Читать книгу Moonglade онлайн

53 страница из 93

Leaving him on the perron, and Madame Hortense sitting unquietly on one of the terrace benches, Marguerite ran to the stables, ordered her favorite horse, “Gavroche,” to be saddled at once, whispered a few words to the old piqueux, who always accompanied her when she rode without her father, and raced back with nervous speed to put on her habit.

Fifteen minutes later she was cantering across the heather toward the forest, with the ease of those who have begun this sport of sports as soon as they could stand on their feet, but with far from her usual pleasure. As she reached the first pines standing sentinel-wise at the limit of the lande the sun was just beginning its downward course to the ocean-rim, and she realized with a certain joyless satisfaction that earth and sea would still for many hours be bathed in that rose-gold light, which, save on very few occasions, on hard midsummer or midwinter days, is the veiled glory of Brittany.

Nobody at the Castle knew that she had gone out, for she had bidden Ireland, the piqueux, to wait for her in the “yard,” where she had mounted “Gavroche,” and now Ireland was following fifty paces behind on “Méssire-Antoine,” the “worst-minded devil at Plenhöel”—as he was distinguished by his present gray-haired rider from a vast company of mettlesome thoroughbreds housed on three rides of the equine “yard,” very much as the hosts of the château were lodged about the Cour-d’Honneur.