Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 37

The fete was ended at last, the lights that had gleamed among the limes and chestnuts had died out, the gardens and salons were emptied and silent, the little Cupid had laid aside his weighty jewelled wings, the carriages with their gorgeous liveries, their outriders, and their guards of honor, had rolled from the gates of Pet.i.te Foret to the Palace of Versailles. Madame la Marquise stood alone once more in the balcony of her salons, leaning her white arms on its gilded bal.u.s.trade, looking down on to the gardens beneath, silvered with the breaking light of the dawn, smiling, her white teeth gleaming between her parted rose-hued lips, and thinking--of what? Who shall say?

Still, still as death lay the gardens below, that an hour ago had been peopled with a glittering crowd, re-echoing with music, laughter, witty response, words of intrigue. Where the lights had shone on diamonds and pearl-broidered trains, on softly rouged cheeks, and gold-laced coats, on jewelled swords and broideries of gold, the gray hue of the breaking day now only fell on the silvered leaves of the limes, the turf wet with dew, he drooped heads of the Provence roses; and Madame la Marquise, standing alone, started as a step through the salon within broke the silence.

"Madame, will you permit me a word _now_?"

Gaston de Launay took her hands off the bal.u.s.trade, and held them tight in his, while his voice sounded, even in his own ears, strangely calm, yet strangely harsh:

"Madame, you love me no longer?"

"Monsieur, I do not answer questions put to me in such a manner."

She would have drawn her hands away, but he held them in a fierce grasp till her rings cut his skin, as they had done once before.

"No trifling! Answer--yes or no!"

"Well! 'no,' then, monsieur. Since you _will_ have the truth, do not blame me if you find it uncomplimentary and unacceptable."

He let go her hands and reeled back, staggered, as if struck by a shot.

"Mon Dieu! it is true--you love me no longer! And you tell it me _thus_!"

Madame la Marquise, for an instant, was silenced and touched; for the words were uttered with the faint cry of a man in agony, and she saw, even by the dim twilight of dawn, how livid his lips turned, how ashy gray grew the hue of his face. But she smiled, playing with Osmin's new collar of pearls and coral.

"Tell it you 'thus'? I would not have told it you 'thus,' monsieur, if you had been content with a hint, and had not evinced so strong a desire for candor undisguised; but if people will not comprehend a delicate suggestion, they must be wounded by plainer truths--it is their own fault. Did you think I was like a little shepherdess in a pastoral, to play the childish game of constancy without variations? Had you presumption enough to fancy you could amuse me for ever----"

He stopped her, his voice broken and hoa.r.s.e, as he gasped for breath.

"Silence! Woman, have you no mercy? For you--for such as you--I have flung away heaven, steeped myself in sin, lost my church, my peace, my all--forfeited all right to the reverence of my fellows, all hope for the smile of my G.o.d! For you--for such as you--I have become a traitor, a hypocrite, an apostate, whose prayers are insults, whose professions are lies, whose oaths are perjury! At your smile, I have flung away eternity; for your kiss, I have risked my life here, my life hereafter; for your love, I held no price too vast to pay; weighed with it, honor, faith, heaven, all seemed valueless--all were forgotten! You lured me from tranquil calm, you broke in on the days of peace which but for you were unbroken still, you haunted my prayers, you placed yourself between Heaven and me, you planned to conquer my anchorite's pride, you wagered you would lure me from my priestly vows, and yet you have so little mercy, that when your bet is won, when your amus.e.m.e.nt grows stale, when the victory grows valueless, you can turn on me with words like these without one self-reproach?"

"Ma foi, monsieur! it is you who may reproach yourself, not I," cried his hearer, insolently. "Are you so very provincial still, that you are ignorant that when a lover has ceased to please he has to blame his own lack of power to retain any love he may have won, and is far too well-bred to utter a complaint? Your language is very new to me. Most men, monsieur, would be grateful for my slightest preference; I permit none to rebuke me for either giving or withdrawing it."

The eyes of Madame la Marquise sparkled angrily, and the smile on her lips was a deadly one, full of irony, full of malice. As he beheld it, the scales fell at last from the eyes of Gaston de Launay, and he saw what this woman was whom he had worshipped with such mad, blind, idolatrous pa.s.sion.

He bowed his head with a low, broken moan, as a man stunned by a mortal blow; while Madame la Marquise stood playing with the pearl-and-coral chain, and smiling the malicious and mischievous smile that showed her white teeth, as they are shown in the portrait by Mignard.

"_Comme les hommes sont fous!_" laughed Madame la Marquise.

He lifted his eyes, and looked at her as she stood in the faint light of the dawn, with her rich dress, her gleaming diamonds, her wicked smile, her matchless beauty; and the pa.s.sion in him broke out in a bitter cry:

"G.o.d help me! My sin has brought home its curse!"

He bent over her, his burning lips scorching her own like fire, holding her in one last embrace, that clasped her in a vice of iron she had no power to break.

"Angel! devil! temptress! _This_ for what I have deemed thee--_that_ for what thou art!"

He flung her from him with unconscious violence, and left her--lying where she fell.

The gray silvery dawn rose, and broke into the warmth and sunlight of a summer day; the deer nestled in their couches under the chequered shadows of the woodlands round, and the morning chimes were rung in musical carillons from the campanile of the chateau; the Provence roses tossed their delicate heads, joyously shaking the dew off their scented petals; the blossoms of the limes fell in a fragrant shower on the turf below, and the boughs, swayed softly by the wind, brushed their leaves against the sparkling waters of the fountains; the woods and gardens of Pet.i.te Foret lay, bright and laughing, in the mellow sunlight of the new day to which the world was waking. And with his face turned up to the sky, clasped in his hand a medallion enamel on which was painted the head of a woman, the gra.s.s and ferns where he had fallen stained crimson with his life-blood, lay a dead man, while in his bosom nestled a little dog, moaning piteous, plaintive cries, and vainly seeking its best to wake him to the day that for him would never dawn.

When her household, trembling, spread the news that the dead priest had been found lying under the limes, slain by his own hand, and it reached Madame la Marquise in her private chambers, she was startled, shocked, wept, hiding her radiant eyes in her broidered handkerchief, and called Azor, and bade him bring her her flask of scented waters, and bathed her eyes, and turned them dazzling bright on Saint-Elix, and stirred her chocolate and asked the news. "_On peut etre emue aux larmes et aimer le chocolat_," thought Madame la Marquise, with her friend Montespan;--while, without, under the waving shadow of the linden-boughs, with the sunlight streaming round him, the little dog nestling in his breast, refusing to be comforted, lay the man whom she had murdered.

The portrait of Mignard still hangs on the walls of the chateau, and in its radiant colors Madame la Marquise still lives, fair type of her age, smiling her victorious smile, with the diamonds shining among her hair, and her brilliant eyes flashing defiance, irony, and coquetry as of yore, when she reigned amidst the beauties of Versailles;--and in the gardens beyond in the summer nights, the lime-boughs softly shake their fragrant flowers on the turf, and the moonlight falls in hushed and mournful calm, streaming through the network of the boughs on to the tangled ma.s.s of violets and ferns that has grown up in rank luxuriance over the spot where Gaston de Launay died.