"Meinherr's rooms are ready, his fire lit and his clothes airing. Will he please to see if everything is to his liking?" said the German.
"Where is my room?"
"In the best part of the house, eccellenz, close to the apartments occupied by the gentleman of whom he has doubtless heard."
"The inconsolable husband?" Maurice's lips were curled into a kind of sneer as he asked the question.
"No, meinherr; the other person concerned, as they say, in this sad business—a Frenchman, I believe."
"So all these details are the common talk of the place," said Maurice to himself. "Unfortunate man!" And then he set his teeth together. "I acted wisely," he muttered; "such a scandal as this would have killed me."
He said nothing more to Karl, and the honest soul, who had rejoiced in the interest his master was taking in sublunary affairs, who had been congratulating himself, in fact, on the very rapid success of his plan for drawing his master out of his dark moods, was distressed and perplexed to see the old frown gather on his brow, to hear his fierce, impatient sigh, and to find himself banished summarily from his room with the curt abruptness to which Karl had become accustomed.
Left alone, Maurice sat down by the little wood-fire, which had been kindled solely in consideration for his feelings as an Englishman, and returned to his sad pondering. He was playing a dangerous game with himself, for he was in that mood which has often tempted a man to tamper with his humanity—to put out his rash hand and experimentalize on the nature whose fearful beauty and hidden mystery it is impossible for him to understand. It would have been better, a thousand times better, for the Englishman at such a moment as this to have thrown himself into any kind of work, to have sought society, however humble, to have looked for some interest in the outer world; anything would have been better, indeed, than this giving way to the spirit that possessed him—this looking for and searching into what no son or daughter of humanity may fathom. Like a fiend's temptation ranbackward and forward through his mind, haunting him with its dull rhythm, the burden of a song that he remembered to have heard in some bygone time:
"A still small voice, it spake to me—Thou art so full of misery,Were it not better not to be?"
And again, with an added force—
"Thou art so steeped in misery,Surely 'twere better not to be—better not to be."
As he repeated these words half aloud, Maurice rose and paced the room excitedly.
"Yes," he said to himself, "a wise counsel. Men, women, what are they?" He knit his brows and his eyes looked fierce. "What are we?—miserable, and our misery makes us bad. God!—if there be a God!"—he lifted his pale, agitated face, but underlying his wretched, wild doubts might have been read there the reverence of a fine soul—"why are we miserable, seeking good for evermore, and finding evil, inconstancy, falsehood? Why is our fair world the abode of fiends incarnate, who burden the ages with their folly? And if we were happy"—again he lifted his pale face, and the dazzling snow-peaks against their azure background met his gaze—"if we were happy," he repeated slowly—"ifshehad been happy—O God! she would have been good, for the soul of purity was in her; but misery brings madness to the blood and thoughts of evil to the heart; and for misery there is no cure under the sun."
For a few moments he remained perfectly still and silent, his arms folded, his brow contracted, looking out upon the snow-fields; then added, this time half aloud, "But one!"
He turned from the window and cast a rapid, hungry glance round the room. It was comfortably arranged, the small wood-fire crackling merrily, the clothes he was about to wear hanging on a chair beside it carefully brushed, his bed turned down, exhibiting the whitest of white linen; but what specially drew Maurice's attention was his portmanteau, which, afterthe necessary articles had been taken from it, Karl had left open, that the expediency of further unpacking might be decided by his master. It was a large travelling portmanteau, evidently full of a miscellaneous collection of articles—books, dressing-apparatus, clothes, curiosities picked up in wandering from place to place. On one of these curiosities, which was lying near the top of the open side, Maurice's eyes finally rested.
For a moment he gazed silently, then crossing the room took it up in his hand to examine it more closely. A case containing a pair of small pocket-pistols, the barrels of silvered metal richly chased with gold. One of these Maurice removed from its covering. He handled it with a certain curiosity, took it to pieces to examine its condition, cleaned it with the most delicate care, then, after putting it together again, spent a few moments in listening to its click. It looked more like an elegant toy than a dangerous weapon. Maurice put it down and returned it to the case, which contained, besides the companion pistol, a small flask of gunpowder and some bullets. These he took out, then in a quiet, leisurely manner proceeded to load the pistol. His attitude was rather that of a man who is amusing himself, trying to kill time, than of one who has any serious purpose in view. And perhaps at this moment Maurice was scarcely serious. In any case, when his work was done he did not proceed farther; he put the pistol down again. It almost seemed as if this quiet, ordinary occupation (for Maurice's firearms had always been treated by him with minute personal care—he did not allow a servant to touch them) had quieted the tone of his mind and banished some of his dark thoughts. He put down the pistol then, and turned back to the fireside to resume his unhealthy musing.
For here lay Maurice Grey's error. Instead of mastering his morbid feelings, driving them away by stress of hard work and diversity of thought, he, like many a strong man before and since, suffered them to master him.
Again and again he would return to the old mystery, bringing the energy of his soul to bear upon it. Again and again it would elude him, till, mortified and baffled, tied down to the narrow circle of self-knowledge, a broad outlook onhumanity impossible by reason of his self-chosen fate, he had come to loathe his very life as an evil thing.
It is easier to meet a foe in fair fight than a giant formed by a diseased imagination—blurred, indistinct, but awful with the terrors of the unknown.
With his small pistol within reach, Maurice set to work once more thinking over humanity's woes and wrongs, gloomily seeking for the shadow of a reason why life should be thought worth having—why it would not be well to pass out from it once and for ever through the lurid portals of self-destruction. What wonder that his unhealthy pondering should point out to him no ray of light, no gleam of hope?
But happily for Maurice, and for the many who were interesting themselves in his welfare, his mind at the time could bear no further tension. Rather to his own surprise, he found it wandering from the solemn question of life versus death to the common things that surrounded him. How strange it is that at the solemnest moments the trivial and commonplace intrude the most perseveringly! And yet it is a fact that might be proved by numberless instances.
Maurice's window looked out upon the hotel garden; gradually, as the tension on his nerves grew less, he caught himself counting and remarking curiously the very few who from time to time passed up and down the snow-shrouded paths and alleys. A woman-servant, apparently looking for some kind of herb; two waiters, who walked rapidly up and down as if enjoying the keen air and glittering sunshine; the landlady, in morning undress, crossing to thedépendancein the grounds, and returning with some utensil which had been left there accidentally; finally—and this it was that riveted Maurice's attention—a traveller, probably a new arrival, for the landlord had given Maurice a detailed account of all those who were in his house at the time, especially giving him to understand that no English visitors remained. And this young man was certainly from England. What other country could have produced the faultless exterior with regard to form, the fair freshness of face, the well-bred nonchalance of manner?
The young man held a cigar lightly in the tips of his fingers, his lively whistle penetrated to Maurice's retreat, hewalked up and down on the crystallized snow with a resolute, energetic step; there was, to the eyes of the jaded man of the world, something peculiarly pleasant and attractive about his general appearance.
"I wonder who he is?" said Maurice to himself. "It would be rather pleasant to meet anything so fresh; he has a good face, too. That young fellow is no scamp."
Inconsistency of human nature, or rather, perhaps, adaptability to circumstances. Maurice a few moments before had been condemning his generation indiscriminately, calling men and women by the harshest names in the vocabulary, longing passionately to escape from them for ever. Appears upon the scene a young man with a fair, fresh face, and he endows him immediately with the qualities in which all his kind had been pronounced deficient! Strange, but true, for such is life, so complex a thing, driven hither and thither by trifles light as air.
Maurice Grey turned away from the window, looked with a half smile, half tremor at the loaded pistol, put it in a safe place lest Karl should see fit to meddle with it, and proceeded to dress himself carefully for the earlytable-d'hôtedinner.
And thus, though he himself was all unconscious of the fact, the work of Margaret's messenger was begun.
For how false is the fairest breast!How little worth, if true!And who would wish possessedWhat all must scorn or rue?Then pass by beauty with looks above:Oh seek never—share never—woman's love.
Maurice Grey's costume was as faultless as that of the young man whom he had admired in the hotel-garden when at the strange hour of two o'clockp. m.he, in obedience to the summoning bell, peered into the long dining-room, at the extremityof which was a small table spread with two or three covers. Karl, his face beaming all over as he recognized his master, was standing behind the chair destined for him, the young Englishman was brushing his feet vigorously on the mat before the door that stood midway in the room, two waiters were hovering about helplessly.
Maurice took his place at one side, Arthur Forrest seated himself at the other side of the table. They were Englishmen and total strangers one to the other, therefore it is scarcely necessary to say that the places they chose were as far apart as the small size of the table would permit. And yet the two men were anxious to know one another—Maurice, because he felt that his companion's freshness would be a relief to his jaded soul; Arthur, because he had recognized in Maurice Grey the husband of Margaret, the man for whom he had been searching through the length and breadth of Europe.
Burning with anxiety to unfold his mission, he could scarcely preserve his composure now the fatal moment had arrived, now he and the man he had been seeking were at last face to face. For he could not be mistaken; he had ascertained from the landlord the name of this only other Englishman besides himself who had not fled from the valleys at the first breath of winter, and Maurice's likeness, confided to him by Margaret, had been too often studied in its every lineament for him not to be able at once to know its original. With the knowledge came an excitement that threatened to overpower him utterly; but he controlled himself. That calm self-possession and a certain amount of diplomacy were absolutely necessary if he would bring his mission to a successful issue, he felt most keenly.
Once Maurice caught the young men's eye scanning his face, and as the eyes met Arthur blushed; he felt, too much for his comfort and composure, that the slightest false move might be fatal. Maurice was utterly unsuspicious; he attributed his young companion's confusion to embarrassment at being caught exhibiting a little too much curiosity, and ne was simply amused, determining in his own mind to find out more about the young fellow, so evidently a gentleman, yet so frank and transparent in his ways.
A few moments of delay passed by; then, as there was no further accession to the company, soup was served. Arthur, too full of tremulous excitement to be able to find a single commonplace, began to eat in total silence; Maurice looked across at him between the spoonfuls.
"Apparently we are to dine alone together," he said at last with a pleasant smile; "rather a different scene from the one I looked in upon a few weeks ago."
"I suppose this place is very full in the season," was Arthur's not very brilliant reply.
"Especially so this year; it is gaining in renown, and certainly the situation is good. But to me hotel-life issodistasteful."
Arthur was beginning to gain confidence. "Do you think so?" he said. "Now, I like it—abroad, that is to say; the people one meets are off their stilts, and generally inclined to be friendly; there is no bother, something approaching to comfort, and plenty of life and gayety."
"I'm afraid present circumstances will scarcely answer to your description," said Maurice.
Arthur laughed: "No, indeed, you and I seem to be the only sane people in the establishment. I gather from the waiters—one of whom, happily for me, speaks English—that the present company consists of an elderly gentleman, ill or out of his mind, certainly peculiar; his daughter, an angel of beauty and goodness; a fuming Austrian, scouring the mountains for his lost wife; attendant brother, similarly occupied; landlord, landlady, staff of servants."
Maurice smiled: "I think you have omitted nobody, only, for fear your expectations should have risen too high, even under circumstances so meagre, I should inform you that the angel of beauty is a child, a mere baby; but my arrival only preceded yours by a few hours, so, like you, I speak from rumor. Now, may I venture to ask how long you will be likely to stand out against such an atrocious state of things? I have an interest in the question, as I believe I am a fixture for some time."
It was by no means an easy question for Arthur to answer. He might have said that the time of his stay depended entirely upon Maurice himself. Not being able to give the trueanswer, he treated the question as lightly as possible: "Oh I I can scarcely say, exactly. I was recommended to come—mountains in winter, snow, and that kind of thing; they certainly look very well, but, you see, I am not precisely an enthusiast in that line."
"Was it for your health?" asked Maurice with grave interest, looking compassionately at the fresh young face, whose brilliant coloring might possibly hide disease.
This question made Arthur turn as red as fire. The knowledge of what his errand really was rendered him painfully self-conscious. "Why, no—yes—no, I mean," he answered, his confusion growing as he advanced.—"What a fool I must be!" he muttered to himself angrily; then, as he caught a faint smile, polite but perplexed, on the lips of his questioner, he controlled himself suddenly. "The fact is," he said rapidly, "I've been so desperately chaffed about this midwinter journey—But, you see, I rather like cold weather, and the air here is bracing."
Maurice saw his questions had been ill-timed, and with true courtesy proceeded to change the subject: "You would not have said so yesterday. Then, and for some days previously, it was anything but bracing up here. We had a fine blanket of cold mist about us—not a tree to be seen beyond the distance of a handsbreadth."
"I thought you had only arrived yesterday," said Arthur, a tremor in his voice. He knew perfectly well whence Maurice had come, but it was his plan to feign ignorance; he wished to draw him on to speak about himself.
Maurice smiled: "I don't come from very far. You must have heard from the people about here of the peculiar Englishman who shuns civilized places—I believe this is the form the rumors take—and lives by himself in a chalet among the mountains. That strange individual is before you now."
Arthur bowed, as in acknowledgment of this peculiar kind of introduction. "I must confess," he replied, "that Mr. Grey is known to me by fame, and being so far in advance of you I must ask you to be obliging enough to accept my card. If, as I suppose, we are to dine in this way tête-à-tête for some few days to come, it is as well that we should at least know each other by name."
"Thank you," replied Maurice cordially. He was at a loss to account for the timidity, the hesitation, the evident constraint of this young man, who was yet, to all appearance, no novice in the ways of the world; but he liked him and wished to set him at his ease.
"You have just come from England, I presume?" he said after a short pause, looking kindly into Arthur's flushed face. "Ihave been a wanderer for many years. How do you like this kind of life?"
"It has been pleasant enough," replied the younger man, reassured once more by his companion's friendliness; "but, do you know, I find nothing to compare with the comfort, the convenience—in fact, you know the kind of thing that one finds at home. Here one can't get even decent tobacco; there is nothing to be had in the way of drink but sour wine. As for the cooking, some people praise it very highly; but—" As he spoke there came up a little dish of vegetables swimming in butter. "Bah! they callthatanentrée, I suppose."
Maurice laughed, and helped himself to the obnoxious dish: "You see what wandering does.Ihave become cosmopolitan in my tastes. From the sauerkraut of Germany to the caviare of Russia I am tolerably at home, able at least to pick up a living; but come, you are right about the wine, which I really think grows in sourness with the added degrees of frost; we might have better tipple than this, and it is an occasion. I have not done the social for many a long day. The 'Wein kart,' Karl. Let us order up the best bottle of champagne the landlord has in his cellar, though I greatly fear his stock is low. Karl, inquire for me—any first quality champagne left?"
The landlord's cellar was not absolutely empty. In a few moments a bottle of very excellent champagne stood on the table between the two young men. Maurice drained a brimming glass; Arthur would scarcely do more than wet his lips. He had not forgotten his purpose, and to bring it to a successful issue he knew it would be necessary to have all his wits about him. Laughingly, Maurice reproached his young companion for his abstemiousness, and filled and refilled his own glass with the glittering draught. For after the dull weight of loneliness, after the terrible experiences of themorning, after the gloomy musing that had oppressed him with its horror, this return, even transitory as he felt it to be, to some of life's amenities was a boundless relief to the man's soul. In the old happy days society had been Maurice Grey's life; it had intoxicated him like wine. Among his peers, when, soul meeting soul, the sparkles of wit, the flashes of gay humor had been struck out in the heat of social intercourse, he had reigned as a king: brilliant, vivacious, boundlessly hospitable, his society had been courted by the world, and he had met the world courteously, drawing out from its pleasures the extreme of good that was in them.
But misery had changed Maurice woefully, and it was only when the wine was in his blood, when its liquid fire was coursing through his veins, that he could return in any degree to his former self—that he could become once more the fascinating, brilliant, cordial man of society. On this particular occasion he had determined to forget himself. It was the flying back of the bow that had been bent nigh to breaking. Wine could make him forget, and he poured out glass after glass, draining them rapidly, as a man might do who was consumed with burning thirst. Gradually his eyes began to shine and his words to flow more readily. The haughty, self-contained man spoke freely of himself, and made a friend and companion of the youth whom hazard had thrown into his way.
Arthur listened silently, with a tremulous joy. If Maurice would confide in him his task was half done already. But love had taught the young man prudence. He would hear before he would speak; he would earnestly study the character of him he had come so far to seek before he would determine how and when his object should be revealed. Maurice, in this mood, was a marvellously agreeable companion. The younger man, standing, as it were, on the threshold of life, listened, entranced, to his descriptions of the great world, and Mr. Grey knew the world better than most men. He had plunged into every kind of society; he had feigned to be what he was not, that he might gain access to that which would otherwise have been denied to him; he had played upon the weaknesses of men and women, only to scathe them with his biting ridicule. Then too, he had seen the world from a variety of standpoints.During the first part of his life as a man he had taken a part in the careers which the great world offers to its votaries; afterward he had lived as a spectator: holding himself aloof from the heartburnings, the jealousies, the ambitions, the intrigues, he had been able more calmly to note and criticise. He had made undying enemies, he had knit to himself faithful friends, he had been concerned in strange histories; but all these things had been apart from himself. As far as his own feelings were concerned, they were nothing, feathers light as air, incidentspour passer le temps—nothing more. He was in the midst of a brilliant series of anecdotes drawn from his life in St. Petersburg, which had been fruitful in events, commenting lightly, even with a kind of sarcasm—for these things could not move Maurice Grey—on the enthusiasm he had excited in female breasts, and on the confusion and dismay which his mysterious absence would create, when the light began to wane, and the waiter came in to set a match to the solitary oil-lamp which was the hotel dining-room's winter allowance of light.
Maurice stopped and drew out his watch: "By Jove! young gentleman, your society is so fascinating that I had altogether forgotten the time. Do you know we have been nearly three hours at table? Now tell me candidly, have you any plan for this evening? I need scarcely ask," he continued laughing; "amusements are not in this primitive corner; if you went out to walk you would infallibly lose yourself, and as far as I can make out there are in the hotel at present no fair ladies to conquer; but so much the better for you. If I had my life to live over again, I would flee woman as I would the plague." His brow contracted. "I wonder why I talk about women at all. They are all alike false and fickle."
Arthur looked up. He was but a boy, and in presence of this man of the world, steeped to the lips in cynicism, it was difficult to express the strong faith of his young soul. But Margaret's face in its calm beauty came suddenly like a sweet vision before his eyes, and he answered, trembling slightly, "I am younger than you, Mr. Grey, and have had much less experience of the world; but I know that in this thing you are wrong. There may be some women who are bad and faithless, and all that kind of thing—there are ever so manymore who are good and pure. Perhaps you have been unfortunate in your intercourse with women—perhaps—" his voice shook, and there was a sudden light in his blue eyes—"perhaps you have made some terrible mistake."
Maurice was earnestly intent on the business of lighting his cigar from the solitary oil-lamp, so that the look on Arthur's face escaped him, but the earnestness, the apparent meaning in the boy's voice, impressed him strangely. He turned round instantly, a slight appearance of surprise in his manner; then as he caught sight of the flushed face and gleaming eyes of his companion, he shook his head and his lips curled into something like a sneer: "My dear fellow, you are young. Wait a few years, and your vigorous championship will die down, withered by circumstances."
He laughed bitterly, and Arthur turned away, a cold feeling at his heart. He could not understand this cynicism. To him who knew this man's history it seemed cruel and wanton beyond compare.
But Maurice was good-natured, and he liked the boy; his very freshness, whose springs he had been trying to poison, pleased him. He took him by the arm and looked into his averted face. "Have I frightened you altogether?" he said kindly, "or will you listen to what I was about to propose?" Arthur smiled his acquiescence, but it was with an effort; he felt in no smiling mood.
"If you like, then, let us adjourn to my quarters. This great place looks desolate with the one oil-lamp they generously allow us. There I have a jar of excellent whisky, and Karl will soon find us all appliances and means to boot for the concoction of whisky-punch, which, if you had lived so long in these inhospitable regions as I have, you would know to be a real luxury."
Arthur smiled: "I have not tasted a drop since I left England."
"Then you agree to my proposal? Come!"
The two men rose, Maurice linking his arm into that of his companion, and leaving the long dining-room, threaded the ill-lit passages which led to Maurice's apartment. The door of the room adjoining his was ajar, and close to its threshold they paused involuntarily for a second or two.What made them stop was nothing more than a child's voice singing a child's hymn: an untaught, feeble voice, thrilling with melody that made it tremble, there was yet in it that which irresistibly drew and fascinated. Even in its weakness there was something strange. To the imaginative it would have seemed like a woman's heart trying to express itself through the feeble medium of a child's voice. For there was soul and purpose in the quavering treble that trilled against the air. With one accord the men stopped to listen, holding their breath lest any of the sounds should escape them. The voice paused a moment and they passed on, but before they had reached their destination, Maurice, who had been looking back toward the door whence the sound had proceeded, caught an instantaneous glimpse of the owner of the childish voice. A little golden head and fair face, on which light from within the room was shining, peered out and looked up and down the passage. Only for a moment, but in that moment the dark eyes of the golden-haired child and the dark eyes of the world-weary man met. The child, frightened vaguely, retreated to the inside of the room; the man staggered as if he had received a blow, and sank down, to his companion's dismay, pale and speechless on the nearest chair.
Maurice, it must be remembered, had been drinking pretty freely and in such a condition as his men are scarcely so well able to master their sudden emotions as they may be at another time.
The face of his child, the sound of the hymns her mother had sung at her cradle, was to Maurice like the dim memory of a fair dream. He did not for a moment recognize the child as his own; he was far from imagining that the little Laura was near him, and the look in her eyes, the expression of her features, the music of her voice, constituted a haunting mystery that absolutely staggered him.
He met her eyes, and suddenly, as in a vision, his wife's pure face, his child's cradle, all the details in their utmost minuteness of a home that had once been happy, flashed over his mind. He did not know how it had come. He scarcely even connected this sudden revulsion of feeling with the sight of the child's face; he only knew that it was there, a haunting memory of past happiness, and that his present pain was almosttoo great to be borne. Covering his face with his hands, the strong, cynical man sat for some minutes—minutes that seemed ages to Arthur—plunged in bitter thought.
When he looked up, Arthur thought his face was more haggard than it had been, and there was a certain excitement in his manner. He rang the bell vigorously. "You will say I am a pretty host, Mr. Forrest," he said lightly; "this is scarcely the entertainment I promised you."
Then, as Karl, who had been in the close neighborhood of the room expecting some such summons, appeared in the doorway, "Try and get a small kettle, two tumblers and a lemon."
In a very short time the required articles were in the room, and with his favorite beverage before him the frown passed from Maurice's brow and the gloomy abstraction from his manner.
He returned to the descriptions which his adjournment to his own room had interrupted, and Arthur was by turns convulsed with merriment, thrilling with sympathy, absorbed in interest; but Maurice's tales left a sad impression. There ran through them all the spirit of the preacher's bitter cry, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
"Yes, Solomon was a wise man," cried Maurice at the end of one of his vivid bits of description. "'One man in a thousand have I found, but a woman have I not found.'"
He flung down his glass with a laugh so bitter that it made his young companion shudder.
"You look incredulous," continued Maurice; "when the gray begins to sprinkle your hair you will come to the same conclusion. Look!" he bowed his head and showed the deep furrows that lined his brow, the white that shone out here and there from his dark hair. "Icouldhave done great things in the world: a woman made me what I am—a wreck in every sense of the word."
The whisky was rapidly mounting to the man's brain. Maurice's cheek was flushed, his eyes glistened, but he recollected himself suddenly: "I am a fool to prate about my own affairs, God knows it were best to hide them; but, young man, you will understand it all some day." He laughed harshly. "Lives there a man who has not suffered?"
Arthur listened to his ravings, and as he did so the memoryof Margaret's pure life, the echo of her noble words, shone out to him like light through the darkness of her husband's desperate words.
At first he felt his heart swell with indignation, but he looked at Maurice and the indignation changed to pity. "Yes," said the young man to himself, "to believe such a woman false must be enough to kill a man's faith in humanity."
He rose from his seat, and stood up before the world-sated man strong in the pure faith of his young soul. His companion had said he would understand this some day.
"Never!" said Arthur earnestly; "God grant that day may never come! I know women on whose constancy and purity I would stake my life." He was thinking of Margaret and Adèle.
Maurice looked at him curiously. For the second time he saw that in Arthur's face which made him think there might possibly be a meaning under his vigorous assertions.
"Life is not very much to stake," he said lightly—"more, no doubt, to you than to me—but I confess I am curious." The cynical smile which Arthur disliked was playing round his lips. "I have given you a chapter out of my experience; return it by giving me one out of yours. I should like to know more about those fair ladies—but perhaps they arenotfair; that would make all the difference—upon whose integrity you would be ready to stake your life." Then his voice deepened and his brow contracted: "God knows I would have done the same once upon a time, but that is past, with other things."
There was silence between the two men for a few moments; then Maurice looked across at the young face, on which a shade of weariness was resting, with some compunction.
"Poor fellow!" he said gently, "I have done wrong. Faith is such a beautiful thing, and it lasts so short a time, I should have left you yours."
But Arthur looked up almost angrily: "You cannot surely think thatmyfaith is weakened by anything you have said."
Maurice smiled. "Youthful infatuation!" he muttered. "But let me hear your story," he added aloud, "then perhaps I shall discover that unlike mine your faith is founded on a rock."
Arthur looked at his companion searchingly. The last words had been carelessly spoken, for the excitement brought on by wine and whisky was wearing Maurice out; fatigue and exhaustion were fast taking possession of him.
The young man read this, and he rose to his feet.
"I cannot tell you my story to-night," he said; "it is rather long, considering the lateness of the hour."
"As you will, my dear fellow." Maurice's eyes were nearly closed.
Arthur went to his own room, and when Karl appeared a few minutes later to take his master's last commands, he had great difficulty in persuading him of the desirability of undressing and lying down between the sheets like a Christian. He succeeded at last, and Maurice slept such a deep unbroken sleep as he had not known for days; but he woke with a racking headache and a general sense of dissatisfaction.
Yes, all the faithless smiles are fledWhose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;The glory of the moon is dead,Night's ghosts and dreams have now departed:Thine own soul still is true to thee,But changed to a foul fiend through misery.
In the mean time, L'Estrange, in his enforced retirement, had not forgotten to supply himself with a means of knowing everything that went on in the house. In most places he had an agent of some kind; where he had not his intimate knowledge of human nature made it not difficult for him to find out the creature he needed.
He had heard of the Austrian lady's flight. This small episode, which in days gone by would scarcely have caused him a moment's thought, had wrought upon his mind to such an extent that a serious relapse had been the consequence.
It was pretty much as the landlord had conjectured. Theproud lady who had put down her pride so woefully, trampling her own and her husband's honor in the dust, was one of the many to whom this man had vowed undying attachment. She had tired him, and he had abandoned her; and from the day of their parting years before in sunny Italy to this time, when L'Estrange and she found themselves strangely under the same roof, they had never met. The fair Austrian had been forgotten, relegated in his mind to the record of past absurdities, but she had never forgotten him.
Her life had been uneventful, lived out in a small German town, where petty gossip is the sole excitement. She had married a man for whom she cared little, simply because to marry had been rendered almost necessary by the exigencies of her position. She had had no children. What wonder, then, that her mind dwelt, ever more morbidly as the slow years passed by, on this one warm, passionate episode in her otherwise cold career?
In any case, so it was. She believed that the man who had loved her then—the man whose tender speeches rung ever in her ears—loved her still with the same passion, and that only necessity, biting poverty or unacknowledged ties, had forced him to leave her so cruelly. After all, it was only a very commonplace and every-day matter. To the woman this summer-day's love-making had been that one great epoch from which everything past and future should thenceforward be dated—the era of an awakening into life of feelings that had before lain dormant and unsuspected in her being. To the man it was nothing more than one sweet out of many—a sweet which, when it should cloy upon his fastidious taste, could be put away without a sigh to the memory of its sweetness.
With the idea in her mind of his continued faithfulness, the Austrian lady had persuaded her husband to travel, only that she might search for her lost lover through the length and breadth of Europe. But for the greater part of two years they had been wanderers, and still they had come upon no traces of him who had formerly seemed to be ubiquitous. She had begun to mourn for him as the dead, when suddenly, in this out-of-the-way corner, at this strange season, she saw his face once more.
It was seldom that this proud lady betrayed the emotions of her soul. It may be that her inner consciousness of want of rectitude of purpose had been one great agent in the formation of those barriers of steel with which she sought to surround herself. But this time there was no help for her. The pent-up torrent had grown in force and intensity, until no bounds could restrain its impetuous overflow. She was a woman, and the haggardness of the face of the man she loved, the stooping walk, the whitened hair, spoke so powerfully to her imagination that she could scarcely be calm. Was it for her he had been sorrowing? And yet in that flash of recognition at the dinner-table she had read nothing but cold indifference. She knew him to be a consummate actor: was this, then, put on? In her hungry desire to know the whole truth she prepared an interview for that evening; but before it her measures had been taken. There was a person in the house—one she had met before—who, her woman's instinct told her, would willingly lay down his life in her service. She would take him into her counsels; and if the presentiment which lay cold at her heart as she looked upon the well-known face that evening should turn out to be true—if she could never be consoled with this man's love—she would flee from the place, leave her husband, give up her position in society and hide her humiliation in a convent.
And so it had all happened. What could L'Estrange say when she spoke to him passionately of their former love, when she asked him plainly if there remained any vestige of it in his heart?
He thought to do what was best and wisest; he thought to kill the madness in her soul by letting her see at once that all which had passed between them was as though it had never been. For Laura's unconscious influence and those struggles through which he had passed had not been altogether in vain; L'Estrange was a better man than he had been in almost any period of his strange, wild career.
Deeply as he pitied the erring lady, he told her the truth—told her that in his heart all such feelings as she would have striven to awaken were for ever dead. It was painful to listen to her wild reproaches, to hear that it was he who hadmade her life a desolation—painful, with only the frail panels of a dividing door between them and the pure child, to bow his head beneath the torrent of her well-deserved anger. But it did not last long. In his dark eyes, made brilliant by fever, in the stern lines written by trouble on his strong face, in the determined tones of his voice, she read his resolve, and with the coming on of darkness she fled over the snows to a hamlet in the mountains, there to stay, under the roof of a poor herdsman, until the first hue-and-cry should be over. Those who helped her flight were faithful to her cause; their measures were well taken, and the drifting of the snow obliterated all marks of footsteps. In time she reached the distant convent, and the mystery of her disappearance was never solved.
But into L'Estrange's soul the iron entered. At the threshold of a new life past evil—evil irrevocable—was meeting him, and before the irrevocable the spirit of the strong man sank. That night he would not touch the beguiling potion. He almost hailed the bitter physical and mental pain which this abstaining entailed. It seemed like a kind of expiation for the follies of his life. He could not close his eyes. Throughout the long watches of the night he paced his room, body and soul racked with inconceivable anguish. The pain was beginning to tell on his strong frame.
When, early on the following morning, the little Laura went into her friend's room, she found him stretched on the sofa pale and gaunt, like one who has passed through a death-agony. She noticed the change at once, and ran to his side: "Mon père is worse?"
"Yes, Laura," he replied; then he took her small face in his hands, and holding it there for a few moments gazed on it earnestly: "Petite chèrie, we must lose no time."
"In finding papa?" replied the little one seriously. "Mon père, I think it will be soon. Last night I dreamt I saw him. Is he here, in this house, I wonder?"
But her friend turned away: "Little one, you are too much shut up here, and this makes you imaginative. It is a fine day. We must ask the good girl who waits on you to take you for a run on the crisp snow."
The little girl clapped her hands. "Yes," she said, "it will be nice, but mon père must have breakfast first."
She rang the bell and proceeded to arrange everything, to have the stove lighted, to set out the breakfast-things in their little sitting-room, and to superintend the preparation of chocolateà la Française, for Laura had become quite a little woman in her ways: then, as she saw that her friend was still suffering, she sat by his side and sang to him in her sweet, childish way till his eyes closed. The little child-heart, by the outcome of its tenderness, had brought rest to the weary brain, the pain-racked soul.
It was nearly midday when, all radiant with color and life, Laura returned from her ramble with the good-natured chambermaid. As she entered the room one of the waiters left it. She found L'Estrange dressed, and sitting in an easy-chair close by the stove, which showed a little patch of glowing red.
He called her to his side, and lifting her on to his knees took off her warm cloak and hood with all the tenderness of a woman, then stroking back her fair hair he kissed her on the brow. "Laura, petite chèrie," he said in a low tone, as if speaking to himself rather than addressing her, "the time has nearly come."
She put her arms round his neck, and resting her fair head on his shoulder looked up into his strong, pale face. "What time, mon père?" she asked in an awed whisper.
"When thou and I must part, fillette."
But the child lifted her head and shook her golden curls. The clear, bracing air, the brilliant sunshine, the glittering snow had breathed a spirit of gladness into her heart. She could not see the necessity for such sad forebodings.
"Mon père," she answered eagerly, "you should not say things like that; indeed, indeed, it's very wrong. You are going back with me to mamma, who'll be ever so glad to see us; and my own papa is to be found: he will thank you, mon père, for bringing me, and then we shall all besohappy together."
For this was always the end of the child's plans. She could not imagine anything else. Her friend smiled, and then he sighed. "Soit donc, petite sage," he replied enigmatically, and Laura was perfectly satisfied.
Once or twice during that day the mysterious waiter interviewed L'Estrange, and each time Laura was condemned to be mystified. They spoke in a language which was a jargon to her; but she was accustomed to mystery where this strange friend of hers was concerned.
The waiter was keeping himau courantin the most trivial details that concerned those inhabitants of the house in whom L'Estrange was interested. He heard of the hue-and-cry that followed the Austrian lady, and of her husband's despair; he heard of the several arrivals, first Maurice Grey's, and then Arthur Forrest's; he knew that they had dined together tête-à-tête and sat a long time over their wine, evidently in deep converse; finally, when the two men were closeted in Maurice's room, his confidential emissary was hovering about, ready to report the slightest extraordinary demonstration. For L'Estrange did not credit Arthur Forrest with so much diplomacy as he had hitherto used in his treatment of the delicate mission with which Margaret had entrusted him, and he knew that fire lay hidden under Maurice Grey's cold reserve. The name of his wife blundered out by a stranger, who would appear to know the sad details of her history and his own, might very possibly cause an explosion of some kind; indeed, during that long evening, whose tedious hours not even Laura's gentle ministries could beguile, the Frenchman was on the alert. From moment to moment he expected to hear the door of the neighboring room pushed violently open, and to understand from his well-feed observer that the young peace-maker had been thrust out from the presence of the proud Englishman, who would feel himself doubly injured by this interference.
Laura did not tell her friend about the strange look which had met hers that evening, though the child pondered it in her simple heart, trying to find out what there was in it that had affected and fascinated her. She would have asked L'Estrange if he thought that this man who had looked at her with a kind of yearning in his sad face could be, indeed, the father they were seeking; but one of his dark moods was on him, and for the first time in all their intercourse she feared to break it.
Since their dinner in the afternoon he had not stirred fromthe one position, except when the mysterious informant had come in to report progress, and then he had looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a glance that would have killed deceit at its very birth. At other times he remained silent, his hands clasped over an ancient staff, on his strong face a look of pain—but pain crushed down by indomitable will—his lips and nostrils faintly quivering as any sound came from outside, his eyes fixed on the small patch of glowing red that was waning and fading out as the day passed away behind the western mountains.
But though Laura feared to break in upon his silence, she did not fear him. She sat at his feet, curled up like a kitten wearied with play, on a crimson cushion that belonged to the heavy-looking couch, trying by the shimmering firelight to look over a book of very gaudy pictures which the landlady, who pitied her apparent isolation, had lent her.
Evening deepened into the early night of the season. Candles were brought by Laura's friend, the good-natured Swiss chambermaid, and before the little girl had succeeded in tracing a history for half of the wonderful pictures in her book, she grew so sleepy that her friend was moved from his abstraction to ring the bell and give her into the care of Gretchen, after a most loving good-night and many tender recommendations to the waiting-maid to take every care of his little treasure.
He did not leave his place by the fireside till his delicate ear told him that there was nothing stirring in the house but himself.
But what time through the heart and through the brainGod hath transfixed us, we, so moved before,Attain to a calm. Ay, shouldering weights of pain,We anchor in deep waters, safe from shore,And hear, submissive, o'er the stormy mainGod's chartered judgments walk for evermore.
Was he to pass another night of racking pain, another night of restless wandering? The little chest which held the only means by which this question, to him so awful, could be answered in the negative, lay at his feet; his very soul was yearning for rest. Outside, the white mountains were sleeping, pure as angels undefiled, beneath the moonbeams; from the next room, the door of which he had opened, came the light sound of the child's regular breathing; in the house was silence absolute.
And his rest might be as absolute as any—nay, not only so, it might be filled with sensuous pleasure, such pleasure as his brilliant youth, that had gone by for ever, had often afforded him; it might be clothed with images of beauty and delight. But, on the other hand, had he not chosen suffering—suffering instead of delight—to be a soul-purifier, to atone, if atonement might be, for some of the self-seeking of his ruined life?
And he could delay no longer; an act of expiation was to be wrought which would demand all the force of his soul to carry to a successful issue; the father of the child he loved was at hand; with all the strong energies of his soul awake he must meet him, and make him own that his enemy's words were the words of truth.
Then—L'Estrange acknowledged it to himself with a sigh—the suffering whose ravages he dreaded did not overcloud his intellect, did not bewilder his brain, as its antidote had done; rather, like the purging fire, it seemed to draw out and develop the greatness of the soul that was in him.
The strong man shivered as he turned from his only hope,and began once again in the unhealthy activity of his heart and brain to think and reason, to live an inner life that was gradually, by its overpowering force, drawing away the life from his body.
He bowed his face in his hands. Where was all this to end? he asked himself. Was he to go down to the grave with the burden of his own ruined life and of the lives he had ruined hanging like a millstone about his neck, dragging him down to the nether hell, without a hope save in the last vague dream of the infidel—an utter death, an eternal sleep?—and this, in his very darkest moments, L'Estrange had never brought himself to believe.
So intense was his mental life during the first part of that night that his physical sufferings were almost forgotten, but at last, as the slow hours went by, pain came, twinge after twinge, that would not be denied, and panting and exhausted, his great strength failing in the struggle, the man threw himself down upon his bed, moaning faintly.
A wild impatience followed. The spasms he experienced were of that gnawing, craving kind more difficult, perhaps, than any other to be borne.
Not the sharp stinging which rends the frame, and then, spent by very force, allows it to rest; but the dull, ceaseless throbbing that nothing can stay, that gives no moment of respite to the overwrought nerves. L'Estrange at the moment felt as if it would madden him. His blood was coursing like liquid fire through his veins; his hands and feet were burning; drops of agony stood on his brow. He crossed his room suddenly, and throwing open the window leaned out into the night; but first—for through everything this strange man did ran the tender thoughtfulness that could only have been prompted by a fine soul—he shut noiselessly the door of communication between his room and Laura's lest the chill night-air should touch his darling. He looked out upon a strange scene—the white earth, in shadow save where the moon had touched it with an unearthly radiance; the mountains looking verily like giants in the uncertain light, yet glistening and transparent where the night-born light was resting; cloud-shadows, whose depth seemed infinite as the outer darkness of despair, blotting out here and there thetransparent whiteness; behind one of the distant peaks a pale line, faint and tremulous, that told of coming dawn; over all a weird unreality.
The face that looked out into the dim night was as strange as the scene could be, though it lacked the utter stillness of the shrouded, moonlit earth. The eyes were wild and wandering, with an impatient, hungry look in them, as though they were searching, seeking, striving to draw from the visible the secrets of that which no eye beholds; the mouth quivered with the storms of feeling; the brow was contracted by a mortal agony, and from time to time the pale lips moved as if in pitiful appeal to some hidden power. But after a few moments of earnest gazing some of all this passed by. It would almost have seemed as though the influence of Nature's eternal calm had been breathed in upon his soul through the medium of sense, or rather perhaps it was a thought from within that swept over the tumult of the man's brain, so that suddenly his agony was stayed.
Was it so very strange? Long ago, in the far ages, a Man to whom conflict and storm were known in all their fulness stood up on a dark night and said to the angry billows and raging winds, "Peace, be still." Was it altogether for the sake of that terror-stricken crew, or was it not also a sublime parable? For, evermore, it is the same. The Man, present in the midst of the soul's tumult, bids in His own time—the best time for the stricken—that the storms which overwhelm it shall sink to rest.
Thus it was with L'Estrange. In the silence and solitude he was finding the great Father, who, though we know it not, is never very far from any one of us. "God is here" was the thought that swept over him through the stillness of Nature, through the profound silence of the night. He knelt before the window and stretched out his hands to the midnight heavens. Who shall say what dreams, what possibilities, passed in that moment through his soul? For with his errors and imperfections, his falseness and his folly, this man was one of the mighty few, a son of divine genius. Will they be judged by another code, I sometimes wonder, than the common herd to whom their gigantic struggles, their vast temptations, their agonies, their failures, must for ever be a life unknown,a sealed-up book?—such a man as Shelley, peering in his spirit's misery through the ages, then when nothing but the aching void, the yawning nothing, answered his wild search, giving himself up to the proclamation of a dark infidelity; or Byron, dying for a dream; or Keats, breathing out his young life with the cry of a disappointed soul? Will the misguided, distorted greatness find in the Hereafter a better sphere? Have they, these mighty dead, even with the last breath of a life tortured with earth's blackness, received as by inspiration the fair beauty of undying truth into their souls? Who shall say? In the presence of mysteries like these we can only bow our heads and pray that so it may be.
To L'Estrange a moment of such inspiration had come. He had prayed before. Often during these last days, when gradually the fetters of self-love had been falling off from his soul, he had cried out in the darkness to the Father of spirits. ButthenHe had been a grand abstraction;now, for the first time, He was near and real.
First happiness, then vengeance, then atoning suffering and self-abnegation, had been looked for as the life of his spirit's life. In that hour of awful sweetness they all fell off from him. God looked down into the man's heart; God was what, all unconsciously to itself, that heart had been seeking, and there was a great calm.
Sweetly the daughter of his affections had sung to him that evening about the Crucified; to the man of the world her hymn had been an idle tale; now all was changed. In the great stillness of God's calm upon his heart he was able to listen more truly.
Bowing his head, the stricken man wept as the Gospel-story in its simple beauty surged in upon his heart. He had often reasoned about it. Calmly and coolly he had torn to shreds the arguments which men weaker but better than himself had brought to bear upon its truth. In this transcendent moment reasoning was not—it could not be.
True, in the craving need of his own heart, in the sudden, awful revelation of his spirit's darkness,therehe read its truth, and like a little child he wept before its unspeakable beauty and pathos.
L'Estrange could never have told how long the time was that he passed on his knees before the open window looking out upon the snow. It was like a dream, but when he rose the white dawn was beginning to rise over the mountains.
The spasms had left him; he scarcely dreaded them now, for the mental struggles that had rent his very being had merged into a great calm. But as he shut the window and tried to cross the room his knees trembled and he staggered strangely.
Weakness as of a little child seemed to have come upon him, and weariness too—a blessed weariness. He threw himself down upon the bed, and for the time forgot all his woes in sleep.
I am digging my warm heartTill I find its coldest part;I am digging wide and low,Further than a spade can go,Till that, when the pit is deepAnd large enough, I there may heapAll my present pain and past.
It was late on the following morning when L'Estrange awoke. He felt strangely refreshed, and wondered for the first few moments what was this change which had come upon him. Then the remembrance of that night's conflict and conquest returned. The calm was still in his heart, drowning in its depths all earthly yearnings.
But more urgently than before he felt the necessity for action. He rang the bell, and his special attendant answered it. From him he learnt that the child, fearful of disturbing him, had taken her morning run with Gretchen while he slept, and that the two Englishmen had started from the hotel with alpenstocks and knapsacks, stating that they would probably not return that evening. From scraps of their conversation the man had gathered that the elder of the two was desirousof showing the younger his home among the mountains. It was therefore more than probable that the chalet usually inhabited by Mr. Grey was their destination.
Mr. Grey's servant, somewhat to his own displeasure, had been left behind at the hotel.
To all this intelligence L'Estrange listened silently. He was surprised, for he had not imagined Maurice Grey would have taken so kindly to the young man who was interesting himself in his affairs; he was disappointed, for on this very day he had determined to meet Maurice, and now another necessary delay must intervene. But he did not express any of his feelings to his attendant. He was accustomed to make use of men, but to all whom he made thus useful himself, his motives and his emotions were a sealed book.
He rose, dressed with the help of the complaisant waiter, and went into the hotel-garden to wait for the return of his darling, and to try, by diligent exercise and exposure to the keen bracing air, to regain some of his old strength.
In the mean time, Maurice Grey and Arthur Forrest were finding their way over the mountains to the chalet, which Arthur was curious to see.
They were drawn together by a kind of mutual attraction that neither of them could explain to himself. Arthur was occasionally very indignant with Maurice's cynicism; he was almost afraid of his superior knowledge of the world; he shrank painfully from his ready sneer, and while he was with him lived in a constant state of agitation in his fear of letting out anything before the time, and thus widening the breach between husband and wife; yet he liked Maurice Grey, he admired his fine proportions, endowed him with all kinds of knowledge and wisdom, and was impatient of the hours that divided them. Maurice, on the other hand, was inclined to despise this boy's rawness and simplicity, and to despise himself for in any sense making a confidant of him, and yet he liked him; he enjoyed his society; the bright expressive eyes of the young man had the power of drawing him out, of making him talk about himself and the troubles of his life.
Perhaps the secret of this strange attraction on his side might have been found in the young Arthur's sympathy andfrank admiration, for few men are above the pardonable weakness of liking to be admired and sought out.
The paths that led to Maurice's dwelling-place were tolerably steep, and in some places the snow was soft, in others the frost made the paths slippery; therefore during their walk Maurice and Arthur were too much engrossed with the one necessity of keeping their footing to find much breath for conversation. But they were both good walkers and strong, stalwart men; therefore, although they had started comparatively late in the morning, the sun had not dropped behind the mountains that shut in the valley before they were seated in Maurice's little room, a jug of whisky punch between them, and on the table the white bread and the meat with which Maurice had taken care to provide himself before leaving the hotel that morning.
They found everything in first-rate order. On the previous day Marie and her little grandchild had arrived. The stove had been kept alight all night, according to Karl's strict orders, lest the books and manuscripts should suffer from the damp, and the old woman had just finished a general cleaning up when her master and his visitor arrived.
The dinner was certainly plain, but the two Englishmen did justice to it—Arthur perhaps appreciating it all the more for the absence of any suspicious-lookingentrées.
"What do you think?" said Maurice when they both paused at last from sheer exhaustion. "This is a very rough place; can you manage to put up with it for a night or two? If so, I will undertake to show you some of the finest points of view in the Alps, seeing which at this season, you know, will render you for all the future a respectable traveller."
Arthur laughed: "Put up with it! I should just think so. I never saw anything so delightfully primitive. I quite envy you your little snuggery."
A sad smile played round Maurice's lips, it softened his face marvellously: "I am scarcely a person to envy, and yet this had been my dream for many a long day. I thought it would make me happy."
There was a bitter ring, a kind of irony of self, in the last words. He looked out meditatively over the snow. "Men are strangely constituted," he continued sadly; "the dreamand hope of to-day are the weariness and disgust of to-morrow." He turned to his young companion: "People will always insist upon buying their own experience at any cost, or else I should prove to you, as a lesson that I have painfully gained, how foolish it is to set one's heart too much on anything under the sun. 'Light come, light go;' if we hold to our possessions lightly, the loss of them grieves us little. I see in your eyes that my philosophy is repugnant."
For Arthur read all Maurice's cynicism in the light of his history. His face flushed. "Depth of feeling is never wasted," he said earnestly; "I ought to know that."
Maurice had cleared away the remnants of their simple meal. They were sitting, one on each side of the small stove, discussing some famous cigars, a stock of which Arthur always had on hand.
His remark made Maurice turn round to him suddenly: "That's rather a deep doctrine for one of your age; but it reminds me you were to tell me something to prove that Solomon, who professed, by the bye, to understand human nature, was altogether wrong in that impolite statement of his about women. Stop, let me see! I drank rather too much last night; still, I don't think I am wrong."
But Arthur turned away. His heart and courage had fallen suddenly. It had been easy enough to think and plan, to imagine how with heart-eloquence he would describe the woman he loved—how he could tell of her quiet, self-denying life, of her constancy, of her undying memory of the past—how, when his story had been triumphantly told, he would give her name, and so dispel for ever the mist of falsehood which had risen in dark clouds about her husband's idea of her. The moment for all this had come, and he found that the heart-thrilling words would not answer to his summons, that his feelings were too intense, that the fear of failure paralyzed him.
"Not now, not here," he said to himself, and then he rose and looked out of the window.
The sun was setting over the mountains, and on their summits a dark cloud was resting, but above it and beyond in a vast circle of rays the golden glory shone. It irradiated the pure snows till they blushed into beauty, it lit up the heavens,it glistened from the torrents. The whole landscape was transfigured—changed from the still fixity of the snow-bound North into the voluptuous warmth of an Oriental dream; the dark fir trees showed crimson stems; the reaches of billowy snow looked warm and inviting under the golden radiance; the distant peaks glowed and shone till to the excited fancy of the gazer they might have seemed hewn out of fire. Arthur looked, and the narrow roof seemed to press him down, the four walls of his friend's chalet were a prison.
"I cannot tell it here," he said to himself; "out there under the witness of the sky, in the presence of the pure snow-peaks, it may perhaps be easier."
Maurice was looking at him curiously. "I fear I have been showing impertinent curiosity," he said lightly, "but you drew it on yourself. Why did you interest me so strangely?"
"I spoke impulsively," replied Arthur in the same light manner, "and, I think, rather underrated the difficulties of what I was attempting. For this once you must excuse me. I have a certain disinclination, for which I really am at a loss to account, to telling my story (a very simple one, after all) in this place. If you can preserve your interest till to-morrow, I will promise not to disappoint you. Take me to the point you mentioned just now, and there I will tell you as well as I can."
As he spoke the last words the young man's voice deepened, and there was a certain solemnity in his manner which aroused Maurice's curiosity; but he said nothing more on the subject, and the two men smoked on in silence till the golden glory had passed from the earth, and the snow lay pale once more under the gray mystery of a northern night. Then Maurice looked at his young companion across the interval of shadow, and saw, by the light which gleamed fitfully from the open stove, that there was a deep thoughtfulness on his brow.
Perhaps it was this that drew him on to speak as he did. "You have only begun life," he said, "I have lived out mine, at least all the good that is in it, and yet, I scarcely know how it is, I have been drawn on to speak to you as I seldom speak to either men or women. I don't say I have no friends. I have made many, and good ones too, in the course of mywanderings, and I have appreciated their friendship, but to the best of them all my life has been a sealed-up book." He paused a little, puffing away silently, and Arthur did not speak, only the earnestness on his face deepened as he literally trembled with hope.
For Arthur's heart was as true as steel. He had thrown himself with a self-denying ardor that nothing could curb into Margaret's cause. She was still the queen of his heart, but since those first days, when her regal beauty and apparent friendlessness had driven him nearly mad with longing and desire, his queen had risen to a far loftier place in his thoughts and dreams. There was something very beautiful and rare in this unselfish devotion. Margaretfor himself, even if he had found that her husband was dead, Arthur never imagined for a moment; in so far he had gained full victory over his own heart. Margaret happy, Margaret raised to her true position, restored to her undoubted rights, and byhisinstrumentality,—this was the proud desire of his soul. Therefore it was that he hung upon Maurice's words that evening, rejoicing with trembling that so far he had been successful.
Young and inexperienced as he was, he saw the world-weary man trusted him. This was something gained, a step in the right direction.
Arthur scanned his companion's face curiously during the silence that followed his last words. It was a mobile face, though for years it had been trained to express nothing but cynic indifference to life and its concerns. On this special evening Maurice had given way, and emotions for which few of his friends would have given him credit were writing their impress on his brow.
He got up suddenly, and crossing to the window shut out the pale snow. "It is desolate," he said in a low tone; "it makes one shiver." Then he lighted a small reading-lamp, that cast a warm yellow light over the room, and sat down again. "I saw a picture once," he continued in the same low voice, "and the snow out there makes me think of it. It was an English scene, a bit out of a village, the church lit up from inside, a house near it, the pleasant firelight shining from within crimson curtains; outside, snow anddesolation. There was a solitary figure amongst it all—a woman with thin tattered clothes and haggard face in which could be seen the remnants of beauty. She was shivering alone in the cold and darkness, looking piteously in at the light. Some moral was tacked on to it, for, if I remember rightly, I came across this long ago in a book or magazine. The whole runs strangely in my mind to-night."