Moths by Ouida — page 50: what you’re looking at

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

hy - | MOTHS.” magic sway of fame; and if he close his lips ‘*the gayety of nations is eclipsed,” and the world seems empty and silent like a wood in which the birds are all dead. It is a supreme power, and may well intoxicate a man. Correze had been as little delirious as any who have drunk of the philtre of a universal fame, although at times it had been too strong for him, and had made him audacious, capricious, incon- stant, and guilty of some follies; but his life was pure from any dark reproach. Nord aa , “« Soyez gentilhomme,” his father had said to him in the little hut on the Pennine Alps, with the snow-fields severing them __ from all other life than their own, and had said it never thinking mliet 20K eRe : <mappr 2 AMT, that this boy would be more than at best a village priest or teacher; the bidding had sunk into the mind of the child, and the ‘man had not forgotten it now that Europe was at his feet, and its princes but servants who had to wait his time, and he liked to make them wait. ‘‘ Perhaps ‘hat is not gentilhomme,” he would say in reproach to himself, but it diverted him, and he did is very often—most often when he thought angrily that he wag but like Hans Andersen’s nightingale, the jeweled one that was thrown aside and despised when once its spring was snapped and broken. If he were only that, he was now at the moment. when emperor and court thought nothing in heaven or on earth worth hearing but the jeweled nightingale, and ‘‘ the crowds in the streets hummed hissong.” Yet as the night train bore him through the level meadows, and corn-fields glistening in the moonlight, and the hush of a sleeping world, his eyes were dim and his heart was heavy, and on the soft cushions of the traveling- bed they had given him he could not find rest. _ ‘The moths will corrupt her,” he thought, sadly and wist- fully. ‘‘The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought; but little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust. Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great weaver’s loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all. One weeps for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and worldly women is a sadder thing to see after all.” His heart was heavy. Was it love? No; he fancied not; it could not be. Love with him—an Almaviva as much off the stage as on it—had been a charming, tumultuous, victorious thing; a concession rather to the weakness of the women who sought him than to his own; the chief, indeed, but only one among many other distractions and triumphs. It was not love that made his heart go out to that fair-haired child with the thoughtful questioning eyes. It was rather pity, tenderness, reverence for innocence, rage against the world soon which would so soon change her, poor little moth, dreaming _of flying up to heaven’s light, and born to sink into earth’s commonest fires! . , comicboo “S (e(o)