Yet it would have been difficult to say whether Raoul de St. Renan, grave, dark and sorrowful as he now showed, was not both a handsomer and more attractive person than he had been in his earlier days, as the gay and thoughtless Viscount de Douarnez.
There was a depth of feeling, as well as of thought, now perceptible in the pensive brow and calm eye; and if the ordinary expression of those fine and placid lineaments was fixed and cold, that coldness and rigidity vanished when his face was lighted up by a smile, as quickly as the thin ice of an April morning melts away before the first glitter of the joyous sunbeams.
Nor were the smiles rare or forced, though not now as habitual as in those days of youth unalloyed by calamity, and unsunned by passion, which, once departed, never can return in this world.
The morning of the young lord's arrival passed gloomily enough; it was the very height of summer, it is true, and the sun was shining his brightest over field and tree and tower, and every thing appeared to partake of the delicious influence of the charming weather, and to put on its blithest and most radiant apparel.
Never perhaps had the fine grounds, with their soft mossy sloping lawns, and tranquil brimful waters and shadowy groves of oak and elm, great immemorial trees, looked lovelier than they did that day to greet their long absent master.
But, inasmuch as nothing in this world is more delightful, nothing more unmixed in its means of conveying pleasure, than the return, after long wanderings in foreign climes, among vicissitudes and cares, and sorrows, to an unchanged and happy home, where the same faces are assembled to smile on your late return which wept at your departure, so nothing can be imagined sadder or more depressing to the spirit than so returning to find all things inanimate unchanged, or if changed, more beautiful and brighter for the alteration, but all the living, breathing, sentient creatures—the creatures whose memory has cheered our darkest days of sorrow, whose love we desire most to find unaltered—gone, never to return, swallowed by the cold grave, deaf, silent, unresponsive to our fond affection.
Such was St. Renan's return to the house of his fathers. Until a few short days before he had pictured to himself his father's moderate and manly pleasure, his mother's holy kiss and chastened rapture at beholding once again, at clasping to her happy bosom, the son, whom she sent forth a boy, returned a man worthy the pride of the most ambitious parent.
All this Raoul de St. Renan had anticipated, and bitter, bitter was the pang when he perceived all this gay and glad anticipation thrown to the winds irreparably.
There was not a room in the old house, not a view from a single window, not a tree in the noble park, not a winding curve of a trout-stream glimmering through the coppices, but was in some way connected with his tenderest and most sacred recollections, but had a memory of pleasant hours attached to it, but recalled the sound of the kindliest and dearest words couched in the sweetest tones, the sight of persons but to think of whom made his heart thrill and quiver to its inmost core.
And for hours he had wandered through the long echoing corridors, the stately and superb saloons, feeling their solitude as if it had been actual presence weighing upon his soul, and peopling every apartment with the phantoms of the loved and lost.