“It does not belong to me. I can do nothing with it. I am not sure that it belongs to any one—which adds to the spectral, you see—although I suppose there is somewhere a nameless heir. How restless you are!” he said, gently. “Will you come out in the long hall where the great window gives an unobstructed view of the thing, and walk off this nervousness? The storm is lifting, I think; the moon is going to overcome. One may see by the way the fire burns that the temperature is mounting. Perhaps we shall have a snow-slide as we walk.”
Rhoda and Merivale were singing some of the songs they had learned since they came into the hill country, Mrs. Montresor was nodding behind her fan an accompaniment to Dr. Devens’s remarks, Adèle was deep in her novel, and a flirtation and some portfolios of prints occupied the rest. To refuse was only to attract attention; besides, I should like to walk. I rose and went out with him into the hall that shut off the wing from the great empty caravansary.
“‘And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor,’”
I quoted as we walked; and despite the fire burning on either side, he had brought me a fur for my shoulders.
“Yes,” he said, “there comes the moon at last. Now you shall see the black and white of it.”
“Oh!” I cried, clasping my hands, as all the silvery lights and immense shadows burst out in a terrible sort of radiance. “The world began to be made here! Poets should be born here!”
“Instead of tavern-keepers,” said he, “which brings me to my story. I am forty-three years old. Of course I was younger twenty-three years ago. That must have been not long before you came into the world yourself. Do you insist upon thinking twenty years’ difference in age makes any disparity, except in the case of him who has lost just that twenty years’ sweetness out of his life?”
“I hardly see what that has to do with the story of the Mount of Sorrow,” I said, as we turned from the window to measure the length of the hall again.
“I hope,” said he, “that the suffrage reform, which is to admit women to the ballot, will never let them sit on the judicial bench, for mercy is foreign to the heart of a woman.”