your wealth could bring.”
The wonderful blue eyes darkened with a sneer. “You have a high
conception of the King!”
“Yes,” smiled Luc proudly. “I know what real loyalty is—no courtier
can teach me. I have walked among the dying, who eased their torments by
murmuring the name of King Louis. I have beheld men spurred to great
achievement by the thought of him; his name is a power that you perhaps
cannot conceive of. I believe with thousands that he will, in the
splendid ardour of his youth, lead France to greater glories that she
has yet attained. Louis the Great will be overshadowed by Louis the Well
Beloved!”
His thin cheek flushed with enthusiasm; he looked beyond the gorgeous
pavilion to the exquisite night.
“His Majesty is to be envied,” said the
other coldly.
Luc drew a deep breath.
“To be envied! Imagine, on such a night as this, to stand beneath the
heavens, young, a king—and King of France! The whole world waiting to
give you her best—the power, the scope, the ardent love and devotion at
your feet. Ah, Monsieur, to be such a man is to almost pass humanity.”
He turned impetuously to find his listener watching him curiously with
the same expression of cold melancholy, and a certain chill came over
his own ardour.
“I do not know why I speak so,” he said with a flush, “nor why I have
been drawn to talk at all.”
“Because,” replied the other wearily, “you are a fool.” He yawned and
then gave a little sigh.
Luc’s instant anger as instantly died, for there was something tragic in
the beautiful face so utterly hopeless, so blind to the spiritual, so
weary of the senses.
“Good night, Monsieur,” said the Marquis gravely.
The other made no answer. His blue eyes fluttered lazily from Luc and
rested on the floor; his chin sunk on the jewelled laces on his breast.
The absolute indifference of his manner was a marked discourtesy. The
Marquis gave him a narrowed glance and left him.
As Luc saw the water, the sky, the roses, and the moonlight, the image
of the jaded, sad, and sneering young man went from his mind; he could
not think melancholy thoughts on such a night of gold and pearl, dark
trees and fragrant flowers.
As Luc stood at the window of his modest bedroom the night of the fête,
he was thinking of two definite themes, curiously woven and twisted into
one strand of reflection.
The first theme was the diamond ring he had seen the Countess Carola
wearing. He wondered how she came by it, and he was rather vexed by the
thought that perhaps the page had never told his master it had been
refused, but kept and sold it secretly; for that it was the same jewel
he had held in his hand in the Governor’s house at Avignon that was now
in the possession of the Polish lady he did not, in his heart, for a
moment doubt.
The second theme, in no way connected, yet mingled, with the other, was
the man he had held that curious conversation with in the fairylike
pavilion at Versailles—a man with life strong within him, yet tired of
life, the most melancholy of spectacles, and one new to Luc.
While men like this one and M. de Richelieu held the great places of the
land, perhaps M. de Biron was right in saying that penniless,
unsupported zeal would find no scope in Paris.
Perhaps, after all, Roland was dead at Ronçesvalles, Charlemagne buried,
and all the peers perished, taking chivalry with them to their graves.
The moon had long since set, and a vivid dawn was spreading above the
housetops of the little town.
Luc softly opened the window and looked out, up and down the bare,
silent little street, fresh and clean in the new light. Supposing it was
all a delusion, supposing glory always evaded him, vanished into clouds
of disappointment, supposing he was always met by the cold look those
blue eyes had turned on him last night?
Ah, well, in that case it would have been far better if he had died with
Hippolyte de Seytres in Prague or with Georges d’Espagnac among the snow
and darkness. And Carola—his highest thoughts had clung to the vision
of her very tenderly. But what did he know of her?
In the cold silence of the dawn he asked himself if he loved her, if she
was worthy to be loved; also what her eyes had said when she raised them
from the wallflower stalk she was turning about in her long, expressive,
smooth fingers.
He thought those eyes, so full of inspiration and courage and eagerness,
had said, “This is love—somewhere between us—shall we find it or lose
it?”
He trembled at the thought, which he had, till now, never dared
formulate; but he could not dismiss it. That look of hers had touched
his conception of her with fire. He now admitted to himself that he had
been stung keenly to see her wearing a jewel once in the possession of
M. de Richelieu; it caused him to think of the wretched magician’s last
words, addressed to the young Duke: “Beware of her who comes from
Bohemia!” He found himself wishing that she was neither so wealthy nor
so highly placed; yet it was no matter to him. If she was worthy to be
loved he could love her as Rudel loved the Lady of Tripoli, and she need
never know it even. He sternly checked his thoughts. What did he know of
her? She was a foreigner; her conduct towards him had been always cold;
and he—he had his place to find, his way to make, his goal to achieve.
He closed the window and sat down rather wearily, resting his head
against the mullions. The little room was full of a melancholy light,
the furniture enveloped with heavy shadows. A large black crucifix above
the curtained bed showed distinct and gloomy; it recalled to Luc the
noble of the pavilion, with his horror of death, his distaste of life,
weighed down by the shadow of the Cross, blind to the roses, yawning in
the face of the moon.
He rose with a little shiver and began pacing up and down the room; his
old fierce yearning for his former life suddenly rushed over him. He
wanted to be away from all these people, out on the march again with his
beloved companions, Hippolyte and Georges.
He paused and clutched the back of a chair in his effort to control this
sudden passionate desire for the past, and fixed his eyes on the square
of lightening sky above the roofs that were slowly beginning to take on
colour and shape and shadow.
A decided but light knock at his door recalled him to commonplace
things. He glanced instinctively at the brass bracket clock near the
window; it was a little after three o’clock. He wondered who could be
rousing him at this hour, and almost persuaded himself that he had not
heard the knock, when it was repeated, firmly, twice.
The Marquis went to the door at once and opened it. Immediately outside,
half obscured by the dim shadows of the landing, was a young man, fully
dressed like himself.
“Your pardon, Monsieur,” he said at once, in an even, sweet voice; “are
you not an Abbé?”
“No,” answered Luc, greatly amazed.
“Ah, forgive me; I thought I had been told that an Abbé lodged here.” He
seemed slightly disappointed, but made no movement of leaving.
“Are you staying in this house, Monsieur?” asked Luc.
“Yes; I have the chambers opposite.” He glanced with a smile at Luc’s
blue velvet and black satins, court sword and powdered hair. “You have
not been sleeping either, I perceive,” he added.
“I was at the fête last night,” answered the Marquis,
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