A few days later there arrived by post the 'Spiritù Santo' of Mexico,
addressed to the Professor Joachim Greswold.
If he had received the order of the Saint Esprit he would not have
been more honoured, more enchanted; and he was deeply touched by the
remembrance of him testified by the gift whose donor he supposed
was back in the gay world of men, not knowing the spell which the
snow mountains of the Tauern had cast on a worldly soul. When he was
admitted to the presence of the Princess Ottilie to consult with her
on her various ailments, she conversed with him of this passer-by who
had so fascinated her fancy, and she even went so far as to permit him
to bring her the great volumes of the "Mexico" out of the library,
and point her out those chapters which he considered most likely to
interest her.
'It is the work of a true Catholic and gentleman,' she said with
satisfaction, and perused with special commendation the passages which
treated of the noble conduct of the Catholic priesthood in those
regions, their frequent martyrdom and their devoted self-negation. When
she had thoroughly identified their late guest with the editor of these
goodly and blameless volumes, she was content to declare that better
credentials no man could bear. Indeed she talked so continually of
this single point of interest in her monotonous routine of life, that
her niece said to her, with a jest that was more than half earnest,
'Dearest mother, almost you make me regret that this gentleman did
not break his neck over the Engelhorn, or sink with his rifle in the
Szalrassee.'
'The spinet would never have spoken,' said the Princess; 'and I am
surprised that a Christian woman can say such things, even in joke!'
The weather cleared, the sun shone, the gardens began to grow gorgeous,
and great parterres of roses glowed between the emerald of the velvet
lawns: an Austrian garden has not a long life, but it has a very
brilliant one. All on a sudden, as the rains ceased, every alley,
group, and terrace were filled with every variety of blossom, and
the flora of Africa and India was planted out side by side with the
gentians and the alpine roses natural to the soil. All the northern
coniferæ spread the deep green of their branches above the turf, and
the larch, the birch, the beech, and the oak were massed in clusters,
or spread away in long avenues--deep defiles of foliage through which
the water of the lake far down below glistened like a jewel.
'If your friend had been a fortnight later he would have seen
Hohenszalras in all its beauty,' said its mistress once to the
Princess Ottilie. 'It has two seasons of perfection: one its midsummer
flowering, and the other when all the world is frozen round it.'
The Princess shivered in retrospect and in anticipation. She hated
winter. 'I should never live through another winter,' she said with a
sigh.
'Then you shall not be tried by one; we will go elsewhere,' said Wanda,
to whom the ice-bound world, the absolute silence, the sense of the
sleigh flying over the hard snow, the perfect purity of the rarefied
air of night and day, made up the most welcome season of the year.
'I suppose it is dull for you,' she added, indulgently. 'I have so
many occupations in the winter; a pair of skates and a sleigh are to me
of all forms of motion the most delightful. But you, shut up in your
blue-room, do no doubt find our winter hard and long.'
'I hybernate, I do not live,' said the Princess, pettishly. 'It is not
even as if the house were full.'
'With ill-assorted guests whose cumbersome weariness one would have
to try all day long to dissipate! Oh, my dear aunt, of all wearisome
_corvées_ the world holds there is nothing so bad as a house
party--even when Egon is here to lead the cotillion and the hunting.'
'You are very inhospitable!'
'That is the third time lately you have made that charge against me. I
begin to fear that I must deserve it.'
'You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you are hospitable to the poor. You set
pedlars, or mule-drivers, or travelling clockmakers, by the dozen round
your hall fires, and you would feed a pilgrimage all the winter long.
But to your own order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In
your mother's time the Schloss had two hundred guests for the autumn
parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to Easter, was
always spent in the capital.'
'She liked that, I suppose.'
'Of course she liked it; everyone ought to like it at what was her age
then, and what is yours now.'
'I like this,' said the Countess Wanda, to change the subject, as
the servants set a little Japanese tea-table and two arm-chairs of
gilt osier-work under one of the Siberian pines, whose boughs spread
tent-like over the grass, on which the dogs were already stretched in
anticipation of sugar and cakes.
From this lawn there were seen only the old keep of the burg and the
turrets and towers of the rest of the building; ivy clambered over
one-half of the great stone pile, that had been raised with hewn
rock in the ninth century; and some arolla pines grew about it. A
low terrace, with low broad steps, separated it from the gardens. A
balustrade of stone, ivy-mantled, protected the gardens from the rocks;
while these plunged in a perpendicular descent of a hundred feet into
the lake. Some black yews and oaks, very large and old, grew against
the low stone pillars. It was a favourite spot with the mistress of
Hohenszalras; it looked westward, and beyond the masses of the vast
forests there shone the snow summit of the Venediger and the fantastic
peaks of the Klein and Kristallwand, whilst on a still day there could
be heard a low sound which she, familiar with it, knew came from the
thunder of the subterranean torrents filling the Szalrassee.
'Oh, it is very nice,' said the Princess, a little deprecatingly. 'And
of course I at my years want nothing better than a gilt chair in the
sunshine. But then there is so very little sunshine! The chair must
generally stand by the stove! And I confess that I think it would be
fitter for your years and your rank if these chairs were multiplied
by ten or twenty, and if there were some pretty people laughing and
talking and playing games in those great gardens.'
'It is glorious weather now,' said her niece, who would not assent and
did not desire to dispute.
'Yes,' interrupted the Princess. 'But it will rain to-morrow. You know
we never have two fine days together.'
'We will take it while we have it, and be thankful,' said Wanda, with a
good-humour that refused to be ruffled. 'Here is Hubert coming out to
us. What can he want? He looks very startled and alarmed.'
The old major-domo's face was indeed gravely troubled, as he bowed
before his lady.
'Pardon me the intrusion, my Countess,' he said hurriedly. 'But I
thought it right to inform you myself that a lad has come over from
Steiner's Inn to say that the foreign gentleman who was here fifteen
days ago has had an accident on the Umbal glacier. It seems he stayed
on in Matrey for sake of the climbing and the shooting. I do not make
out from the boy what the accident was, but the Umbal is very dangerous
at this season. The gentleman lies now at Pregratten. You know, my
ladies, what a very wretched place that is.'
'I suppose they have come for the Herr Professor?' said Wanda, vaguely
disturbed, while the Princess very sorrowfully was putting a score of
irrelevant questions which Hubert could not answer.
'No doubt he has no doctor there, and these people send for that
reason,' said Wanda, interrupting with an apology for the useless
interrogations. 'Get horses ready directly, and send for Greswold at
once wherever he may be. But it is a long bad way to Pregratten; I do
not see how he can return under twenty-four hours.'
'Let him stay two nights, if he be wanted,' said the Princess, to whom
she spoke. She had always insisted that the physician should never be
an hour out of Hohenszalras whilst she was in it.
'Your friend has been trying to shoot a _kuttengeier_ again, I
suppose,' said her niece, with a smile. 'He is very adventurous.'
'And you are very heartless.'
Wanda did not deny the charge; but she went into the house, saw the
doctor, and requested him to take everything with him of linen, wines,
food, or cordials that might possibly be wanted.
'And stay as long as you are required,' she added, 'and send mules
over to us for anything you wish for. Do not think of us. If my dear
aunt should ail anything I can dispatch a messenger to you, or call a
physician from Salzburg.'
Herr Joachim said a very few words, thanked her gratefully, and took
his departure behind two sure-footed mountain cobs that could climb
almost like chamois.
'I think one of the Fathers should have gone too,' said Mme. Ottilie,
regretfully.
'I hope he is not _in extremis_,' said her niece. 'And I fear if he
were he would hardly care for spiritual assistance.'
'You are so prejudiced against him, Wanda!'
'I do not think I am ever prejudiced,' said the Countess von Szalras.
'That is so like a prejudiced person!' said the Princess, triumphantly.
For twenty-four hours they heard nothing from Pregratten, which is in
itself a miserable little hamlet lying amidst some of the grandest
scenes that the earth holds: towards evening the next day a lad of the
village came on a mule and brought a letter to his ladies from the Herr
Professor, who wrote that the accident had been due, as usual, to the
gentleman's own carelessness, and to the fact of the snow being melted
by the midsummer sun until it was a thin crust over a deep crevasse.
He had found his patient suffering from severe contusions, high fever,
lethargy, and neuralgic pains, but he did not as yet consider there
were seriously dangerous symptoms. He begged permission to remain, and
requested certain things to be sent to him from his medicine-chests and
the kitchens.
The boy slept at Hohenszalras that night, and in the morning returned
over the hills to Pregratten with all the doctor had asked for. Wanda
selected the medicines herself, and sent also some fruit and wine for
which he did not ask: the Princess sent a bone of S. Ottilie in an
ivory case and the assurance of her constant prayers. She was sincerely
anxious and troubled. 'Such a charming person, and so handsome,' she
said again and again. 'I suppose the priest of Pregratten is with
him.' Her niece did not remind her that her physician did not greatly
love any priests whatever, though on that subject he was always
discreetly mute at Hohenszalras.
For the next ten days Greswold stayed at Pregratten, and the Princess
bore his absence, since it was to serve a person who had had the good
fortune to fascinate her, and whom also she chose to uphold because her
niece was, as she considered, unjust to him. Moreover, life at the burg
was very dull to the Princess, whatever it might be to its châtelaine,
who had so much interest in its farms, its schools, its mountains, and
its villages: an interest which to her great-aunt seemed quite out of
place, as all those questions, she considered, should belong to the
priesthood and the stewards, who ought not to be disturbed in their
direction, the one of spiritual and the other of agricultural matters.
This break in the monotony of her time was agreeable to her--of the
bulletins from Pregratten, of the dispatch of all that was wanted,
of the additional pleasure of complaining that she was deprived of
her doctor's counsels, and also of feeling at the same time that in
enduring this deprivation she was doing a charitable and self-denying
action. She further insisted on sending out to Steiner's Inn, greatly
to his own discomfort, her own confessor.
'Nobles of Brittany have always deep religious feeling,' she said to
her niece; 'and Father Ferdinand has such skill and persuasion with the
dying.'
'But no one is dying,' said Wanda, a little impatiently.
'That is more than any human being can tell,' said the Princess,
piously. 'At all events, Father Ferdinand always uses every occasion
judiciously and well.'
Father Ferdinand, however, was not very comfortable in Pregratten, and
soon returned, much jolted and worn by the transit on a hill pony.
He was reserved about his visitation, and told his patroness sadly
that he had been unable to effect much spiritual good, but that the
stranger was certainly recovering from his hurts, and had the ivory
case of S. Ottilie on his pillow; he had seemed averse, however, to
confession, and therefore, of course, there had been no possibility for
administration of the Sacrament.
The Princess was inclined to set this rebelliousness down to the fault
of the physician, and determined to talk seriously to Greswold on
spiritual belief as soon as he should return.
'If he be not orthodox we cannot keep him,' she said severely.
'He is orthodox, dear aunt,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. 'He
adores the wonders of every tiny blossom that blows, and every little
moss that clothes the rocks.'
'What a profane, almost sacrilegious answer!' said the Princess. 'I
never should have imagined that _you_ would have jested on sacred
themes.'
'I did not intend a jest. I was never more serious. A life like our old
Professor's is a perpetual prayer.'
'Your great-aunt Walburga belonged to the Perpetual Adoration,'
rejoined the Princess, who only heard the last word but one. 'The order
was very severe. I always think it too great a strain on finite human
powers. She was betrothed to the Margraf Paul, but he was killed at
Austerlitz, and she took refuge in a life of devotion. I always used
to think that you would change Hohenszalras into a sacred foundation;
but now I am afraid. You are a deeply religious woman, Wanda--at least
I have always thought so--but you read too much German and French
philosophy, and I fear it takes something from your fervour, from your
entirety of devotion. You have a certain liberty of expression that
alarms me at times.'
'I think it is a poor faith that dares not examine its adversaries'
charges,' said her niece, quietly. 'You would have faith blindfolded.
They call me a bigot at the Court, however. So you see it is hard to
please all.'
'Bigot is not a word for a Christian and Catholic sovereign to employ,'
said the Princess, severely. 'Her Majesty must know that there can
never be too great an excess in faith and service.'
On the eleventh day Greswold returned over the hills and was admitted
to immediate audience with his ladies.
'Herr von Sabran is well enough for me to leave him,' he said, after
his first very humble salutations. 'But if your excellencies permit
it would be desirable for me to return there in a day or two. Yes,
my ladies, he is lying at Steiner's Inn in Pregratten, a poor place
enough, but your goodness supplied much that was lacking in comfort.
He can be moved before long. There was never any great danger, but it
was a very bad accident. He is a good mountaineer it seems, and he had
been climbing a vast deal in the Venediger group; that morning he meant
to cross the Umbal glacier to the Ahrenthal, and he refused to take a
guide, so Isaiah Steiner tells me.'
'But I thought he left here to go to Paris?'
'He did so, my Countess,' answered the doctor. 'But it seems he loves
the mountains, and their spell fell on him. When he sent back your
postillions he went on foot to Matrey, and there he remained; he
thought the weather advanced enough to make climbing safe; but it is
a dangerous pastime so early in summer, though Christ from Matrey,
who came over to see him, tells me he is of the first form as a
mountaineer. He reached the Clarahutte safely, and broke his fast
there; crossing the Umbal the ice gave way, and he fell into a deep
crevasse. He would be a dead man if a hunter on the Welitz side had
not seen him disappear and given the alarm at the hut. With ropes and
men enough they contrived to haul him up, after some hours, from a
great depth. These accidents are very common, and he has to thank his
own folly in going out on to the glacier unaccompanied. Of course he
was insensible, contused, and in high fever when I reached there: the
surgeon they had called from Lienz was an ignorant, who would soon
have sent him for ever to as great a deep as the crevasse. He is very
grateful to you both, my ladies, and would be more so were he not so
angry with himself that it makes him sullen with the world. Men of his
kind bear isolation and confinement ill. Steiner's is a dull place:
there is nothing to hear but the tolling of the church bell and the
fret of the Isel waters.'
'That means, my friend, that you want him moved as soon as he can
bear it?' said Wanda. 'I think he cannot very well come here. We know
nothing of him. But there is no reason why you should not bring him
to the Lake Monastery. There is a good guest-chamber (the Archbishop
stayed there once), and he could have your constant care there, and
from here every comfort.'
'Why should he not be brought to this house?' interrupted Mme. Ottilie;
'there are fifty men in it already----'
'Servants and priests, no strangers. Beside, this gentleman will be
much more at his ease on the Holy Isle, where he can recompense the
monks at his pleasure; he would feel infinitely annoyed to be further
burdened with a hospitality he never asked!'
'Of course it is as you please!' said the Princess, a little irritably.
'Dear aunt! when he is on the island you can send him all the luxuries
and all the holy books you may think good for him. Go over to the monks
if you will be so kind, Herr Joachim, and prepare them for a sick
guest; and as for transport and all the rest of the assistance you may
need, use the horses and the household as you see fit. I give you carte
blanche. I know your wisdom and your prudence and your charity.'
The physician again returned to Pregratten, where he found his patient
fretting with restless impatience at his enforced imprisonment. He had
a difficulty in persuading Sabran to go back to that Szalrassee which
had cost him so dear; but when he was assured that he could pay the
monks what he chose for their hospitality, he at last consented to be
taken to the island.
'I shall see her again,' he thought, with a little anger at himself.
The mountain spirits had their own way of granting wishes, but they had
granted his.
On the Holy Isle of the Szalrassee there was a small Dominican
congregation, never more than twelve, of men chiefly peasant-born,
and at this time all advanced in years. The monastery was a low, grey
pile, almost hidden beneath the great willows and larches of the isle,
but rich within from many centuries of gifts in art from the piety of
the lords of Szaravola. It had two guest-chambers for male visitors,
which were lofty and hung with tapestry, and which looked down the lake
towards the north and west, to where beyond the length of water there
rose the mighty forest hills washed by the Salzach and the Ache, backed
by the distant Rhœtian Alps.
The island was almost in the centre of the lake, and, at a distance
of three miles, the rocks, on which the castle stood, faced it across
the water that rippled around it and splashed its trees and banks. It
was a refuge chosen in wild and rough times when repose was precious,
and no spot on earth was ever calmer, quieter, more secluded than this
where the fishermen never landed without asking a blessing of those who
dwelt there, and nothing divided the hours except the bells that called
to prayer or frugal food. The green willows and the green waters met
and blended and covered up this house of peace as a warbler's nest is
hidden in the reeds. A stranger resting-place had never befallen the
world-tossed, restless, imperious, and dissatisfied spirit of the man
who was brought there by careful hands lying on a litter, on a raft,
one gorgeous evening of a summer's day--one month after he had lifted
his rifle to bring down the _kuttengeier_ in the woods of Wanda von
Szalras.
'Almost thou makest me believe,' he murmured, when he lay and looked
upward at the cross that shone against the evening skies, while the
raft glided slowly over the water, and from the walled retreat upon the
isle there came the low sound of the monks chanting their evensong.
They laid him down on a low, broad bed opposite a window of three
bays, which let him look from his couch along the shining length of the
Szalrassee towards the great burg, where it frowned upon its wooded
cliffs with the stone brows of many mountains towering behind it, and
behind them the glaciers of the Glöckner and its lesser comrades.
The sun had just then set. There was a lingering glow upon the water,
a slender moon had risen above a distant chain of pine-clothed hills,
the slow, soft twilight of the German Alps was bathing the grandeur of
the scene with tenderest, faintest colours and mists ethereal. The Ave
Maria was ringing from the chapel, and presently the deep bells of the
monastery chimed a Laus Deus.
'Do you believe in fate?' said Sabran abruptly to his companion
Greswold.
The old physician gave a little gesture of doubt.
'Sometimes there seems something stronger than ourselves and our will,
but maybe it is only our own weakness that has risen up and stands
in another shape like a giant before us, as our shadow will do on a
glacier in certain seasons and states of the atmosphere.'
'Perhaps that is all,' said Sabran. But he laid his head back on his
pillow with a deep breath that had in it an equal share of contentment
and regret, and lay still, looking eastward, while the peaceful night
came down upon land and water unbroken by any sound except that of a
gentle wind stirring amidst the willows or the plunge of an otter in
the lake.
That deep stillness was strange to him who had lived so long in all the
gayest cities of the world; but it was welcome: it seemed like a silent
blessing: his life seemed to stand still while holy men prayed for him
and the ramparts of the mountains shut out the mad and headlong world.
With these fancies he fell asleep and dreamed of pathless steppes,
which in the winter snows were so vast and vague, stretching away,
away, away to the frozen sea and the ice that no suns can melt, and
ceaseless silence, where sleep is death.
In the monastic quiet of the isle he soon recovered sufficient strength
to leave his bed and move about slowly, though he was still stiff and
sprained from the fall on the Umbal; he could take his dinner in the
refectory, could get out and sit under the great willows of the bank,
and could touch their organ as the monks never had heard it played.
It was a monotonous and perfectly simple life; but either because his
health was not yet strong, or because he had been surfeited with
excitement, it was not disagreeable or irksome to him; he bore it with
a serenity and cheerfulness which the monks attributed to religious
patience, and Herr Joachim to philosophy. It was not one nor the other:
it was partly from such willingness as an overtaxed racer feels to lie
down in the repose of the stall for a while to recruit his courage
and speed: it was partly due to the certainty which he felt that now,
sooner or later, he must see face to face once more the woman who had
forbade him to shoot the vulture.
The face which had looked on him in the pale sunlight of the
pine-woods, and made him think of the Nibelungen queen, had been always
present to his thoughts, even during the semi-stupor of sedative-lulled
rest in his dull chamber by the lonely Isel stream.
From this guest-room, where he passed his convalescence, the wide
casements all day long showed him the towers and turrets, the metal
roofs, the pinnacles and spires of her mighty home, backed by its
solemn neighbours of the glacier and the alps, and girdled with the
sombre green of the great forests. Once or twice he thought as he
looked at it and saw the noon sun make its countless oriels sparkle
like diamonds, or the starlight change its stones and marbles into
dream-like edifices meet for Arthur's own Avilion, once or twice he
thought to himself, 'If I owned Hohenszalras, and she Romaris, I would
write to her and say: "A moment is enough for love to be born."'
But Romaris was his--those aged oaks, torn by sea-winds and splashed
with Atlantic spray, were all he had; and she was mistress here.
When a young man made his first appearance in the society of Paris
who was called Réné Philippe Xavier, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, his
personal appearance, which was singularly attractive, his manners,
which were of extreme distinction, and his talents, which were great,
made him at once successful in its highest society. He had a romantic
history.
The son of that Marquis de Sabran who had fallen under the pikes of
the mob of Carrier had been taken in secret out of the country by
a faithful servant, smuggled on board a _chasse-marée_, which had
carried him to an outward-bound sailing ship destined for the seaboard
of America. The chaplain was devoted, the servant faithful. The boy
was brought up well at a Jesuit college in Mexico, and placed in full
possession, when he reached manhood, of his family papers and of such
remnants of the family jewels as had been brought away with him. His
identity as his father's only living son, and the sole representative
of the Sabrans of Romaris, was fully established and confirmed
before the French Consulate of the city. Instead of returning to his
country, as his Jesuit tutors advised and desired, the youth, when he
left college, gave the reins to a spirit of adventure and a passion
for archæology and natural history. He was possessed beyond all with
the desire to penetrate the mystery of the buried cities, and he had
conceived a strong attachment to the flowery and romantic land of
Guatemozin and of Montezuma. He plunged, therefore, into the interior
of that country, and, half as a Jesuit lay-missionary, and half as
an archeological explorer, let all his best years slip away under
the twilight shadows of the virgin forests, and amidst the flowering
wilderness of the banks of the great rivers, making endless notes upon
the ancient and natural history of these solitudes, and gathering
together an interminable store of tradition from the Indians and the
half-breeds with whom he grew familiar. He went further and further
away from the cities, and let longer and longer intervals elapse
without his old friends and teachers hearing anything of him. All that
was known of him was that he had married a beautiful Mexican woman,
who was said to have in her the blood of the old royal race, and that
he lived far from the steps of white men in the depths of the hills
whence the Pacific was in sight. Once he went to the capital for the
purpose of registering and baptizing his son by his Mexican wife.
After that he was lost sight of by those who cared for him, and it
was only known that he was compiling a history of those lost nations
whose temples and tombs, amidst the wilderness, had so powerfully
attracted his interest as a boy. A quarter of a century passed; his
old friends died away one by one, nobody remained in the country who
remembered or asked for him. The West is wide, and wild, and silent;
endless wars and revolutions changed the surface of the country and
the thoughts of men; the scholarly Marquis de Sabran, who only cared
for a hieroglyphic, or an orchid, or a piece of archaic sculpture,
passed away from the memories of the white men whose fellow student he
had been. The land was soaked in blood, the treasures were given up
to adventurers; the chiefs that each reigned their little hour, slew,
and robbed, and burned, and fell in their turn shot like vultures or
stabbed like sheep; and no one in that murderous _tohu-bohu_ had either
time or patience to give to the thought of a student of perished altars
and of swamp-flora. The college, even, where the Jesuits had sheltered
him, had been sacked and set on fire, and the old men and the young
men butchered indiscriminately. When six-and-twenty years later he
returned to the capital to register the birth of his grandson there was
no one who remembered his name. Another quarter of a century passed
by, and when his young representative left the Western world for Paris
he received a tender and ardent welcome from men and women to whom
his name was still a talisman, and found a cordial recognition from
that old nobility whose pride is so cautious and impregnable in its
isolation and reserve. Everyone knew that the young Marquis de Sabran
was the legitimate representative of the old race that had made its
nest on the rocks with the sea birds through a dozen centuries: that he
had but little wealth was rather to his credit than against it.
When he gave to the world, in his grandfather's name, the result of all
those long years of study and of solitude in the heart of the Mexican
forests, he carried out the task as only a scientific scholar could
have done it, and the vast undigested mass of record, tradition, and
observation which the elder man had collected together in his many
years of observation and abstraction were edited and arranged with so
much skill that their mere preparation placed their young compiler
in the front frank of culture. That he disclaimed all merit of his
own, affirming that he had simply put together into shape all the
scattered memoranda of the elder scholar, did not detract from the
learning or from the value of his annotations. The volumes became the
first authority on the ancient history and the natural history of a
strange country, of which alike the past and the present were of rare
interest, and their production made his name known where neither rank
nor grace would have taken it. To those who congratulated him on the
execution of so complicated and learned a work, he only replied: 'It is
no merit of mine: all the learning is his. In giving it to the world I
do but pay my debt to him, and I am but a mere instrument of his as the
printing-press is that prints it.'
This modesty, this affectionate loyalty in a young man whose attributes
seemed rather to lie on the side of arrogance, of disdainfulness,
and of coldness, attracted to him the regard of many persons to
whom the mere idler, which he soon became, would have been utterly
indifferent. He chose, as such persons thought, most unfortunately, to
let his intellectual powers lie in abeyance, but he had shown that he
possessed them. No one without large stores of learning and a great
variety of attainments could have edited and annotated as he had done
the manuscripts bequeathed to him by the Marquis Xavier as his most
precious legacy. He might have occupied a prominent place in the world
of science; but he was too indolent or too sceptical even of natural
facts, or too swayed towards the pleasures of manhood, to care for
continued consecration of his life to studies of which he was early
a master, and it was the only serious work that he ever carried out
or seemed likely ever to attempt. Gradually these severe studies were
left further and further behind him; but they had given him a certain
place that no future carelessness could entirely forfeit. He grew to
prefer to hear a _bluette d'amateur_ praised at the Mirliton, to be
more flattered when his presence was prayed for at a _première_ of the
Française; but it had carried his name wherever, in remote corners of
the earth, two or three wise men were gathered together.
He had no possessions in France to entail any obligations upon him. The
single tower of the manoir which the flames had left untouched, and
an acre or two of barren shore, were all which the documents of the
Sabrans enabled him to claim. The people of the department were indeed
ready to adore him for the sake of the name he bore; but he had the
true Parisian's impatience of the province, and the hamlet of Romaris
but rarely saw his face. The sombre seaboard, with its primitive
people, its wintry storms, its monotonous country, its sad, hard, pious
ways of life, had nothing to attract a man who loved the gaslights of
the Champs-Élysées. Women loved him for that union of coldness and of
romance which always most allures them, and men felt a certain charm
of unused power in him which, coupled with his great courage and his
skill at all games, fascinated them often against their judgment. He
was a much weaker man than they thought him, but none of either sex
ever discovered it. Perhaps he was also a better man than he himself
believed. As he dwelt in the calm of this religious community his sins
seemed to him many and beyond the reach of pardon.
Yet even with remorse, and a sense of shame in the background, this
tranquil life did him good. The simple fare, the absence of excitement,
the silent lake-dwelling where no sound came, except that of the bells
or the organ, or the voices of fishermen on the waters, the 'early
to bed and early to rise,' which were the daily laws of the monastic
life--these soothed, refreshed, and ennobled his life.