The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales

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Title: The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales (1933) Author: Marjorie Bowen * A Project BookishMall.com of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0900571h.html Language: English Date first posted: Mar 2013 Most recent update: Mar 2013 This eBook was produced by: Roy Glashan Project BookishMall.com of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project BookishMall.com of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://BookishMall.com.net.au/licence.html To contact Project BookishMall.com of Australia go to http://BookishMall.com.net.au

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The Last Bouquet
Some Twilight Tales

by

Marjorie Bowen

First published by John Lane/The Bodley Head, London, 1933

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. The Last Bouquet
    (No record of prior publication found)
  2. Madam Spitfire
    (No record of prior publication found)
  3. The Fair Hair of Ambrosine
    (No record of prior publication found)
  4. The Hidden Ape
    (No record of prior publication found)
  5. The Avenging of Ann Leete
    (Seeing Life! And Other Stories, 1923)
  6. The Crown Derby Plate
    (Grace Latouche and the Warringtons, 1931
  7. The Prescription (not included in this e-book)
    (The London Magazine, Jan 1929)
  8. Elsie's Lonely Afternoon
    (No record of prior publication found)
  9. The Lady Clodagh
    (No record of prior publication found)
  10. A Plaster Saint (not included in this e-book)
    (No record of prior publication found)
  11. Florence Flannery
    (variant title: Florence Flannery—An Ornament in Regency Paste, 1924)
  12. Kecksies
    (Seeing Life! And Other Stories, 1923)
  13. The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes
    (Grace Latouche and the Warringtons, 1931)
  14. Raw Material
    (Grace Latouche and the Warringtons, 1931)

 

Illustration

The John Lane/The Bodley Head edition, 1933

 

1.—THE LAST BOUQUET

I

Mme. Marcelle Lesarge and Miss Kezia Faunce quarrelled violently in the private sitting-room of an expensive Parisian hotel. The interview had begun with embarrassment, but decorously, and had proceeded through stages of mutual exasperation to final outbursts of recrimination that were without restraint. The disgust, contempt, and fury which each had cherished in their hearts for years rose to their lips, and rage at being involved in such a humiliating quarrel added force to the energy with which they abused each other.

Mme. Lesarge was a fashionable actress, beautifully dressed in a frilled interchangeable crimson and blue silk, with dark red feathers in the small hat exquisitely poised on her glossy curls. The reticule that dangled from the wrist of her white kid pearl-buttoned gloves was of gold mesh, and the handle of her parasol was carved ivory. There were real diamonds at her ears and in the costly lace at her throat. All her movements were graceful and well trained, at once impetuous and languishing.

Miss Faunce wore an ugly brown travelling dress frogged with black braid. Her hair was grey and brushed into a chenille net. Her gestures were brusque and her voice was harsh.

These two women, who seemed in everything dissimilar, were twin sisters. They had not seen each other for ten years.

A spiteful curiosity that thinly masked hatred had brought Miss Faunce to Paris, and the same emotion had induced Mme. Lesarge to call at her sister's hotel. Yet the first interchanges after this long silence had been civil enough. Miss Faunce had sent quite a friendly little note stating casually that she was in Paris for a few days, naming her hotel and adding how pleased she would be to see Martha again after so many years.

Mme. Lesarge replied in a letter written on an impulse of kindness and had accepted, quite warmly, the invitation to renew the relationship broken off so early and for such a great while, as it seemed, completely forgotten.

But, when they met, the first friendly conventionalities had soon changed into this bitter quarrelling. Neither woman could forgive the appearance of the other. Miss Kezia Faunce saw in the actress the woman who had attained everything which she, in the name of Virtue, had denied herself. She admired, envied and loathed all the manifestations of this unblushing Vice which had made such a profitable use of its opportunities. In this successful wanton who was really her twin sister Kezia Faunce saw the woman she would have liked to have been, and the realisation of this brought to a climax the smouldering anger of years. But, if she were enraged, no less deep was the fury of Martha who called herself Marcelle Lesarge, for in this plain woman with the grey hair, harsh voice, drab complexion, and clumsy clothes she saw herself, the woman who, without her affectations, her graces, her costly clothes, her paints and dyes, she really was.

It was true that she contrived to look thirty and that Kezia did not look a day less than fifty, but they were twins and their common age, forty-five, seemed to the actress to be written all over the red plush and gilt of the hotel sitting-room.

There was a pause in their fierce speech and they sat slack, exhausted by passion, staring at each other and each thought: 'It must never be known by any of my friends that that dreadful woman is my sister.'

'I should be ruined,' the actress said to herself. 'Everyone would think I am even older than I am. That hideous, middle-aged, dowdy bourgeoisemy sister! I should be laughed out of Paris. Why did she come here? Why was I such a fool as to see her?'

And Kezia thought:

'If anyone at Stibbards were to see her I should be ruined and I should never be able to hold up my head again. A great, blousy, painted trollop! I must have been crazy to come.'

The actress was the first to recover herself. Her rage had resolved itself into a steady fear that someone in Paris should get to know that this miserable English provincial was her twin sister.

Mme. Lesarge was not without rivals nor fears for the future. She had skilfully built up many legends about herself that even the whisper of the existence of Miss Faunce would destroy.

So, pulling at the large pearls that fastened her pale grey gloves she said, with some art:

'It is very stupid of us to quarrel. You should not have come and I should not have seen you. But now I suppose we have said all the unpleasant things we can think of.