The Scarlet Pimpernel (8 page)

"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.

The afternoon was rapidly drawing to a close; and a long, chilly English
summer's evening was throwing a misty pall over the green Kentish
landscape.

The DAY DREAM had set sail, and Marguerite Blakeney stood alone on the
edge of the cliff over an hour, watching those white sails, which bore
so swiftly away from her the only being who really cared for her, whom
she dared to love, whom she knew she could trust.

Some little distance away to her left the lights from the coffee-room of
"The Fisherman's Rest" glittered yellow in the gathering mist; from time
to time it seemed to her aching nerves as if she could catch from thence
the sound of merry-making and of jovial talk, or even that perpetual,
senseless laugh of her husband's, which grated continually upon her
sensitive ears.

Sir Percy had had the delicacy to leave her severely alone. She supposed
that, in his own stupid, good-natured way, he may have understood that
she would wish to remain alone, while those white sails disappeared into
the vague horizon, so many miles away. He, whose notions of propriety
and decorum were supersensitive, had not suggested even that an
attendant should remain within call. Marguerite was grateful to her
husband for all this; she always tried to be grateful to him for his
thoughtfulness, which was constant, and for his generosity, which really
was boundless. She tried even at times to curb the sarcastic, bitter
thoughts of him, which made her—in spite of herself—say cruel,
insulting things, which she vaguely hoped would wound him.

Yes! she often wished to wound him, to make him feel that she too held
him in contempt, that she too had forgotten that she had almost loved
him. Loved that inane fop! whose thoughts seemed unable to soar beyond
the tying of a cravat or the new cut of a coat. Bah! And yet! . . . vague
memories, that were sweet and ardent and attuned to this calm summer's
evening, came wafted back to her memory, on the invisible wings of the
light sea-breeze: the tie when first he worshipped her; he seemed so
devoted—a very slave—and there was a certain latent intensity in that
love which had fascinated her.

Then suddenly that love, that devotion, which throughout his courtship
she had looked upon as the slavish fidelity of a dog, seemed to vanish
completely. Twenty-four hours after the simple little ceremony at old
St. Roch, she had told him the story of how, inadvertently, she had
spoken of certain matters connected with the Marquis de St. Cyr before
some men—her friends—who had used this information against the
unfortunate Marquis, and sent him and his family to the guillotine.

She hated the Marquis. Years ago, Armand, her dear brother, loved Angele
de St. Cyr, but St. Just was a plebeian, and the Marquis full of
the pride and arrogant prejudices of his caste. One day Armand, the
respectful, timid lover, ventured on sending a small poem—enthusiastic,
ardent, passionate—to the idol of his dreams. The next night he was
waylaid just outside Paris by the valets of Marquis de St. Cyr, and
ignominiously thrashed—thrashed like a dog within an inch of his
life—because he had dared to raise his eyes to the daughter of the
aristocrat. The incident was one which, in those days, some two years
before the great Revolution, was of almost daily occurrence in France;
incidents of that type, in fact, led to bloody reprisals, which a few
years later sent most of those haughty heads to the guillotine.

Marguerite remembered it all: what her brother must have suffered in
his manhood and his pride must have been appalling; what she suffered
through him and with him she never attempted even to analyse.

Then the day of retribution came. St. Cyr and his kin had found their
masters, in those same plebeians whom they had despised. Armand and
Marguerite, both intellectual, thinking beings, adopted with the
enthusiasm of their years the Utopian doctrines of the Revolution,
while the Marquis de St. Cyr and his family fought inch by inch for the
retention of those privileges which had placed them socially above their
fellow-men. Marguerite, impulsive, thoughtless, not calculating the
purport of her words, still smarting under the terrible insult her
brother had suffered at the Marquis' hands, happened to hear—amongst
her own coterie—that the St. Cyrs were in treasonable correspondence
with Austria, hoping to obtain the Emperor's support to quell the
growing revolution in their own country.