High Noon | Page 6

luminous pall--a mysterious golden shroud.
"Oh! God," he cried, out of the anguish of his soul, "what a hideous world! Beneath all this painted surface, this bedizened face of earth, lies naught but the yawning maw of the insatiable universe. This very lake, with its countenance covered with rippling smiles, is only a cruel monster waiting to devour. Everything, even the most beautiful, typifies the inexorable laws of Fate and the futility of man's struggle with the forces he knows not."
He looked far off, wistfully, to the great pile of the B��rgenstock, the one place in the whole world that for him was most rich in tender memories. And yet he knew that its undulating blueness hid hard, relentless rock, as unyielding as the very hand of death itself.
"Love," he said slowly, his heart swelling with the deep sense of his loss, "love should lead to happiness and peace--not to conflict, murder, and sudden death."
And he lay there pondering, until at last, as always in the end, his better genius triumphed. And when the evening sunshine turned the windows of the distant hamlets into tongues of flame and set the waters in the little bay a-dancing, he rowed slowly back to the hotel, his own resourceful English self again.
Far up on the side of the B��rgenstock a dim light shone--a faint glow, until a cloud bank, stealing ever nearer, nearer, crept between like some soft curtain, and the silent mystery of the evening fell upon the lake, and wrapped the mountains in a velvet pall.
CHAPTER IV
Nearly a week had passed since Paul reached the Mecca of his pilgrimage. Other guests at the hotel had seen little of him, except as they glimpsed him of a morning as he made an early start to some favourite haunt; or again as he returned at night-fall, to pass quickly through the chattering groups upon the terrace or about the hall and retire to his suite, where usually his dinner was served in solitary state.
His resolutely maintained seclusion was so marked that even his English friends, accustomed as they were to the exclusiveness of their kind, commented on it. Barclay openly lamented, for, as he said, "Was not Sir Paul the best of company when he chose, and why come here to this gay garden spot to mope?"
Daisy Livingstone, the American girl, from that meeting in the train had found a peculiar attraction in her big Englishman, as she called Verdayne playfully when speaking of him to her friends. She knew now, of course, that he was the famous Sir Paul Verdayne, the personage so prominent in British public affairs. And she remembered, too, with a woman's quick intuition for a heart forlorn, Paul's sad, almost melancholy face.
One balmy evening, as she was slowly strolling back and forth beside her mother on the terrace, "Mother," she said in a low voice, "why should Sir Paul look so triste? He has everything, apparently, that a man could wish to make him happy--health, wealth, and a success that can be the result only of his own efforts. And yet he is not happy. What hidden sorrow can he have--some grief, I am sure--that should keep him away from all companions? Every day he goes away alone. And I have seen him almost every night, coming back to the hotel, only to disappear in his rooms, where he must spend many lonely hours."
"Really, Daisy, you are much too interested in this Verdayne. When I was a girl, I never should have paid such close attention to the humour of a strange man. Don't you think that you are becoming altogether too attracted by this Englishman?"
Mrs. Livingstone was an old-fashioned mother who was little in sympathy with the free and easy point of view of radical latter-day Americans.
"Not at all, mother. I find something to interest me in all the people here. Sir Paul is merely a distinct type, just as that awful fat American with the automobile is another in his own way, and that horrid French creature who goes motoring with him every day."
"Then there is the beautiful dark-haired foreign lady, too--she is more fascinating to study than all the rest. She must be a Russian from her colouring, and, besides, she wears those wonderful embroideries. And her servants, too, talk some outlandish gibberish among themselves. Of course she belongs to the nobility, you can see that, even in the way she walks."
"Really, mother, while I'm a true enough American not to be dazzled by the glamour of a coronet, there is something in a long line of well-bred ancestry. You know the old saying, 'Blood will tell.' I've woven quite a fairy story about those wonderful eyes of hers. She is the princess in the fairy story whom some fine prince will find and wake up