“What does this behavior mean?” she now demanded, standing like a black statue of reproof within a yard of the culprit, her white hands folded within her wide sleeves.
“Pardon me, Madame Marie-Antoinette,” Marguerite stammered, “but you ... you see, Laurence is g-going away ... soon!” Here tears of mingled rage and distress began again to run from beneath the heavy, drooping lashes!
An almost imperceptible wave of delicate color rose to the nun’s still features and wiped twenty years from them! She, too, had known those great despairs of early youth—far greater ones, perhaps—and it was in an altogether altered voice that she replied.
“I am sorry to see you so unhappy, Marguerite,” she said, drawing nearer to her, “but such outbursts of feeling are not seemly, my child; besides, they prove nothing—nothing at all—and are—er—vulgar!” She gave a little cough, and went on, equably: “Laurence has her duties as you have yours. So come with me now, at least until you have controlled yourself”; and as an afterthought she concluded, “By the way, you are both in contravention, for you are well aware that the garden and park are forbidden ground to you when unaccompanied by one of us.”
Marguerite reverently touched a fold of the nun’s robe. “I am sorry,” she whispered very mournfully; “I am sorry!”
For a moment Laurence had been watching the picture made by the “Gamin” in this unusually contrite mood, looking, in fact, quite like a little saint in the discreet sun-shower beneath the trees that dappled her slim black gown and formed a bright nimbus around her lovely lowered head. Twice she opened her lips to speak, but refrained. Then, courtesying deeply to the nun, she walked demurely indoors, where, however, as soon as she found herself alone, she raced at top speed up the stairs, thinking, as she went: “Better so. Outbursts are—are—vulgar, as Madame Marie-Antoinette has so sapiently remarked, and our poor ‘Gamin’ is still so very impulsive—so impossible to convince that I’d sooner not try it!”
CHAPTER II
Where first the wave, in long unrest
Rolled from the glamour of the West,
Breaks with the voice of Fate along
The shores of Legend and of Song.
The sea was beating into unbroken foam at the foot of the towering cliff—an uninterrupted front of granite, quite unscalable except at narrow clefts four and five miles apart, which nobody would attempt except at low water, when a precarious path of shingle is laid bare between that grim rampart and the lip of the tide. A summer storm had raged for two days and nights along this terrible coast, and now, although the leadenness of the sky was thinning here and there to patches of faded turquoise, the waves, still savagely churned by the wind, were piling beds of semi-solid spume far above the ragged margin of the inner Bay of Plenhöel.
From the stone terrace of the Castle the sight would have been awe-inspiring to any but its inhabitants, hardened through generation after generation to such spectacles and such sensations. To the right of the fortress-like building a wall of spindrift whirling up an embayment of the falaise shut off all view of the coast to the eastward; to the left and in front chaos reigned supreme in a fathomless gulf, while behind it miles of pine forest stretched to the crest of the table-land in endless tossing manes of somber green.