Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/315

304 the Cistercian, with musing amaze. "You can do all things that you turn your hand to it seems!" "I have lived in many countries and with many men."

"You must have been more than a mere barcarola, my son?"

"I told you I have been a 'wanderer' from my birth," said Erceldoune, with a smile at the play on the Celtic meaning of his nationality. "The career is a bad one for gold, but it is the best in the world, I fancy, for learning self-help and other men's virtues."

"But you must learn much vice too, my son?"

Erceldoune shrugged his shoulders.

"What of that? Vice is a good teacher too, in its way, and one must take the warp with the woof."

"But, you know, one cannot touch pitch, my son, and keep undefiled."

Erceldoune laughed a little.

"Good father, where is the man that ever did keep so? And as for that, the pitch will not stay long unless the surface be ready for it. But, for Heaven's sake, chatter no more; I love speech little at any time, and now—I am famished."