Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

Maurice Grey was tired of hotel-life when he came upon this treasure trove. Life in the mountains, with the constant companionship of ignorant tourists, would-be enthusiasts and blasé fashionables (for Maurice, though touched and charmed by Nature's beauty, had not arrived at the higher point of seeing beauty in humanity), was scarcely the life of solitude he had been seeking.

In the inane vapidity of travellers' talk all the impressions which Nature's loveliness had been writing on his soul seemed to pass into cynicism and irritability. He would get away from the charmed circle—he would break loose once and for ever from the galling fetters with which his kind would chain him. This chalet was the very thing to suit him. He had come upon it in the course of a long, solitary ramble which was taking him into ground untrodden apparently by the ordinary tourist. It led to no point of special interest, there was nothing remarkable to distinguish it from thousands of Alpine meadows in the vicinity, it was intersected by no well-frequented path.

Maurice Grey set inquiries on foot. He found that the neglected chalet had been intended for a small pension; that the proprietor, who was a farmer, had sustained an unexpected loss in cattle, and had thus been unable to complete and furnish it; that he would be only too delighted to let it on very moderate terms to any one who would take the trouble of making it habitable.

On the very next day Maurice found out the farmer, and an arrangement was entered into highly to the satisfaction of both. It took a very short time to fit up the small abode, or two rooms on the ground floor, with the few articles an Englishman would find necessary—a wooden bed and a large bath, a table and chair, one leather-backed arm-chair, rough shelves with a selection of books that he had ordered in one of the German towns through which he had passed, writing-materials and his beloved pipe, sole companion of his solitude.

These were all, save the kitchen utensils, which his new servant, a German who could do everything, had procured for him, and with these Maurice Grey settled down to a hermit's life. It was scarcely the life to suit him. There was too much vigor and manhood in his frame, too many cravings in the heart he had thought dead, for the death-in-life of one cut off from the society of his fellows to be bearable for any length of time. During the long hours of the day, when even his servant was absent seeking at the nearest village for the daily necessaries of their life, Maurice Grey, the sociable, lively Englishman, would sit like a patriarch at the door of his tent and look out—not on his children and children's children playing on the green sward, but on the savage grandeur of the mountains, on shaggy pines rising head above head like a great army on the hillside, on the flash of torrents, their fall scarcely heard in the far distance, scattering their white foam into the sunshine, on radiant ice-rivers sweeping down between dark gray rocks. And the wonder entered into his soul. But the illusion faded, for, all grand and glorious as it was, there was yet in it nothing to lay hold upon the heart or satisfy its wants.

Sometimes the stillness would grow so oppressive that even the tinkling of the cattle-bells, notifying the approach of the sleepy, quiet animal, would be a relief to the man's brain And then he would rush into the wood. There was sound enough there—the rustling of leaves, the chirping of grasshoppers, the movement and ceaseless murmur of life various and multiform.

At times Maurice Grey would enjoy it, but not always, for in the midst of this rich profusion of Nature his was a life apart. More than once he was mortified, even in those first days, when solitude had a certain novelty, to discover how instinctively his step would quicken and his heart grow lighter when in the evening, his hour for dinner drawing near, he could look forward to seeing at the door of his chalet the familiar face of his servant and only companion. He was too proud, however, to betray himself even to Karl, and in spite of everything was determined to persevere. He would give the new life a fair trial. Happily, Maurice had a resource in his pen. In his youth he had cherished ambitious dreams of distinguishing himself in the world of letters. In these hours of solitude the desire returned—not, indeed, with a like force, for the cry of the miserable, the cui bono? of a sick soul, was at the heart of it.

If the grandeur of Nature could inspire him with high thoughts—if as a poet he could breathe out any one of these, sending it forth a living image of beauty into the world—why and for whom should he do it? For men and women? For their enjoyment, their false praise? Maurice Grey, as it will be seen, had not lost his cynicism in his solitude. But he wrote as he had never written before. He transcribed his strange, wild dreams that were formed in the ice-caverns, and clothed the woods and hills with legends, dismal, gloomy, awe-inspiring, that had drunk from the bitter waters of his own dark soul.

As days and weeks passed on that soul grew darker. Even the faithful Karl, who was strongly attached to his English master, began to fear his strange moods and wonder vaguely at his caprices, recalling the weird märchen that had fed his boyhood in his Black Forest home—of men haunted with the spirit of evil, condemned to wander for ever, seeking rest and finding none; of ghosts that had taken to themselves a fleshly home, and living with human beings had been considered human themselves, till the dark fear of betraying their origin in some unwary moment had driven them to the wilds, there to batten on horrors till the startled flesh should forsake, once and for ever, the naked, shivering ghost.