"Where is my room?"
"In the best part of the house, eccellenz, close to the apartments occupied by the gentleman of whom he has doubtless heard."
"The inconsolable husband?" Maurice's lips were curled into a kind of sneer as he asked the question.
"No, meinherr; the other person concerned, as they say, in this sad business—a Frenchman, I believe."
"So all these details are the common talk of the place," said Maurice to himself. "Unfortunate man!" And then he set his teeth together. "I acted wisely," he muttered; "such a scandal as this would have killed me."
He said nothing more to Karl, and the honest soul, who had rejoiced in the interest his master was taking in sublunary affairs, who had been congratulating himself, in fact, on the very rapid success of his plan for drawing his master out of his dark moods, was distressed and perplexed to see the old frown gather on his brow, to hear his fierce, impatient sigh, and to find himself banished summarily from his room with the curt abruptness to which Karl had become accustomed.
Left alone, Maurice sat down by the little wood-fire, which had been kindled solely in consideration for his feelings as an Englishman, and returned to his sad pondering. He was playing a dangerous game with himself, for he was in that mood which has often tempted a man to tamper with his humanity—to put out his rash hand and experimentalize on the nature whose fearful beauty and hidden mystery it is impossible for him to understand. It would have been better, a thousand times better, for the Englishman at such a moment as this to have thrown himself into any kind of work, to have sought society, however humble, to have looked for some interest in the outer world; anything would have been better, indeed, than this giving way to the spirit that possessed him—this looking for and searching into what no son or daughter of humanity may fathom. Like a fiend's temptation ran backward and forward through his mind, haunting him with its dull rhythm, the burden of a song that he remembered to have heard in some bygone time:
"A still small voice, it spake to me—
Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?"
And again, with an added force—
"Thou art so steeped in misery,
Surely 'twere better not to be—better not to be."