CHAPTER VII THE SECRET ORCHARD
Once outside the noisy coffee-room, along in the dimly-lighted
passage, Marguerite Blakeney seemed to breathe more freely. She
heaved a deep sigh, like one who had long been oppressed with the
heavy weight of constant self-control, and she allowed a few tears to
fall unheeded down her cheeks.
Outside the rain had ceased, and through the swiftly passing
clouds, the pale rays of an after-storm sun shone upon the beautiful
white coast of Kent and the quaint, irregular houses that clustered
round the Admiralty Pier. Marguerite Blakeney stepped on to the porch
and looked out to sea. Silhouetted against the ever-changing sky, a
graceful schooner, with white sails set, was gently dancing in the
breeze. The DAY DREAM it was, Sir Percy Blakeney's yacht, which was
ready to take Armand St. Just back to France into the very midst of
that seething, bloody Revolution which was overthrowing a monarchy,
attacking a religion, destroying a society, in order to try and
rebuild upon the ashes of tradition a new Utopia, of which a few men
dreamed, but which none had the power to establish.
In the distance two figures were approaching "The Fisherman's
Rest": one, an oldish man, with a curious fringe of grey hairs round a
rotund and massive chin, and who walked with that peculiar rolling
gait which invariably betrays the seafaring man: the other, a young,
slight figure, neatly and becomingly dressed in a dark, many caped
overcoat; he was clean-shaved, and his dark hair was taken well back
over a clear and noble forehead.
"Armand!" said Marguerite Blakeney, as soon as she saw him
approaching from the distance, and a happy smile shone on her sweet
face, even through the tears.
A minute or two later brother and sister were locked in each
other's arms, while the old skipper stood respectfully on one side.
"How much time have we got, Briggs?" asked Lady Blakeney,
"before M. St. Just need go on board?"
"We ought to weigh anchor before half an hour, your ladyship,"
replied the old man, pulling at his grey forelock.
Linking her arm in his, Marguerite led her brother towards the cliffs.
"Half an hour," she said, looking wistfully out to sea, "half
an hour more and you'll be far from me, Armand! Oh! I can't believe
that you are going, dear! These last few days--whilst Percy has been
away, and I've had you all to myself, have slipped by like a dream."
"I am not going far, sweet one," said the young man gently, "a
narrow channel to cross-a few miles of road--I can soon come back."
"Nay, ‘tis not the distance, Armand--but that awful Paris...
just now..."
They had reached the edge of the cliff. The gentle sea-breeze
blew Marguerite's hair about her face, and sent the ends of her soft
lace fichu waving round her, like a white and supple snake. She tried
to pierce the distance far away, beyond which lay the shores of
France: that relentless and stern France which was exacting her pound
of flesh, the blood-tax from the noblest of her sons.
"Our own beautiful country, Marguerite," said Armand, who
seemed to have divined her thoughts.
"They are going too far, Armand," she said vehemently. "You
are a republican, so am I...we have the same thoughts, the same
enthusiasm for liberty and equality...but even YOU must think that
they are going too far..."
"Hush!--" said Armand, instinctively, as he threw a quick,
apprehensive glance around him.
"Ah! you see: you don't think yourself that it is safe even to
speak of these things--here in England!" She clung to him suddenly
with strong, almost motherly, passion: "Don't go, Armand!" she begged;
"don't go back! What should I do if...if...if..."
Her voice was choked in sobs, her eyes, tender, blue and
loving, gazed appealingly at the young man, who in his turn looked
steadfastly into hers.
"You would in any case be my own brave sister," he said
gently, "who would remember that, when France is in peril, it is not
for her sons to turn their backs on her."
Even as he spoke, that sweet childlike smile crept back into
her face, pathetic in the extreme, for it seemed drowned in tears.
"Oh! Armand!" she said quaintly, "I sometimes wish you had
not so many lofty virtues.... I assure you little sins are far
less dangerous and uncomfortable. But you WILL be prudent?" she
added earnestly.
"As far as possible...I promise you."
"Remember, dear, I have only you...to...to care for me...."
"Nay, sweet one, you have other interests now. Percy cares
for you...."
A look of strange wistfulness crept into her eyes as she murmured,--
"He did...once..."
"But surely..."
"There, there, dear, don't distress yourself on my account.
Percy is very good..."
"Nay!" he interrupted energetically, "I will distress myself
on your account, my Margot. Listen, dear, I have not spoken of these
things to you before; something always seemed to stop me when I wished
to question you. But, somehow, I feel as if I could not go away and
leave you now without asking you one question.... You need not
answer it if you do not wish," he added, as he noted a sudden hard
look, almost of apprehension, darting through her eyes.
"What is it?" she asked simply.
"Does Sir Percy Blakeney know that...I mean, does he know
the part you played in the arrest of the Marquis de St. Cyr?"
She laughed--a mirthless, bitter, contemptuous laugh, which
was like a jarring chord in the music of her voice.
"That I denounced the Marquis de St. Cyr, you mean, to the
tribunal that ultimately sent him and all his family to the
guillotine? Yes, he does know..... I told him after I married
him...."
"You told him all the circumstances--which so completely
exonerated you from any blame?"
"It was too late to talk of ‘circumstances'; he heard the
story from other sources; my confession came too tardily, it seems. I
could no longer plead extenuating circumstances: I could not demean
myself by trying to explain--"
"And?"
"And now I have the satisfaction, Armand, of knowing that the
biggest fool in England has the most complete contempt for his wife."
She spoke with vehement bitterness this time, and Armand St.
Just, who loved her so dearly, felt that he had placed a somewhat
clumsy finger upon an aching wound.
"But Sir Percy loved you, Margot," he repeated gently.
"Loved me?--Well, Armand, I thought at one time that he did,
or I should not have married him. I daresay," she added, speaking
very rapidly, as if she were about to lay down a heavy burden, which
had oppressed her for months, "I daresay that even you thought-as
everybody else did--that I married Sir Percy because of his
wealth--but I assure you, dear, that it was not so. He seemed to
worship me with a curious intensity of concentrated passion, which
went straight to my heart. I had never loved any one before, as you
know, and I was four-and-twenty then--so I naturally thought that it
was not in my nature to love. But it has always seemed to me that it
MUST be HEAVENLY to be loved blindly, passionately, wholly...
worshipped, in fact--and the very fact that Percy was slow and stupid
was an attraction for me, as I thought he would love me all the more.
A clever man would naturally have other interests, an ambitious man
other hopes.... I thought that a fool would worship, and think of
nothing else. And I was ready to respond, Armand; I would have
allowed myself to be worshipped, and given infinite tenderness in
return...."
She sighed--and there was a world of disillusionment in that
sigh. Armand St. Just had allowed her to speak on without
interruption: he listened to her, whilst allowing his own thoughts to
run riot. It was terrible to see a young and beautiful woman--a girl
in all but name--still standing almost at the threshold of her life,
yet bereft of hope, bereft of illusions, bereft of all those golden
and fantastic dreams, which should have made her youth one long,
perpetual holiday.
Yet perhaps--though he loved his sister dearly--perhaps he
understood: he had studied men in many countries, men of all ages, men
of every grade of social and intellectual status, and inwardly he
understood what Marguerite had left unsaid. Granted that Percy
Blakeney was dull-witted, but in his slow-going mind, there would
still be room for that ineradicable pride of a descendant of a long
line of English gentlemen. A Blakeney had died on Bosworth field,
another had sacrified life and fortune for the sake of a treacherous
Stuart: and that same pride--foolish and prejudiced as the republican
Armand would call it--must have been stung to the quick on hearing of
the sin which lay at Lady Blakeney's door. She had been young,
misguided, ill-advised perhaps. Armand knew that: her impulses and
imprudence, knew it still better; but Blakeney was slow-witted, he
would not listen to "circumstances," he only clung to facts, and these
had shown him Lady Blakeney denouncing a fellow man to a tribunal that
knew no pardon: and the contempt he would feel for the deed she had
done, however unwittingly, would kill that same love in him, in which
sympathy and intellectuality could never had a part.
Yet even now, his own sister puzzled him. Life and love have
such strange vagaries. Could it be that with the waning of her
husband's love, Marguerite's heart had awakened with love for him?
Strange extremes meet in love's pathway: this woman, who had had half
intellectual Europe at her feet, might perhaps have set her affections
on a fool. Marguerite was gazing out towards the sunset. Armand
could not see her face, but presently it seemed to him that something
which glittered for a moment in the golden evening light, fell from
her eyes onto her dainty fichu of lace.
But he could not broach that subject with her. He knew her
strange, passionate nature so well, and knew that reserve which lurked
behind her frank, open ways.
The had always been together, these two, for their parents had
died when Armand was still a youth, and Marguerite but a child. He,
some eight years her senior, had watched over her until her marriage;
had chaperoned her during those brilliant years spent in the flat of
the Rue de Richelieu, and had seen her enter upon this new life of
hers, here in England, with much sorrow and some foreboding.
This was his first visit to England since her marriage, and
the few months of separation had already seemed to have built up a
slight, thin partition between brother and sister; the same deep,
intense love was still there, on both sides, but each now seemed to
have a secret orchard, into which the other dared not penetrate.
There was much Armand St. Just could not tell his sister; the
political aspect of the revolution in France was changing almost every
day; she might not understand how his own views and sympathies might
become modified, even as the excesses, committed by those who had been
his friends, grew in horror and in intensity. And Marguerite could
not speak to her brother about the secrets of her heart; she hardly
understood them herself, she only knew that, in the midst of luxury,
she felt lonely and unhappy.
And now Armand was going away; she feared for his safety, she
longed for his presence. She would not spoil these last few
sadly-sweet moments by speaking about herself. She led him gently
along the cliffs, then down to the beach; their arms linked in one
another's, they had still so much to say that lay just outside that
secret orchard of theirs.