And ever the image in his mind's eye was, as before, Cécile—Cécile who had come back to him, for all sober reason knew it was but the child.
The child——! Why had he never thought of the children these weary years? They, all that remained of Cécile, were living and might have been sought. Strange that he had not remembered him of the children!
Twenty years since he had last set eyes upon the little living creature in her mother's arms. And the picture that the memory evoked was, after all, Cécile again, only Cécile—not the queer little black-eyed puppet, even then associated with sea-foam and salty breeze. Twenty years during which she was growing and waxing in beauty, and unawares, maturing towards this wonderful meeting—and he had never given a thought to her existence.
In what sheltered ways had this fair duplicate of his love been growing from a child to womanhood during that space of life, so long to look back upon—or so short and transient, according to the mood of the thinker?
And, lazily, in his happier and tender present mood he tried to measure once again the cycles of past discontent, this time in terms of the girl's own lifetime.
It is bitter in misery to recall past misery—almost as bitter, for all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of secret complacency.
Truly, mused Sir Adrian, for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations, for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child! Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, whilst unhappy Adrian, ragged and degraded into a mere fighting beast, roamed through the Marais with Chouan bands, hunted down by the merciless revolutionists, like vermin; falling, as months of that existence passed over him, from his high estate to the level of vermin indeed; outlawed, predatory, cunning, slinking, filthy—trapped at last, the fit end of vermin!
Scarcely better the long months of confinement in the hulks of Rochelle. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel! Then!—not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the safeguard of his roof.
Good it was, that he had escaped at last, though with the blood of one of his jailors red upon his hands; the blood of a perhaps innocent man, upon his soul. It was the only time he had taken a life other than in fair fight, and the thought of it had been wont to fill him with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened to René's insidious whispers—René, who could not endure the captivity to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than escape alone—the faithful heart!
Yes, it was good, and he was glad of it, or time would not have come when she (stay, how old was the child then?—almost three years, and still sheltered and cherished by the house of Landale)—when she would return, and gladden his eyes with a living sight of Cécile, while René watched in his tower above; ay, and old Margery herself lay once more near the child she had nursed.