Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

The black eagle was flapping its great wings above them, feathered fowl of a thousand varieties were twittering on the branches of the trees. Many of the coverts might harbor the wolf or lynx; in the reach of meadow to which a forest-glade might lead the gigantic elk would probably be resting with her young.

It was a position to exhilarate the coldest brain, and the Englishman, who took the lead into the forest, did not look particularly torpid.

He was monarch, too, of all he surveyed, for one of the hospitable nobles of Courland had given his guest a free permission to shoot not only through his estates, which were sufficiently vast, but through those of his neighbors; indeed, the whole province was free to Maurice Grey. With gun and dogs he might traverse the wilds of Courland in all their length and breadth.

To an Englishman, a lover of sport for its own sake, could any position be more delightful? He seemed to feel this. Mounted on his horse, a fine little mare of Arab extraction, his keen sportsman's eye scanning the depths of wood, his ear intent on the faintest sound, he looked another man from the jaded, weary traveller resting listlessly on the shores of the silver lake.

But the dogs looked uneasy; there was a rustling in the underwood; the dry fallen leaves crackled ominously. He cocked his gun. Hist! a long, gray-looking animal, gliding ghost-like out of the bush, but not within range. It was a fierce she-wolf—the terror of the neighborhood; this the Englishman discovered, and then the chase began. The wily dogs urged her out into the open; bewildered she fled before them—long, swift, seemingly untiring. With bellies to the ground, and legs that seemed barely to skim it, followed the noble hounds, and after them their master, urging them on by his voice, till dogs, wolf and horseman seemed to fly over the plain.

On, on, leaving the Russian servants and ponies in the far distance, the forest behind, the blue distance before them, till at last the wolf grew weary, her pace perceptibly flagged: she tried to stand at bay, but exhaustion overcame her; the hounds were on her haunches; they pinned her to the ground till the voice of their master called them off, and a shot put an end for ever to the robber of Russian hen-roosts and the terror of Russian babies.

Various other feats were performed that day, each exciting in its kind; and when the young Englishman, who had ridden far into the short, bright night of that season, rested at last in a kind of log-built hunting-lodge, where the hospitable owner of the estate had always a few necessaries in readiness for the guests of the hunt, he was quite ready for refreshment and repose. He partook of the provisions put before him by his servants, bathed in the river that flowed at no great distance, and laid himself down to rest, rejoicing in the glorious solitude, in the freedom from anxiety, in the triumph of having found one pursuit that could put to flight, even for a time, haunting care and cruel retrospect.

But the triumph was short. The few hours of night passed, and kindly sleep would hold his restless spirit no longer. With the gray dawning Maurice lifted his head from his couch and looked around him. The Russian servants, wrapped in sheepskins, were lying on mats at his feet, fast asleep; even the hounds were silent and motionless, wearied with their day of hard work. The neighborhood of the sleepers was oppressive. He rose and wandered out into the little clearing in the midst of which the hut was built.

Yes, this was solitude, true solitude, without excitement of any kind to fill it; and as Maurice looked listlessly at the sun rising over the woods he tried to persuade himself that it was delightful. Far from the babble of false men and falser women, not even the rising of a thin wreath of smoke in the far distance telling of their existence,—this was what he had been seeking, and hitherto seeking in vain. He seated himself on the trunk of a fallen tree to look this great loneliness in the face and realize the comfort of his position, but it would not do.

Insensibly, as he thought and gazed, came visions of the past, dreams of the future, like weird, shapeless demons whom memory had robed in horrors to rob him of his peace and fill his solitude with care. For Maurice Grey had loved as some men can and do love, throwing all the strength of their nature into this one thing. And he had lost, not by the hand of death—so pitiless when put forth to take the loved—but by a something more dread, more pitiless still—the discovery of his lady's falsehood. Oh, he had honored her, trusted her, given her his all; and what had he found? That through the long years they had passed together in such perfect harmony her heart had been not his, but another's. He had given all; she had given nothing—worse than nothing. And in the bitter revulsion of feeling consequent on the discovery he had not waited for explanations; he had left her, vowing, in a vow that came from the very depths of his stricken heart, not to look upon her fair, false face again.