Free The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

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