Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

As he repeated these words half aloud, Maurice rose and paced the room excitedly.

"Yes," he said to himself, "a wise counsel. Men, women, what are they?" He knit his brows and his eyes looked fierce. "What are we?—miserable, and our misery makes us bad. God!—if there be a God!"—he lifted his pale, agitated face, but underlying his wretched, wild doubts might have been read there the reverence of a fine soul—"why are we miserable, seeking good for evermore, and finding evil, inconstancy, falsehood? Why is our fair world the abode of fiends incarnate, who burden the ages with their folly? And if we were happy"—again he lifted his pale face, and the dazzling snow-peaks against their azure background met his gaze—"if we were happy," he repeated slowly—"if she had been happy—O God! she would have been good, for the soul of purity was in her; but misery brings madness to the blood and thoughts of evil to the heart; and for misery there is no cure under the sun."

For a few moments he remained perfectly still and silent, his arms folded, his brow contracted, looking out upon the snow-fields; then added, this time half aloud, "But one!"

He turned from the window and cast a rapid, hungry glance round the room. It was comfortably arranged, the small wood-fire crackling merrily, the clothes he was about to wear hanging on a chair beside it carefully brushed, his bed turned down, exhibiting the whitest of white linen; but what specially drew Maurice's attention was his portmanteau, which, after the necessary articles had been taken from it, Karl had left open, that the expediency of further unpacking might be decided by his master. It was a large travelling portmanteau, evidently full of a miscellaneous collection of articles—books, dressing-apparatus, clothes, curiosities picked up in wandering from place to place. On one of these curiosities, which was lying near the top of the open side, Maurice's eyes finally rested.

For a moment he gazed silently, then crossing the room took it up in his hand to examine it more closely. A case containing a pair of small pocket-pistols, the barrels of silvered metal richly chased with gold. One of these Maurice removed from its covering. He handled it with a certain curiosity, took it to pieces to examine its condition, cleaned it with the most delicate care, then, after putting it together again, spent a few moments in listening to its click. It looked more like an elegant toy than a dangerous weapon. Maurice put it down and returned it to the case, which contained, besides the companion pistol, a small flask of gunpowder and some bullets. These he took out, then in a quiet, leisurely manner proceeded to load the pistol. His attitude was rather that of a man who is amusing himself, trying to kill time, than of one who has any serious purpose in view. And perhaps at this moment Maurice was scarcely serious. In any case, when his work was done he did not proceed farther; he put the pistol down again. It almost seemed as if this quiet, ordinary occupation (for Maurice's firearms had always been treated by him with minute personal care—he did not allow a servant to touch them) had quieted the tone of his mind and banished some of his dark thoughts. He put down the pistol then, and turned back to the fireside to resume his unhealthy musing.

For here lay Maurice Grey's error. Instead of mastering his morbid feelings, driving them away by stress of hard work and diversity of thought, he, like many a strong man before and since, suffered them to master him.

Again and again he would return to the old mystery, bringing the energy of his soul to bear upon it. Again and again it would elude him, till, mortified and baffled, tied down to the narrow circle of self-knowledge, a broad outlook on humanity impossible by reason of his self-chosen fate, he had come to loathe his very life as an evil thing.

It is easier to meet a foe in fair fight than a giant formed by a diseased imagination—blurred, indistinct, but awful with the terrors of the unknown.

With his small pistol within reach, Maurice set to work once more thinking over humanity's woes and wrongs, gloomily seeking for the shadow of a reason why life should be thought worth having—why it would not be well to pass out from it once and for ever through the lurid portals of self-destruction. What wonder that his unhealthy pondering should point out to him no ray of light, no gleam of hope?

But happily for Maurice, and for the many who were interesting themselves in his welfare, his mind at the time could bear no further tension. Rather to his own surprise, he found it wandering from the solemn question of life versus death to the common things that surrounded him. How strange it is that at the solemnest moments the trivial and commonplace intrude the most perseveringly! And yet it is a fact that might be proved by numberless instances.