Gaston de Latour | Page 4

singers--Might he be saved from mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine love. "The Lord is my inheritance" whispers Gaston distinctly, as the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five places, "after the fashion of Christ's crown," the shears in the episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice ripples down over him. "This is the generation of them that seek Him," the choir sings: "The Lord Himself is the portion of my inheritance and my cup." It was the Church's eloquent way of bidding unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.
The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf flung across the land, as [12] the party returned home in the late August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral occupants started back out of the daylight--"Why depart, dear ghosts?" was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood. There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in one of the two old houses. That other, the Chateau d'Amour, remained for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders, though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate brothers, onwards--above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de Latour had died of joy.
With minds full of their recent business it was difficult to go back to common occupations; as darkness came on, the impressions of the day did but return again more vividly and concentrate [13] themselves upon the inward sense. Observance, loyal concurrence in some high purpose for him, passive waiting on the hand one might miss in the darkness, with the gift or gifts therein of which he had the presentiment, and upon the due acceptance of which the true fortune of life would turn; these were the hereditary traits alert in Gaston, as he lay awake in the absolute, moon-lit, stillness, his outward ear attentive for the wandering footsteps which, through that wide, lightly-accentuated country, often came and went about the house, with weird suggestions of a dim passage to and fro, and of an infinite distance. He would rise, as the footsteps halted perhaps below his window, to answer the questions of the travellers, pilgrims, or labourers who had missed their way from farm to farm, or halting soldier seeking guidance; terrible or terror-stricken companies sometimes, rudely or piteously importunate to be let in-- for it was the period of the Religious Wars, flaming up here and there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years.
Once, in the beginning of these troubles (he was then a child, leaning from the window, as a sound of rickety, small wheels approached) the enquiry came in broken French, "Voulez-vous donner direction?" from a German, one of the mercenaries of the Duc de Guise, hired for service in a civil strife of France, drawing wearily a crippled companion, so far from home. [14] The memory of it, awakening a thousand strange fancies, had remained by him, as a witness to the power of fortuitous circumstance over the imagination.
One night there had come a noise of horns, and presently King Charles himself was standing in the courtyard, belated, and far enough now from troublesome company, as he hunted the rich-fleshed game of La Beauce through the endless corn. He entered, with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place, expressed in a shrill strain of half-religious oaths, like flashes of hell-fire to Gaston's suddenly- awakened sense. It was the invincible nature of the royal lad to speak, and feel, on these mad, alto notes, and not unbecoming in a good catholic; for Huguenots never swore, and these were subtly theological oaths. Well! the grandparents repressed as best they could their apprehensions as to what other hunters, what other disconcerting incident, might follow; for