"'I want shelter if you can give it me,' I answered her. 'I have lost my way coming from Gavarnie, and am drenched through. I will pay you liberally if you will give me an asylum till the weather clears.'
"Her eyes blazed like coals through the little grille.
"'M'sieu, we take no money here—have you mistaken it for an inn? Come in if you want shelter, in Heaven's name! The Holy Virgin forbid we should refuse refuge to any!'
"And she crossed herself and uttered some conjurations to Mary to protect them from all wolves in sheep's clothing, and guard their dwelling from all harm, by which I suppose she thought I spoke fairly and looked harmless, but might possibly be a thief or an assassin, or both in one. She unlocked the gate, and calling to a boy to take my horse into a shed, admitted me under a covered passageway into the house, which looked like part, and a very ruined part, too, of what had probably been, in the times of Henri-Quatre and his grandfather, a feudal chateâu fenced in by natural ramparts from the rocks that surrounded it, shutting in the green slope on which it stood, with only one egress, the path through which I had ascended, into the level plain below. She marshalled me through this covered way into an interior passage, dark and vaulted, cheerless enough, and opened a low oak door, ushering me into a chamber, bare, gloomy, yet with something of lost grandeur and past state lingering about its great hearth, its massive walls, its stained windows, and its ragged tapestry hangings. The woman went up to one of the windows and spoke with a gentleness to which I should have never thought her voice could have been attuned with its harsh patois.
"'Mon enfant, v'là un m'sieu étranger qui vient chercher un abri pour un petit peu. Veux-tu lui parler?'
"The young girl she spoke to turned, rose, and, coming forward, bade me welcome with the grace, simplicity, and the naïve freedom from embarrassment of a child, looking up in my face with her soft clear eyes. She was like——No matter! you have seen that crayon-head, it is but a portrayal of a face whose expression Raphael and Sassoferrato themselves would have failed to render in its earnest, innocent, elevated regard. She was very young—
Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet—
Womanhood and childhood fleet.
Good Heavens, I am quoting poetry! what will you think of me, to have gone back to the Wertherian and Tennysonian days so far as to repeat a triplet of Longfellow's? No man quotes those poets after his salad days, except in a moment of weakness. Caramba! why has one any weaknesses at all? we ought not to have any; we live in an atmosphere that would kill them all if they were not as obstinate and indestructible as all other weeds whose seeds will linger and peer up and spoil the ground, let one root them out ever so! I owed you an apology for that lapse into Longfellow, and I have made it. Am I to go on with this story?"
He laughed as he spoke, and his laugh was by no means heartfelt. I told him to go on, and he lighted another Manilla and obeyed me, while the Arno murmured on its way, and the dusky, sultry clouds brooded nearer the earth, and the lights were lit in the distant windows of the palace of the Marchese Acqua d'Oro, that fairest of Florentines, who rouges so indiscriminately and flirts her fan so inimitably, to one of whose balls we were going that night.
He settled himself back in his chair, with his face darkened again by the shadow cast on it from the pillar of the balcony; and took his cigar out of his mouth.