The Quest of Glory, Marjorie Bowen [reading an ebook .txt] 📗
- Author: Marjorie Bowen
- Performer: -
Book online «The Quest of Glory, Marjorie Bowen [reading an ebook .txt] 📗». Author Marjorie Bowen
into me ideas I am scarcely free of yet. But it is no use—I belong to
my age, I am one with those men in Paris.”
“With Voltaire, atheist, canaille.”
“With him, Monseigneur.”
“My son tells this to me!” cried the old man wildly. “If you want to
read books, read the history of your house; you will find them much good
company and not one pedant! You will be the first of your race to so
disgrace yourself!”
With equal fire and decision Luc answered—
“Nothing can move me. I am what I am. There is only that one thing for
me to do. I will not betray my inspiration because I am a man of
quality—I would sooner degrade my rank than degrade my spirit.”
The Marquis moved back and put out his hand against the chimneypiece.
The encroaching shadows began to strengthen in the long, dark chamber;
they were over the face of the old noble, these shadows, and gave it a
look of hardness, of dreariness, of implacable wrath—a terrible look
and a terrible face to be turned on that other marred face opposite, a
terrible glance for eyes to dart on those other eyes, half blind, but
valiant, that watched patiently.
“There is only one thing for me to do,” he said, in bitter mockery of
his son’s words. “If you mean what you say, if you hold the beliefs you
avow, you leave at once and for ever the house of de Clapiers, you will
never look on me or your mother again, and you will not obtain from me a
single louis if you are starving—as you will starve in your folly and
wickedness.”
The old clock struck the half-hour. Those same bells had chimed when Luc
had first come into his father’s presence in his fine uniform and been
blessed with proud gladness by the man who was spurning him now.
Luc trembled a little, then sat down.
“I meant,” he replied, “all I said, Monseigneur.”
“And I also mean what I say.”
Luc was silent; his hands fell into his lap. His father remained
motionless, erect, hard, grey in the grey shadows. “I must go—even on
these terms I must go.” His voice was yearning, full of regret, of
sorrow, but not of weakness. “Then go—at once.”
The young man got to his feet.
“Like—this?”
“At once.”
“Monseigneur! “—he held his hands out across the table—“is there
nothing in the past that can prevent you from parting so from
me—nothing?”
“The present kills the past. You choose to forget your blazon, your
quality, your name—you are then nothing to me, I shall forget my eldest
son as he has forgotten me.”
Luc answered feverishly, desperately—
“Take care, Monseigneur—you will never be able to undo what you do
now—never. Think of it—what a difference it would make to me if I had
a kind remembrance of you to take with me into the last endeavour of my
life.”
“Go—leave my presence. I do not wish to hear your voice.”
“My father!”
“Go!”
“Will you hear me?”
“Hear you! What do you think it is to me to hear my son speak as you
have spoken?”
“Be merciful! Remember I shall never have a child to speak to me—I have
nothing but myself.”
The Marquis winced and his face quivered.
“You have boasted that before!” he cried.
“No boast,” said Luc steadily—“the truth.”
“Then on that truth we part. Go to Paris and never think of me again.”
Luc stood for a full minute silent.
“I think you mean it,” he said at last. “I know I might waste my passion
on you. I shall never trouble you any more, Monseigneur.”
The shadows gathered with steady swiftness. Luc was reminded of other
darknesses: of the retreat from Prague, his journey with Carola to the
convent, his parting with Clémence. He put his frail hand over his eyes
to shut out the pallid bitterness of his father’s face.
“I must see my mother,” he said. “I think she would wish to say
farewell.”
Without a word the Marquis pulled the long bell rope. Luc heard his
quick orders, when the servant appeared—“To beg Madame for her
presence.”
“Thank you, Monseigneur,” he said hoarsely. He seated himself and sank
his face in his hands. Were there still depths of anguish, of regret to
be sounded? Were there still delicate pangs of pain as yet unknown to
him?
He heard the door open. He looked up, to perceive the Marquise entering
the room—to perceive her, between his blurred sight and the shadows,
very dimly, a gleam of rose-coloured brocade, a flash of brilliants in
the fire-glow.
“Madame,” said M. de Vauvenargues, in a voice hard and bitter, “I have
brought you here to say farewell to your son.”
Luc was on his feet. He began to speak—he did not know what he was
saying.
“No,” interrupted the Marquis.—“Hear me first, Madame.”
Madame de Vauvenargues laid her hand on his cuff.
“What has come between you two?” she asked. “Joseph, how is this
possible?”
“God and honour have come between us,” he answered. “Luc is going to
Paris—o—Voltaire—to earn his bread among mountebanks by writing
blasphemies. He—a de Clapiers!—he elects to go down into the gutter.”
“Hush, Monseigneur, hush!” she implored. “There is some mistake. Luc,
Luc—speak to me—tell me what you wish.”
His own voice sounded hollow and weary to him as he answered—
“I am a follower of M. de Voltaire, Madame. I choose to use what life I
have left in the profession of letters—I am going to Paris for that
purpose.”
“You hear!” cried the Marquis—“you hear!”
His wife held herself erect.
“Luc,” she said, “you will not persist in this wicked folly.”
“Alas!” he answered with great sweetness, “does it seem that to you, my
mother?”
“Voltaire!” she murmured.
“Say your farewells,” commanded the Marquis fiercely. Luc came slowly
round the table, feeling his way by the edge of it.
“You, at least, will not let me go with harsh words,” he said
unsteadily.
“Tell me one thing!” she flashed—“do you turn your back on God?”
He was beyond all subterfuge. Lies seemed then too flimsy to
handle—things that broke at a ouch—only truth was strong enough for
his mood.
“On the God of the Gospels, yes,” he answered. “But what has that to do
with you and me?”
She crossed herself and shrank back against her husband. “You deny
Christ?” she asked, quivering.
“I am speaking to you, mother,” he answered passionately. “I am in great
need of you, I am very lonely and weak with regrets—give me a kind
farewell.”
“Do you deny Christ?” she repeated, and clutched her husband’s hand.
Luc lurched and caught hold of the back of the settle by the fire-place.
“Shall a dead man come between us?” he asked, and his voice was faint.
“The Living God!” answered his mother.
Luc straightened himself.
“I deny Him—before my own soul I deny Him. If He is more to you than
your son—then I go—free—even of your love—free,” he laughed. “I
cannot see you. Shall I go like this? Mother, does your God let you cast
me off like this?”
She stood, taut and cold, at her husband’s side.
“I have no more to say to you,” she replied. “With great anguish I shall
pray for you.”
“Is it possible,” murmured Luc—“is it possible?” The Marquis spoke
now.
“Madame, you have heard for yourself what manner of son we have. I have
told him never to think or speak of us again. Was I right?”
She steadied herself against his shoulder.
“Quite—right.”
“I have bidden him go to Paris—to never set foot in Aix again. Again,
was I right?”
“Quite—right.”
“I tell him, before you, to look for no pity, no charity, no recognition
from us until he has made his peace with his outraged God. Marguérite,
am I right?”
She replied now in one word—
“Yes.”
Luc drew a little broken sigh.
“Farewell,” he said.
His father did not answer nor move from his haughty attitude, but his
mother said in an awful voice—
“Farewell, and Christ have mercy on you.”
He could not see either of them. In moving to the door he stumbled
several times against the furniture, for the deep twilight meant utter
darkness to his partial blindness.
The two before the fire heard his awkward steps, his fumbling for the
handle of the door, and never moved.
When he at last had gone from them utterly, the Marquis caught his wife
by the shoulders and looked down into her face.
“Never speak his name to me again,” he cried; “never! never!”
Luc sat in a corner of the Paris post-chaise which was driving through
the dark away from Aix.
It was over now. He was free of everything; his own master; on his own
road to his own goal.
Though, knowing his father, he must have known this utter breach would
follow his confession of his faith and belief, yet no previous
preparation could soften the pang of the suddenness with which the thing
had happened. For years he had been aware that if he spoke what was in
his mind his father would be moved to terrible wrath; yet it was none
the less awful that he was riding away from Aix, from his home, for
ever.
His mother, too. She had let him go with less kindness than he had often
seen her show to poor beseechers of charity at her gate.
Jean, his own body-servant, had shrunk from him—he had packed his
portmanteaus himself; the other servants had kept out of his way. He
seemed to have left the house under a silent curse.
He roused himself; demanded of himself what he was doing brooding on the
past. His justification lay in the future. He looked round the interior
of the coach, which was full of mist, and shadow, and the wavering light
of an oil lamp that hung above the red upholstered worn back of the seat
opposite him.
It was a chilly night, the road rough, and progress slow. Luc’s weak
sight slowly made out the other passengers. His mental preoccupation had
been such that till now he had not noticed them.
One, who sat opposite him, under the lamp, was an ordinary middle-aged
citizen, wrapped in a frieze coat and wearing a grey wig. He was half
asleep, and his head shook to and fro on his breast with the rattling of
the coach. The remaining passenger was a woman, so muffled from head to
foot in a dark mantle that face, figure, hands, and feet were
hidden—probably she was asleep.
Luc had never been in a public coach before. The close smell, the worn
fittings, the near presence of strangers—it was all new to him, as were
the joltings and lurching in the heavy leathers. He reflected that
henceforth all his life would be as strange, as different as this from
what he had hitherto known; that from now on he would have to consider
things from another standpoint—the soldier, the noble existed no
longer. He was a man broken in health, with very little longer to live,
adventuring to Paris. He schooled himself to endure the monotony of the
cold, the
Comments (0)