A Sheaf of Bluebells

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

The exquisite fairy of two sennights ago looked like a haughty and unapproachable woman to-day, sedate and grave, with that dark shawl folded primly round her shoulders, and the folds of her hood hiding her golden hair and casting a shadow over her limpid blue eyes.

"Will you not give me your arm, mon cousin?" she asked after a while, just as he was beginning to wonder whether he would not turn on his heel and run away as the simplest way out of his present misery. He looked at her—puzzled at the sudden graciousness of her mood, and then he encountered her blue eyes, from whence all sternness had vanished as swiftly as does a snowflake under the warm kiss of the sun. He held out his arm and she placed her hand on it.

II

For a brief moment their eyes met, with strange, inward questioning on both sides. Even she—Fernande—with all her hatred, all her contempt for this traitor to his King, this enemy to his kindred and his caste, could not help but feel that here was no ordinary man with whose passions and whose feelings she could toy with impunity. That subtle intuition which comes to every woman even before she has stepped over the threshold of childhood, had told her before now that Ronnay de Maurel's rough and unbridled nature had already been stirred to its depths by her beauty, and that he loved her at this moment with a love all the more ardent that he himself was as yet scarce conscious of its glow.

A sense of triumph chased all other thoughts from her mind. She had it in her power—she, Fernande de Courson, who had seen kindred, friends, her own father, driven to poverty and exile by the brutal excesses of these democrats—she had it in her power to bring this protagonist of those revolutionary ideals to humiliation and suffering. Not one spark of pity did she feel for the man who was doomed to suffer for her sake. That he would suffer—keenly, grievously—was plainly writ in those deep-set eyes of his which, she now noticed for the first time, were of that mysterious violet colour which reveals a passionate soul. It was writ, too, on that sensitive mouth round which the lines of pleasure and of pain were wont to chase one another so swiftly. Yes, he would suffer and at her hands—suffer quite as much, mayhap, as her father had suffered when he had to flee from his home at dead of night, leaving his one motherless baby to the care of a sister as helpless, as homeless as himself. He would suffer less, at any rate, than did the martyred Queen, when her royal husband was torn brutally from her arms by that revolutionary mob whose ideals Ronnay de Maurel would uphold.

It was, indeed, the law of reprisals which was pursuing its course with ruthless impartiality, and Fernande, with the fire of an ardent patriotism filling her entire soul, could not find a spark of pity for the enemy of her cause. She hated him as she never thought that she had it in her to hate any man; she longed for that freedom of thought and of action when she need no longer dissemble, when she need not endure the look of boundless admiration wherewith he dared to envelop her as with a caress, and when she could tell him to his face, the utter contempt, the hopeless loathing wherewith he inspired her.

The intensity of her feelings at the moment literally swept her off her feet. Her heart was so full that tears of self-pity welled up to her eyes; and he, seeing her tears, was clumsy enough to misinterpret them.

"Mademoiselle Fernande," he said, with a soft tone of entreaty in his rugged voice, "meseems that you are sad to-day. Will you not tell me if aught hath angered you, or caused you distress?"

Then, as she made no reply—for, of a truth, she felt that the next words which she uttered would choke her—he added more gruffly: "Will you believe me, I wonder, when I say that I would give my life to save you a moment's pain?"