Monsieur Maurice | Page 7

winds; and it was only
when the wintry sun shone out at noon and the air came tempered from
the south, that he dared venture from his own fire-side. When, however,
there shone a sunny day, with what delight I used to summon him for a
walk, take him to my favourite points of view, and show him the
woodland nooks that had been my chosen haunts in summer! Then, too,
the unwonted colour would come back to his pale cheek, and the smile
to his lips, and while the ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all
jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of
the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half
grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs--of Bacchus, and Pan, and

Polyphemus--of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were
transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of
antique Greece--far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales
of gnomes and witches in my book of Hartz legends.
At other times, when the weather was cold or rainy, he would take
down his "Musée Napoléon," a noble work in eight or ten volumes, and
show me engravings after pictures by great masters in the Louvre,
explaining them to me as we went along, painting in words the glow
and glory of the absent colour, and steeping my childish imagination in
golden dreams of Raphael and Titian, and Paulo Veronese.
And sometimes, too, as the dusk came on and the firelight brightened in
the gathering gloom, he would take up his guitar, and to the
accompaniment of a few slight chords sing me a quaint old French
chanson of the feudal times; or an Arab chant picked up in the tent or
the Nile boat; or a Spanish ballad, half love-song, half litany, learned
from the lips of a muleteer on the Pyrenean border.
For Monsieur Maurice, whatever his present adversities, had travelled
far and wide at some foregone period of his life--in Syria, and Persia; in
northernmost Tartary and the Siberian steppes; in Egypt and the Nubian
desert, and among the perilous wilds of central Arabia. He spoke and
wrote with facility some ten or twelve languages. He drew admirably,
and had a profound knowledge of the Italian schools of art; and his
memory was a rich storehouse of adventure and anecdote, legend and
song.
I am an old woman now, and Monsieur Maurice must have passed
away many a year ago upon his last long journey; but even at this
distance of time, my eyes are dimmed with tears when I remember how
he used to unlock that storehouse for my pleasure, and ransack his
memory for stories either of his own personal perils by flood and field,
or of the hairbreadth 'scapes of earlier travellers. For it was his
amusement to amuse me; his happiness to make me happy. And I in
return loved him with all my childish heart. Nay, with something
deeper and more romantic than a childish love--say rather with that
kind of passionate hero-worship which is an attribute more of youth
than of childhood, and, like the quality of mercy, blesseth him that
gives even more than him that takes.
"What dreadful places you have travelled in, Monsieur Maurice!" I

exclaimed one day. "What dangers you have seen!"
He had been showing me a little sketchbook full of Eastern jottings,
and had just explained how a certain boat therein depicted had upset
with him on a part of the Upper Nile so swarming with alligators that
he had to swim for his life, and even so, barely scrambled up the slimy
bank in time.
"He who travels far courts many kinds of death," replied Monsieur
Maurice; "but he escapes that which is worst--death from ennui."
"Suppose they had dragged you back, when you were half way up the
bank!" said I, shuddering.
And as I spoke, I felt myself turn pale; for I could see the brown
monsters crowding to shore, and the red glitter of their cruel eyes and
the hot breath steaming from their open jaws.
"Then they would have eaten me up as easily as you might swallow an
oyster," laughed Monsieur Maurice. "Nay, my child, why that serious
face? I should have escaped a world of trouble, and been missed by no
one--except poor Ali."
"Who was Ali?" I asked quickly.
"Ali was my Nubian servant--my only friend, then; as you, little
Gretchen, are my only friend, now," replied Monsieur Maurice, sadly.
"Aye, my only little friend in the wide world--and I think a true one."
I did not know what to say; but I nestled closer to his side; and pressed
my cheek up fondly against his shoulder.
"Tell me more about him,