The Orchard of Tears

Chapter 7

For all the exquisite sympathy of his nature and intuitive understanding of others, there was a certain trait in the character of Paul Mario not infrequently found in men of genius. From vanity he was delightfully free, nor had adulation spoiled him; but his interest in the world was strangely abstract, and his outlook almost cosmic. He dreamed of building a ladder of stars for all earth-bound humanity, and thought not in units, but in multitudes. Picturesque distress excited his emotions keenly, and sometimes formed ineffaceable memories, but memories oddly impersonal, little more than appreciations of sorrow as a factor in that mystic equation to the solving of which he had bent all his intellect.

On the other hand he was fired by a passionate desire to aid; nor when occasion had arisen had he hesitated to sacrifice self for another's good. But such altruism was born of impulse and never considered. The spectacle of the universe absorbed him, and listening for the Pythagorean music of the spheres he sometimes became deaf to the voices of those puny lives about him. His attention being called to them, however, his solicitude was sweet and sincere, but once removed from his purview they were also dismissed from his mind; and because of his irresistible charm there were some who wept to be so soon forgotten. His intellect was patrician-almost deiform in the old Roman sense. Probably all great masters have been similarly endowed, for if in order that one shall successfully conduct a military campaign he must think in armies and not in squads, so, if another would aspire to guide Thought, presumably must he think in continents. It does not follow that he shall lack genius for love and friendship, but merely that he cannot distract his mind in seeking out individual sorrows. The physician tends the hurts of the body, the priest ministers to the ills of the spirit; Paul Mario yearned to heal the wounds of a stricken world.

But Flamby interested him keenly, and therefore he draped her in a mantle of poesy, obscuring those shades displeasing to his sensibilities; as, an occasional coarseness due to association with her father; and enhancing her charms and accomplishments. Her beauty and spirit delighted the sthete, and her mystery enthralled the poet. She had feared Sir Jacques. Why? Paul toyed with the question in his own fashion and made of Hatton Towers a feudal keep and of his deceased uncle a baron of unsavoury repute. The maid Flamby, so called because men had likened the glory of her hair to a waving flambeau, he caused to reside in a tiny cottage beneath the very shadow of Sir Jacques' frowning fortress; and the men-at-arms looking down from battlement and bartizan marvelled when the morning wove a halo around the head of the witch's daughter. (In the poem-picture which grew thus in his mind as he swung along towards Hatton, Mrs. Duveen had become even more shrivelled than nature had made her; her eyes had grown brighter and her earrings longer).

Word of the maid's marvellous comeliness reaching Sir Jacques, he won entrance to the cottage crouching against his outer walls, disguised as a woodman; for the mighty weald had reclaimed its own in the period visited by Paul's unfettered spirit and foresters roamed the greenwood. He wooed maid Flamby, employing many an evil wile, but she was obdurate and repulsed him shrewdly. Whereupon he caused Dame Duveen to be seized as a weaver of spells and one who had danced before Asmodeus at the Witches' Sabbath to music of the magic pipe. To serve his end Sir Jacques invoked inhuman papal witch-law; the stake was set, each faggot laid. But by stratagem of a humble cowherd who loved her with a fidelity staunch unto death, Flamby secured the Dame's escape and the two fled together covertly, through the forest and by night....