It was the hour for ghosts and shadows and unearthly sounds. Again we thought of the rich and rare crowd that had pa.s.sed up and down in sacques and swords in the centuries gone by; every one of whom had long been a ghost and shadow in its turn. Again we saw clearly as in a vision that last happy pair who had separated--he to find death on the battlefield, she to rejoin him in the Land o' the Leal. Distinctly we heard the rustle of the gown, the fervency of their last embrace, the sighs that came in quick succession. So easily imagination runs away with us.

We were awakened to realities by Jose, who, heavy-eyed and dreamy, was politely wishing us good-night, hardly wakeful enough to reach his room.

"I will follow his example," said H. C. "The air of Gerona conduces to slumber. I verily believe you never sleep. To-morrow I shall hear that the good father's confessions terminated with the breakfast hour. Ah! I shall miss the black coffee--but I have a flask of my own, though its contents have nothing to do with the centuries."

Then Delormais turned to us, his eyes full of kindly solicitude.

"Are you equal to a vigil? Is it not too bad, after your hard day's work--pleasure is often labour--to ask you to give an old man an hour or two from your well-earned slumbers? Do you not also find the air of Gerona conducive to sleep? I warn you that at the first sign of drooping eyelid I dismiss the a.s.sembly."

"A challenge! Never was sleep less desired. Though the breakfast hour finds us here, as H. C. foretells, there shall be no want of attention.

But do not forget the black coffee!"

We heard H. C.'s receding echoes through the labyrinthine pa.s.sages; the closing of a door; then a voice gently elevated in song, utterly oblivious of small hours and unconscious neighbours. "Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine," it warbled; "leave but a kiss within the cup, and I'll ne'er ask for wine."

Here recollection seemed to come to the voice; an open window looking on to a pa.s.sage was softly closed, and all was silent. H. C. was evidently thinking of the charming face he had seen at the opera, all the more lovely and modest contrasted with the shameless old woman at its side.

Delormais led the way through the corridors. His light threw weird shadows around. A distant clock struck the hour of one. The hush in the house was ghostly. The very walls seemed pregnant with the secrets of the past. They had listened to mighty dramas political and domestic; heard love-vows made only to be broken; absorbed the laughter of joy and the tears of sorrow. All this they now appeared to be giving out as we went between them, treading quietly on marble pavement sacred to the memory of the dead.

We entered Delormais' sitting-room. At once he turned up two lamps, and lighting some half-dozen candles produced an illumination.

"One of my weaknesses," he said. "I love to take night walks and lose myself in thought under the dark starlit skies, but that is quite another thing. In my room I must have brilliancy."

"When you are a bishop you will so indulge this weakness that your palace will be called a Shining Light, its lord a Beacon of the Church."

A peculiar smile pa.s.sed over the face of Delormais. We did not understand it at the moment, but knew its meaning later on.

Then he brought forward the coffee equipage, for which, if truth must be told, though slumber was never farther from us, we were grateful.

"I had it all prepared by our amiable host, and I have my own spirit-lamp, without which I never travel," said the priest. "There are times when I visit the most uncivilised, hope-forgotten places, and if I had not a few accessories with me, should fare badly."

The water soon boiled, an aromatic fragrance spread through the room; the clear black coffee was poured into white porcelain cups.

"But where is the supplement? I do not see the century-old flask," said Delormais.

"That is sacred to headache--or the charm would go; there are other fixed rules besides the Persian laws."

"I am glad to hear it. Then after all my little homily this morning was not needed. That is why you took it so amiably. Only the truth is painful."

He placed for us a comfortably cushioned armchair near the table, and one for himself. Our coffee equipage was between us, the steaming incense rising. A shaded lamp threw its rays upon the white china and crimson cloth, gently illumined the intellectual and refined face of Delormais. We could note every play of the striking features, every flash of the large dark eyes.

A sudden stillness came over him; he seemed lost in profound thought, his eyes took a deep, dreamy, far-away look. They were gazing into the past, and saw a crowd of events and people who had lived and moved and had their being, but were now invisible to all but the mental vision.

The hands--firm, white, well-shaped and made for intellectual work--were spread out and met at the tips of the long slender fingers. The legs were crossed, bringing into prominence a shapely foot and ankle set off by a thin well-fitting shoe. In all matters of personal appointment Delormais was refined and fastidious.

For some minutes he appeared thus absorbed in mental retrospect. The man of life and energy had suddenly changed to contemplation. Apparently he had forgotten our presence, and the silence of the room was profound.

One almost heard the rising of the incense from the coffee-cups, as it curled upwards in fantastic forms and devices, and died out. We were motionless as himself. Not ours to break the silence, though it grew strained. We had come to listen, and waited until the spirit moved him.

Nor had we to wait long. He roused himself from his reverie; the dreamy light pa.s.sed out of his eyes; his spirit seemed to come back to earth as he turned to us with a penetrating, kindly gaze.

CHAPTER IX.

DELORMAIS.

Magnetism--Past life--Impulsive nature--First impressions--Perfumed airs--A gentle spirit--Haunted groves--Blue waters of the Levant--Great devotion--A rose-blossom--Back to the angels--Special providence--Fair Provence--Charmed days--Excursions--Isles of Greece--Ossa and Pelion--City of the violet crown--Spinning-jennies have something to answer for--Olympus--aegina--Groves of the Sacred Plain--Narrow escapes--Pleasures of home-coming--Rainbow atmosphere--Orange and lemon groves--The nightingales--Impressionable childhood--Fresh plans--The Abbe Riviere--Rare faculty--Domestic chaplain--Debt of grat.i.tude--Treasure-house of strength--Given to hospitality--First great sorrow--Pa.s.sing away--Resolve to travel--"I can no more"--The old Adam dies hard--Chance decides.

Delormais roused himself to the present as one who awakes from a dream.

Those large dark eyes seemed capable of every expression; could flash with intellect, melt with fervent love or grow earnest with condemnation; sparkle with wit, or suffuse with sympathy and pathos. In Delormais susceptibilities and intellect seemed equally balanced.

"I have been reviewing my life," he began. "And I am asking myself why we are here seated together as old familiar friends. How it is that to you, a comparative stranger, I have promised to speak of the past, open my heart, disclose secrets unknown to the world? It must be that you deal in magnetism. Or that we were born in the same mystic sphere, or under the same conjunction of stars; and that for the third time in my life I discover one who is altogether sympathetic to me; to whom I feel I can speak as to my other self. Nor is it necessary that this feeling should be shared by you in an equal degree. Enough that you are not antagonistic; even approach me with a friendly liking. I, many years your senior, am the dominant power. You follow where I lead. But a truce to metaphysics; searchings into spiritual conditions we cannot altogether fathom; wandering into realms withholden from mortal vision.

Let us leave the unseen and uncertain, and turn altogether to the present world."

We made no reply. Our sympathy was strongly awakened in this singular man. Here was a nature rare as it was powerful; distinguished by all the finest and n.o.blest qualities vouchsafed to mankind. But we wished him to take his own way, utter his own thoughts, not disturbed by remark or turned aside by suggestion.

He rose for a moment, replenished the cups, and went on with his narrative.

"I have not asked you to join me to-night to read you a lesson," he continued. "In reviewing my past life, I find it full of incident and action. But it has none of those startling dramas and strange coincidences, none of those high achievements or fatal mistakes, which occasionally make biographies a solemn warning to some or a pillar of fire to others. I have brought you here simply for the pleasure of spending an evening with you. If I beguiled you at this late hour under any other impression I am guilty of false pretences. But late though it be it is still evening to me, to whom all hours are alike. For a whole week at a time I have slept an hour in the twenty-four in my arm-chair, and found this sufficient rest. We give too much time to sleep. Like everything else it is a habit. The day will come soon enough for the folding of the hands. At any time I can turn night into day, and feel no sense of fatigue or loss of power. Nature never takes her revenge by turning day into night. I cannot remember the time when the daylight hours caught me napping.

"So then, for the pleasure of your company, and that we may become better acquainted, I have persuaded you to join me; not that I have much to tell you that can be useful or instructive. And yet it is said that the record of every life is a lesson. But all this you do not require. I was presumptuous enough at mid-day to read you a homily of which black coffee was the text and strong waters were the application. It was done partly from the impulsiveness of my nature which has carried me into a thousand-and-one unpremeditated scenes and circ.u.mstances; partly that my heart warmed towards you and I thought it a surer introduction to a better acquaintance than the usual topic of the weather. Throughout my life of more than sixty years, from the day I was able to observe and reflect I have been a student of human nature. You see even my rashness did not mislead me. I was not rebuked. On the contrary, your heart immediately responded to the singular and presuming old man."

He called himself old, but in reality, though six decades had rolled over his head, he was still in full force and vigour of life.

He paused a moment. The deep musical voice echoed through the room in subdued cadences. There was nothing harsh or loud in its tones.

Delormais was too well-bred, too much a man of the world and student of human nature, as he had said, not to know the charm and value of modulation.

He paused, but we the patient listener: Saul sitting at the feet of Gamaliel: made no reply.

"Nevertheless, if I cannot instruct, I think I can interest you,"

continued Delormais, breaking the momentary silence. "My life has been singular and eventful. I will rapidly sketch some of its pa.s.sages: a mere outline. To go through it circ.u.mstantially, in detail, would prolong the narrative to days and weeks. To write the life chapter by chapter, incident by incident, would fill many volumes.

"I have a good memory and it carries me back to the earliest scenes of childhood: scenes full of fairy visions and sweet remembrances.

Orange-groves and lemon-groves, olive-yards and vineyards, orchards where grew all the luscious fruits of the earth, gardens filled with its choicest flowers, these are my first impressions. I breathed an air for ever perfumed.

"These realms were inhabited by beings fitted for paradise. My mother's lovely and gentle face haunted the groves; my father's voice filled the house with music and energy. He was a man born to command, but ruled by charm, not by power: expressed a wish rather than gave an order. Most lovable of husbands and most indulgent of fathers, we, who were to him as the breath of his nostrils, worshipped him. I was his constant companion. Day after day, when just old enough to run by his side, he would sail about with me in his white-winged boat, on the blue waters of the Levant. On the terrace in front of the chateau my mother would sit and watch us, an open book before her to which only half her thoughts were given and nothing of her heart. That followed the little craft skimming to and fro in the sunshine.

"Or in a larger yacht, we would take longer voyages; but if my mother were not with us these absences were rare, three days their limit. I was the idol of the sailors, just as my father was their king, who could do no wrong.

"All my days and surroundings were coloured by this gentle, dark-eyed mother of exquisite loveliness and delicate refinement, whose only failing was too great a devotion to her husband and boy. I was an only surviving child, and for that reason doubly precious to my parents. A little daughter had first been born to them; a child, I have heard, the very counterpart of her mother--frail, delicate, and too good for earth; her soul too pure and her face too fair. At the age of three, when she was budding into loveliest rose-blossom, she went back to the angels.

"There never was any fear of that sort for me. From the first I was strong and st.u.r.dy, escaping even the ordinary ailments of childhood. So far I saved my parents all anxiety. Their only care was to check my high and venturesome spirit, which now would cause me to be fished up from the bottom of shallow waters; and now would bring me down to earth with a broken olive-bough that possibly had borne fruit for centuries and might have done so for ages yet to come. I never came to harm. A special providence watched over me--I record it with all reverence.

"As the bird flies my home was not so very far from here, though it was in France, not Spain. We lived in one of the loveliest spots of fair Provence, where indeed the earth brought forth abundantly all her fruits and flowers.

"My mother had offended her family by her marriage, yet in no sense of the word was my father her inferior. But she was of n.o.ble birth and he was not, though a patrician. He was a gentleman in all his thoughts and deeds, a great landed proprietor, a man of vast intellectual culture and refinement. The _mesalliance_ her people chose to see in the matter existed only in their worldly minds and wicked ambitions. For to marry my father she had refused the Duke of G., an empty-headed _bon vivant_, with nothing but his t.i.tle and wealth to recommend him. For fifteen years my mother's life was happy as life on earth can be. The day came when her people acknowledged the wisdom of her choice, the hollowness of theirs. But one circ.u.mstance in her father I have always thought condoned all his obstinacy. He finally yielded to her wishes. Without this the marriage would have been impossible. When he saw that her very existence depended upon it, he at length dismissed the duke and gave his consent--reluctantly, with a bad grace it must be admitted, but it was done. The duke married elsewhere. Wild, unprincipled, unstable as water, he entangled himself in all sorts of intrigues, gambled, and finally fell into embarra.s.sment. Not until then was my father really and truly received without reservation as a son of the family--a position to which he was in every possible way ent.i.tled.

"Those were charmed and charming days of childhood and youth. It has been said that when the early years are specially happy, the after-life is the opposite. I cannot say that this has been my experience, though, as you will see, the hand of sorrow has sometimes been heavy upon me.

"My father was wealthy. He spent much time in his library, where my mother might almost always be found, her seat near to him. By stretching forth his hand he could occasionally clasp hers, as though to a.s.sure her that his heart still beat for her alone. In all my father's intellectual pursuits she was thoroughly at home--no study was too deep or abstruse for her comprehension.