Page:The Quest Volume 13 (1921-22).djvu/104

 head, and no eye-brows or eye-lashes either. Even at that time he made the impression upon me of being an old man—maybe because of the odd, extremely old-fashioned costume he used to wear all the year round: a lustreless moss-green cloth tall hat, narrowing almost to a point towards the top, a Dutch velvet waistcoat, buckle-shoes and black silk knee-breeches on his disquietingly short thin shanks. Perhaps this was why he looked so, so 'defunct,' for otherwise his high, soft childish voice and wonderfully finely drawn girlish lips contradicted the idea of old age. On the other hand there probably never were such extinct eyes as his seemed to be in the whole world.

While not wishing to fail in due respect, I must add that he was hydrocephalous. Moreover his head seemed frightfully soft—as soft as a peeled boiled egg—and that not only as to his quite round pale face but also as to his skull. At least, whenever he put his hat on, there instantly rose up all round it under the brim a kind of anæmic swelling, and when he took it off a considerable time always elapsed before his head happily regained its former shape.

From the first minute of Dr. Haselmayer's arrival until his departure, he and his lordship the Count used to talk of the moon without break or interruption even for eating or drinking or sleeping, and that with a puzzling earnestness which I failed to understand. Their hobby went so far that, whenever the time of the full-moon fell on the 21st of July, they invariably went out at nightfall to the small, marshy lake of the castle, and would stare for hours at the reflection of the silvery disk in the dark water.

Once, while passing by them, as I occasionally did, I even noticed that both gentlemen threw pale