“_Pauvre petite_!” he said, shutting up the book, “it is too terrible
a story. I ought not to have told it to you. Try to forget it.”
“Ah, no!” I said. “I shall never forget it, Monsieur Maurice. Poor Ali!
Have you still the piece of fringe you found lying in the road?”
He unlocked his desk and touched a secret spring; whereupon a small drawer
flew out from a recess just under the lock.
“Here it is,” he said, taking out a piece of folded paper.
It contained the thing he had described--a scrap of fringe composed of
crimson and yellow twist, about two inches in length.
“And those other things?” I said, peering into the secret drawer with a
child's inquisitiveness. “Have they a history, too?”
Monsieur Maurice hesitated--took them out--sighed--and said, somewhat
reluctantly:--
“You may see them, little Gretchen, if you will. Yes; they, too, have their
history--but let it be. We have had enough sad stories for to-day.”
Those other things, as I had called them, were a withered rose in a little
cardboard box, and a miniature of a lady in a purple morocco case.
5
It so happened that the Winter this year was unusually severe, not only at
Brühl and the parts about Cologne, but throughout all the Rhine country.
Heavy snows fell at Christmas and lay unmelted for weeks upon the ground.
Long forgotten sleighs were dragged out from their hiding places and put
upon the road, not only for the transport of goods, but for the conveyance
of passengers. The ponds in every direction and all the smaller streams
were fast frozen. Great masses of dirty ice, too, came floating down the
Rhine, and there were rumours of the great river being quite frozen over
somewhere up in Switzerland, many hundred miles nearer its source.
For myself, I enjoyed it all--the bitter cold, the short days, the rapid
exercise, the blazing fires within, and the glittering snow without. I
made snow-men and snow-castles to my heart's content. I learned to skate
with my father on the frozen ponds. I was never weary of admiring the
wintry landscape--the wide plains sheeted with silver; the purple
mountains peeping through brown vistas of bare forest; the nearer trees
standing out in featherlike tracery against the blue-green sky. To me it
was all beautiful; even more beautiful than in the radiant summertime.
Not so, however, was it with Monsieur Maurice. Racked by a severe cough
and unable to leave the house for weeks together, he suffered intensely all
the winter through. He suffered in body, and he suffered also in mind. I
could see that he was very sad, and that there were times when the burden
of life was almost more than he knew how to bear. He had brought with him,
as I have shown, certain things wherewith to alleviate the weariness of
captivity--books, music, drawing materials, and the like; but I soon
discovered that the books were his only solace, and that he never took up
pencil or guitar, unless for my amusement.
He wrote a great deal, however, and so consumed many a weary hour of the
twenty-four. He used a thick yellowish paper cut quite square, and wrote a
very small, neat, upright hand, as clear and legible as print. Every time
I found him at his desk and saw those closely covered pages multiplying
under his hand, I used to wonder what he could have to write about, and
for whose eyes that elaborate manuscript was intended.
“How cold you are, Monsieur Maurice!” I used to say. “You are as cold as my
snow-man in the court-yard! Won't you come out to-day for half-an-hour?”
And his hands, in truth, were always ice-like, even though the hearth was
heaped with blazing logs.
“Not to-day, petite,” he would reply. “It is too bleak for me--and besides,
you see, I am writing.”
It was his invariable reply. He was always writing--or if not writing,
reading; or brooding listlessly over the fire. And so he grew paler every
day.
“But the writing can wait, Monsieur Maurice,” I urged one morning, “and you
can't always be reading the same old books over and over again!”
“Some books never grow old, little Gretchen,” he replied. “This, for
instance, is quite new; and yet it was written by one Horatius Flaccus
somewhere about eighteen hundred years ago.”
“But the sun is really shining this morning, Monsieur Maurice!”
“_Comment_!” he said, smiling. “Do you think to persuade me that
yonder is the sun--the great, golden, glorious, bountiful sun? No, no, my
child! Where I come from, we have the only true sun, and believe in no
other!”
“But you come from France, don't you, Monsieur Maurice?” I asked quickly.
“From the South of France, petite--from the France of palms, and
orange-groves, and olives; where the myrtle flowers at Christmas, and the
roses bloom all the year round!”
“But that must be where Paradise was, Monsieur Maurice!” I exclaimed.
“Ay; it was Paradise once--for me,” he said, with a sigh.