Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

Maurice was earnestly intent on the business of lighting his cigar from the solitary oil-lamp, so that the look on Arthur's face escaped him, but the earnestness, the apparent meaning in the boy's voice, impressed him strangely. He turned round instantly, a slight appearance of surprise in his manner; then as he caught sight of the flushed face and gleaming eyes of his companion, he shook his head and his lips curled into something like a sneer: "My dear fellow, you are young. Wait a few years, and your vigorous championship will die down, withered by circumstances."

He laughed bitterly, and Arthur turned away, a cold feeling at his heart. He could not understand this cynicism. To him who knew this man's history it seemed cruel and wanton beyond compare.

But Maurice was good-natured, and he liked the boy; his very freshness, whose springs he had been trying to poison, pleased him. He took him by the arm and looked into his averted face. "Have I frightened you altogether?" he said kindly, "or will you listen to what I was about to propose?" Arthur smiled his acquiescence, but it was with an effort; he felt in no smiling mood.

"If you like, then, let us adjourn to my quarters. This great place looks desolate with the one oil-lamp they generously allow us. There I have a jar of excellent whisky, and Karl will soon find us all appliances and means to boot for the concoction of whisky-punch, which, if you had lived so long in these inhospitable regions as I have, you would know to be a real luxury."

Arthur smiled: "I have not tasted a drop since I left England."

"Then you agree to my proposal? Come!"

The two men rose, Maurice linking his arm into that of his companion, and leaving the long dining-room, threaded the ill-lit passages which led to Maurice's apartment. The door of the room adjoining his was ajar, and close to its threshold they paused involuntarily for a second or two. What made them stop was nothing more than a child's voice singing a child's hymn: an untaught, feeble voice, thrilling with melody that made it tremble, there was yet in it that which irresistibly drew and fascinated. Even in its weakness there was something strange. To the imaginative it would have seemed like a woman's heart trying to express itself through the feeble medium of a child's voice. For there was soul and purpose in the quavering treble that trilled against the air. With one accord the men stopped to listen, holding their breath lest any of the sounds should escape them. The voice paused a moment and they passed on, but before they had reached their destination, Maurice, who had been looking back toward the door whence the sound had proceeded, caught an instantaneous glimpse of the owner of the childish voice. A little golden head and fair face, on which light from within the room was shining, peered out and looked up and down the passage. Only for a moment, but in that moment the dark eyes of the golden-haired child and the dark eyes of the world-weary man met. The child, frightened vaguely, retreated to the inside of the room; the man staggered as if he had received a blow, and sank down, to his companion's dismay, pale and speechless on the nearest chair.

Maurice, it must be remembered, had been drinking pretty freely and in such a condition as his men are scarcely so well able to master their sudden emotions as they may be at another time.

The face of his child, the sound of the hymns her mother had sung at her cradle, was to Maurice like the dim memory of a fair dream. He did not for a moment recognize the child as his own; he was far from imagining that the little Laura was near him, and the look in her eyes, the expression of her features, the music of her voice, constituted a haunting mystery that absolutely staggered him.

He met her eyes, and suddenly, as in a vision, his wife's pure face, his child's cradle, all the details in their utmost minuteness of a home that had once been happy, flashed over his mind. He did not know how it had come. He scarcely even connected this sudden revulsion of feeling with the sight of the child's face; he only knew that it was there, a haunting memory of past happiness, and that his present pain was almost too great to be borne. Covering his face with his hands, the strong, cynical man sat for some minutes—minutes that seemed ages to Arthur—plunged in bitter thought.