The Grey Cloak - Page 60/256

Time doled out to the marquis a lagging hour. There were moments when

the sounds of merriment, coming from the dining-hall, awakened in his

breast the slumbering canker of envy,--envy of youth, of health, of the

joy of living. They were young in yonder room; the purse of life was

filled with golden metal; Folly had not yet thrown aside her cunning

mask, and she was still darling to the eye. Oh, to be young again; that

light step of youth, that bold and sparkling glance, that steady

hand,--if only these were once more his! Where was all the gold Time had

given to him? Upon what had he expended it, to have become thus

beggared? To find an apothecary having the elixir of eternal youth! How

quickly he would gulp the draft to bring back that beauty which had so

often compelled the admiration of women, a Duchesse de Montbazon, a

Duchesse de Longueville, a Princesse de Savoie, among the great; a Margot

Bourdaloue among the obscure!

Margot Bourdaloue. . . . The marquis closed his eyes; the revelry

dissolved into silence. How distinctly he could see that face,

sculptured with all the delicacy of a Florentine cameo; that yellow hair

of hers, full of captive sunshine; those eyes, giving forth the

velvet-bloom of heartsease; those slender brown hands which defied the

lowliness of her birth, and those ankles the beauty of which not even the

clumsy sabots could conceal! He knew a duchess whose line of blood was

older than the Capets' or the Bourbons'. Was not nature the great

Satirist? To give nobility to that duchess and beauty to that peasant!

Margot Bourdaloue, a girl of the people, of that race of animals he

tolerated because they were necessary; of the people, who understood

nothing of the poetry of passing loves; Margot Bourdaloue, the one

softening influence his gay and careless life had known.

Sometimes in the heart of swamps, surrounded by chilling or fetid airs, a

flower blossoms, tender and fragrant as any rose of sunny Tours: such a

flower Margot had been. Thirty years; yet her face had lost to him not a

single detail; for there are some faces which print themselves so

indelibly upon the mind that they become not elusive like the memory of

an enhancing melody or an exquisite poem, but lasting, like the sense of

life itself. And Margot, daughter of his own miller--she had loved him

with all the strength and fervor of her simple peasant heart. And he?

Yes, yes; he could now see that he had loved her as deeply as it was

possible for a noble to love a peasant. And in a moment of rage and

jealousy and suspicion, he had struck her across the face with his

riding-whip.

What a recompense for such a love! In all the thirty years only once had

he heard from her: a letter, burning with love, stained and blurred with

tears, lofty with forgiveness, between the lines of which he could read

the quiet tragedy of an unimportant life. Whither had she gone, carrying

that brutal, unjust blow? Was she living? . . . dead? Was there such a

thing as a soul, and was the subtile force of hers compelling him to

regret true happiness for the dross he had accepted as such? Soul?

What! shall the atheist doubt in his old age?