Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/201

 familiar to him as the smoking-room of the most exclusive London clubs. For had he not pressed with the slender arabarch of his foot, nay microscopically scrutinised with his cold passionless glance, every cubic inch of our mother-earth from zenith to zodiac, from equinox to ecliptic? Now unarmed and alone, battling with the wild bull-elephant in Siberian forests, whose fossil tusks would crumble into dust beneath his iron grasp—anon, ere the sun had risen and set again o'er his triumph, tracking the white bear to its den in the fastnesses of the primæval Mexican steppe—now drifting over vast unknown inland seas of the Himalaya in a hollowed out bamboo craft of his own construction—anon, vainly wooed in the low sweet guttural diphthongs of the Zend Avesta dialect by golden-haired Nautsch girls, whose dowry was a prince's ransom, or discoursing sweet nothings in fluent Semitic to solemn-eyed Ckgszwchian signoritas with great sad ears, and the thick-skinned patience of the Sphinx! Seven times had the Sepoy's scalping knife performed on him its revolting office, as he lay steeped in some wild haschish dream, in lone wildernesses and remote "waste places of the fern;" seven times had he risen, Phœnix-like, from his own sack-cloth and ashes, and blown the slumbering spark of vitality into a lurid flame, wreaking a fearful holocaust on the red-skinned bravos who had, in the short lived triumph of their bloody vendetta, dared to trifle with the tawny crest that fair hands, braceletted with the ducal strawberry-leaf, had been proud to toy with! And yet he never alluded to these "hairbreadth 'scrapes," as he lounged on the ottoman at "Whites'," clad in snow-coloured seal-skin dressing-gown, 'broidered with intertwisted monograms of golden fleur-de-luce (one of many such, yet not the best by far)—now withering the aristocratic habitues with sarcasms that fell from his lips thick and cold as the snows of an Arcadian winter—now scathing the menials of the establishment with scornful look and word; for in his high-born contempt of the "oi populoi," he was ever mindful of the difference between the proud blue blood that ran riot in his own Norman veins, and

Is it strange that such a man should set all laws at defiance, laws of honour, courtesy, social intercourse, perspective, religion, scientific inquiry?—nay, the very laws of digestion itself? For to his world-sated palate the oyster and the oyster-shell were as one and the same—the one yielded no joy, the other presented no difficulty.

His hate was ruinous to men, his love fatal to women, his indifference, deadly alike to all, whether they knew him or not!

Again and again, wo, wo to the women who crossed his path, be they widows or wives, matrons or maidens! Down they went on their knees before him, like threshed corn beneath the shears of the mower, to worship for awhile at the shrine of his cruel glance, and then—withered 'neath his insolent scorn, flung away into the dim irrevocable future, like a worn-out glove, a soiled scarf, a slipper down at heel—far beyond all appeal or hope of redress from 'him! for it is of such men that Tasso has written:—

Every husband, every father, every brother, feared and loathed him as the incarnation of the Evil one—in their mean, narrow, tedious nauseating philosophy they held him as a perjured villain of the deepest dye, steeped in utterest infamy!

Perhaps his greatest charm in women's eyes was that he was never heard to boast of this.... 94