Monsieur Maurice | Page 9

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.
Thus, after a moment's pause, he went on:--
"The house in which I was born stands on a low cliff above the sea. It is
an old, old house, with all kinds of quaint little turrets, and gable ends,
and picturesque nooks and corners about it--such as one sees in most
French Châteaux of that period; and it lies back somewhat, with a great
rambling garden stretching out between it and the edge of the cliff.
Three berceaux of orange-trees lead straight away from the paved
terrace on which the salon windows open, to another terrace
overhanging the beach and the sea. The cliff is overgrown from top to
bottom with shrubs and wild flowers, and a flight of steps cut in the
living rock leads down to a little cove and a strip of yellow sand a
hundred feet below. Ah, petite, I fancy I can see myself scrambling up
and down those steps--a child younger than yourself; watching the sun
go down into that purple sea; counting the sails in the offing at early
morn; and building castles with that yellow sand, just as you build
castles out yonder with the snow!"
I clasped my hands and listened breathlessly.
"Oh, Monsieur Maurice," I said, "I did not think there was such a
beautiful place in the world! It sounds like a fairy tale."
He smiled, sighed, and--being seated at his desk with the pen in his
hand--took up a blank sheet of paper, and began sketching the Château
and the cliff.
"Tell me more about it, Monsieur Maurice," I pleaded