Moths by Ouida — page 367: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTHS. » 365 wes more he saw the wide gray plains that stretched around rrisla. for days and weeks he lingered on in the miserable village which alone afforded him a roof and bed; he passed there as a stranger from the South buying furs; he waited and waited in the pine woods merely to see her face. ‘‘If I can see her once drive by me, and she is well, I will go away,” he said to himself, and he watched and waited. But she never came. At length he spoke of her to the archimandrite of the villace asa traveler might of a great princess of whom hearsay had told 1 He learned that she was unwell and rarely left the house. Correze, as he heard, felt his heart numb with fear, as all nat- ure was numbed with frost around him. He could not bring himself to leave. The village population an to speak with wonder and curiosity of him; he had bought all the furs they had to sell, and sent them through into Silesia ; they knew he was no trader, for he never bargained, and poured out his roubles like sand; they began to speak of him, ead won- der at him, and he knew that it was needful he should go. But he could not ; he lived in wretchedness, with scarcely any of the necessaries, and none of the comforts, of life in the only place that sheltered travelers, but from that cabin he could see the stone walls of her prison-house across the white sea of the snow- covered plains ; it was enough. The spot was dearer to him than the gay delirious pleasures of his own Paris. In the world, wherever he chose to go, he would have luxury, welcome, amuse, ment, the rapture of crowds, the envy of men, the love of women, all the charm that success and art and fame can lend to life at its zenith. But he stayed on at Szarisla for the sake of seeing those pale stern walls that rose up from the sea of snow. Those walls inclosed her life. The snow had ceased to fall, the frost had set in, in its full in- tensity; one day the sun poured through the heavy vapors of the cloud-covered sky. He went nearer the building than he had ever done. He thought it possible the gleam of the sun might tempt her to the open air. | | He stood without the gates and looked: the front of the great somber pile seemed to frown; the casements had iron stanchions; _ the doors were like the doors of a prison. ‘* And that brute has shut her here!” he thought—‘ shut her here while he sups with Casse-une-Croute!” | Suddenly he seemed to himself to be a coward, because he did not strike Sergius Zouroff and shame him before the world. ‘‘T have no right,” he thought. ‘* But does a man want one when a woman is wronged?” He stood in the shadow of some great Siberian pines, a century old, and looked ‘“‘ his heart out through his eyes.” As he stood there, one person and then another and then another came up and stood there, until they gathered in a little crowd. He asked, in their own tongue, of oneof them why they came; they were all poor; the man, who was a cripple, said to bim, * The princess used to come tic us while she could; now she Eomicboo Ss ‘ (E(0) ‘ — 3) - a) “