5
It so happened that the Winter this year was unusually severe, not only at Brühl and the parts about Cologne, but throughout all the Rhine country. Heavy snows fell at Christmas and lay unmelted for weeks upon the ground. Long forgotten sleighs were dragged out from their hiding places and put upon the road, not only for the transport of goods, but for the conveyance of passengers. The ponds in every direction and all the smaller streams were fast frozen. Great masses of dirty ice, too, came floating down the Rhine, and there were rumours of the great river being quite frozen over somewhere up in Switzerland, many hundred miles nearer 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!”