CHAPTER XXIV
Love that keeps all the choir of lives in chime
Love that is blood within the veins of time.
—Swinburne.
You all know that funny little inn at St. Denis, on what was then the main road between Paris and Havre; it stands sheltered against north and east winds by a towering bouquet of mighty oaks, which were there, believe me—though mayhap not quite so gnarled and so battered by storms of wind and thunder as they are now—in the April of that year 1678.
The upper story gabled and raftered hung then as now quite askew above its lower companion, and the door even in those days was in perpetual warfare with its own arched lintel, and refused to meet it in a spirit of friendly propinquity. The Seine winds its turgid curves in the rear of the building with nothing between it and the outer walls only the tow path always ankle deep in mud.
The view out and across the winding river is only interesting to the lover of colour and of space, for there are no romantic hills, no rugged crags or fir-crowned plateaus to delight the eye. Only a few melancholy acacias sigh and crackle in the wind and tall poplars rear their majestic heads up to the vast expanse of sky.
Now elegant villas and well-trimmed gardens fill the space over which two hundred and forty years ago the eye wandered seeking in vain for signs of human habitation. Rank grass covered the earth, and close to the water's edge clumps of reeds gave shelter to water rats and birds.
Through the small dormer window just beneath the gable, Michael Kestyon looked out upon the melancholy landscape and found it exquisitely fair.