The Great Amulet

The Great Amulet, by Maud
Diver

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Title: The Great Amulet
Author: Maud Diver

Release Date: December 31, 2006 [eBook #20238]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AMULET***
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THE GREAT AMULET

by
MAUD DIVER

"Love is the greatest Amulet that makes this world a garden: and 'Hope
comes to all' outwears the accidents of life; and reaches with tremulous
hands beyond the grave and Death."
--R. L. S.
"Four things come not back to man or woman: the sped arrow; the
spoken word; the past life; and the neglected opportunity."
--Omar El Khuttub.

THE GREAT AMULET
by
MAUD DIVER
Author of "Captain Desmond, V.C."
Shilling Edition

William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London MCMXV All
rights reserved

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
TRIX FLEMING
IN MEMORY OF DALHOUSIE DAYS.

Let thy heart see that still the same Burns early friendship's sacred
flame, The affinities have strongest part In youth, to draw men heart to
heart: As life draws on, and finds no rest, The individual in each breast
Is tyrannous to sunder them.
--Rossetti.

CONTENTS.
PROLOGUE
BOOK I.
AFTER FIVE YEARS
BOOK II.
JUST IMPEDIMENT
BOOK III.
THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL
BOOK IV.
THE VALLEY OF DECISION

THE GREAT AMULET.
PROLOGUE.
I.
"The little more, and how much it is! The little less, and what worlds
away." --Browning.

No one in Zermatt dreamed that a wedding had been solemnised in the
English church on that September afternoon of the early eighties.
Tourists and townsfolk alike had been cheated of a legitimate thrill of
interest and speculation. Nor would even the most percipient have
recognised as bride and bridegroom the tall dark Englishman, in a
rough shooting suit, and the girl, in simple white travelling gear, who
stood together, an hour later, on the outskirts of the little town, and took
leave of their solitary wedding guest:--an artist cap-à-pie; velveteen
coat, loosely knotted tie, and soft felt hat complete.
In this Bohemian garb Michael Maurice,--as the bride's brother,--had
led his sister up the aisle, and duly surrendered her to Captain Lenox,
R.A., serenely unaware, the while, of censorious side-glances bestowed
upon him by the ascetic-featured chaplain, who had an air of officiating
under protest, of silently asserting his own aloofness from this
hole-and-corner method of procedure. But his attitude was powerless to
affect the exalted emotion of that strange half-hour, wherein, by the
repetition of a few simple, forcible words, a man and woman take upon
themselves the hardest task on earth with a valiant assurance which is
at once pathetic and sublime.
To Quita Maurice, impressionable at all times, the absence of ceremony,
of those trivialities which obscure and belittle the one supreme fact,
gave an added solemnity to the unadorned service: forced upon her a
half-disturbing realisation that she was passing from an independence,
dearer to her than life, into the keeping of a man:--a man of whom she
knew little beyond the fact that he loved her with a strength and
singleness of heart which is the heritage of those who reach life's
summit without indulging in emotional excursions by the way.
And now all needful preliminaries were over; even to the wedding
breakfast, a cheerful, casual meal of cold chicken, iced cake, and a
bottle of champagne, served in Maurice's unpretentious rooms, on the
pastry-cook's second floor.
The scene of their brief courtship lay behind them, dozing in the golden
stillness of late September: before them a footpath climbed through a
forest of pine and fir to the Eiffel Alp Hotel; and on all sides

multitudinous mountains flung heroic contours outward and upward, to
a galaxy of peaks, that glittered diamond-bright upon a turquoise sky.
A mule, ready-saddled, champed his bit at a respectful distance from
the trio: for Lenox, an indefatigable mountaineer, had insisted on taking
the footpath up to the Eiffel; where they would spend ten days, before
crossing into Italy, and so on to Brindisi, en route for his station in
India.
The expiration of his leave, and his determination to take Quita
Maurice back with him, were responsible for the brevity of their
engagement, and for the absence, in both, of that brand-new aspect
which proclaims a bride and bridegroom to an eternally interested
world.
For this last Eldred Lenox was abundantly grateful. All the Scot in him
asserted itself in a fierce reticence, an inbred sense of privacy where a