"Nine Coaches Waiting"

As a (Gothic) romance writer, Mary Stewart is a master of leaving one wanting more; as a British writer, of course she makes sure plenty of poems are quoted.

• Quite suddenly I ceased to be sorry I had come. It was as if the past, till then so longed-after, so lived-over, had slipped off my shoulders like a burden. The future was still hidden, somewhere in the lights that made a yellow blur in the sky beyond the end of the dark street.
• I had waited for life to offer itself back to me on the old terms. Well, it wasn’t going to. Because of my childhood I had rejected what England had for me, and now the Paris of my childhood had rejected me. Here, too, I had been dispossessed. And if I was ever to have a place, in whatever country – well, nobody ever wanted you anyway unless you damned well made them.
• Very soon, it seemed, we were in a narrow gorge where road, river, and railway, crossing and re-crossing one another in a fine confusion, plaited their way up between high cliffs hung with trees.
• Nor did I attempt to explain, even to myself, why I had launched so unerringly on that sea of lies about the elderly lady from Lyons, or how I knew I would never, never have the courage to tell Léon de Valmy that I spoke French even better than he spoke English,
• Mrs. Seddon, too, had all the trappings of the competent and superior housekeeper; but her voice and some of her mannerisms had, gloriously defying gentility, remained the homely and genuine voice and ways of Mary Seddon, erstwhile second-gardener’s daughter.
• But here she stopped, sighing a little wheezily, and shook her head. ‘Eh, well, miss, he’s half foreign, say what you will.’ There was all rural England in the condemnation.
• I say ‘hold conversation’ advisedly, because that phrase does perfectly imply the difficult and stilted communication that took place.
• Everybody needs a – a centre. Somewhere to go out from and come back to. And I suppose as you get older you enjoy the coming back more than the going out.’
• His face in repose had a suggestion of tranquil melancholy about it that was vaguely reminiscent of the White Knight, but no-one could ever doubt Monsieur Florimond’s large sanity.
• not the easy charm of the vivid personality, but the real and irresistible charm that reaches out halfway to meet you, assuring you that you are wanted and liked.
• ‘No. But the piece you moved, mon vieux, was a bishop. I’m sorry to be petty about it, but there is a rule which restricts the bishop to a diagonal line. Nugatory, you will say; trifling … but there it is. Medes and Persians, Philippe.’
• elegance, that courteous silverpoint grace just on the hither side of decadence. …
• If that Albertine wasn’t his sister born, I’d have said why not them, they wouldn’t spoil two houses, and them as alike as two hogs in the same litter. A sour-faced, black-avised sort of chap he is and all, for a bonny young girl like Berthe to be losing her head over.
• The cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land … yes, that was it. That was it. Not for the first time I was sharply grateful to Daddy for making poetry a habit with me. The best words in the best order … one always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone’s words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Daddy had been right. Poetry was awfully good material to think with.
• Now, in the faint moonlight, the forest was no more than a looming darkness, a towering cloud faintly luminous where the crescent moon feather-edged the rims of the pines.
• an extremely noisy and shapeless song whose burden was something like: Bang, bang, bang, Bang, bang, bang, Got you, got you, Bang, bang, bang.
• I said: ‘Have you ever thought, when something dreadful happens, “a moment ago things were not like this; let it be then, not now, anything but now”? And you try and try to remake then, but you know you can’t. So you try to hold the moment quite still and not let it move on and show itself.
• There was one thing that stood like stone among the music and moonfroth of the evening’s gaieties. It was stupid, it was terrifying, it was wonderful, but it had happened and I could do nothing about it. For better or worse, I was head over ears in love with Raoul de Valmy.
• So much for Cinderella. I sat quietly beside him and nibbled the bitter crusts of commonsense.
• and then he was across the room and had me in his arms and was kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.
• I laughed at him. ‘Shakespeare,’ I said, ‘congratulating Minou Drouet on a neat phrase?
• My betrothal supper, held between firelight and moonlight in a little boy’s bedroom – to me a feast every bit as magical as the banquet Porphyro spread for his Madeleine on that ‘ages long ago’ St. Agnes’ Eve.
• ‘Remind me to resent that another time when I feel more earthly.’ He laughed. ‘More champagne?’ <这把狗粮撒后就准时开虐了>
• ‘L’ironie. … I suppost its Chance, or Fate (le destin), or something, that follows you around and spies on what you do and say, and then uses it against you at the worst possible time.
• I didn’t let the promise Berthe had blackmailed from me weigh with me for a second; being a woman, I put commonsense in front of an illusory ‘honour’,
• So Héloïse de Valmy, like Lady Macbeth, had that weighing on her heart which sent her sleepwalking through the night to Philippe’s room.
• I woke him quietly. I used a trick I had read about somewhere in John Buchan – a gentle pressure below the left ear.
• Brightness falls from the air …
• if filet mignon can be translated as darling steak this was the very sweetheart of its kind. By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan single-handed.
• This was Raoul, who had been a quiet lonely little boy in a house that was ‘not a house for children’, an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadow of a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin … wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once … but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn’t even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.
• Later, when we could admit between us the commonplace of laughter, he said, with the smile back in his voice: