The weather became fine again.Antoinette availed herself of the opportunity to take long promenades; she clambered up the mountain-slopes, over slippery turf, in the hope of carrying home some rare plant; but her strength was not equal to her valour--she could not succeed in scaling those heights where flourished the /Edelweiss/.Aweek after her arrival she had a surprise, we might even say a pleasurable emotion, which was not comprised in the programme of amusements that the proprietor of Hotel Badrutt undertook to procure for his guests.Returning from an excursion to Lake Silvaplana, she found in her chamber a basket containing a veritable sheaf of Alpine flowers, freshly gathered, and among them not only /Edelweiss/ in profusion, but several very rare plants, and the rarest of all a certain bell-flower creeper, which smells like the apricot, and which, except in some districts of the Engadine, is only found now in Siberia.This splendid bouquet was accompanied by a note, thus conceived:
"A man who had had enough of life, resolved to hang himself.To execute his dolorous design, he selected a lonely and dismal spot, where there grew a solitary oak, whose sap was nearly exhausted.
As he was engaged in securing his cord, a bird alighted on the half-dead tree and began to sing.The man said to himself: 'Since there is no spot so miserable that a bird will not deign to sing in it, I will have the courage to live.' And he lived.
"I arrived in this village disgusted with life, sorrowful and so weary that I longed to die.I saw you pass by, and I know not what mysterious virtue entered into me.I will live.
" 'What matters it to me?' you will say, in reading these lines;and you will be right.My sole excuse for having written them is, that I will leave here in a few days; that you never will see me again, never know who I am!"The first impression of Antoinette was one of profound astonishment.
She would have taken it for granted that there was some mistake had not her name been written in full on the envelope.Her second impulse was to laugh at her adventure.She accorded full justice to Mlle.
Moriaz; she knew very well that she did not resemble the first chance comer; but that her beauty would work miracles, resurrections; that a hypochondriac, merely from seeing her pass by, was likely to regain his taste for existence, scarcely appeared admissible to her.So great was her curiosity, that she took the pains to make inquiries; the flowers and the letter had been left by a little peasant, who was not of the place, and who could not be found.Antoinette examined the hotel-register; she did not see there the handwriting of the letter.
She studied the faces which surrounded her; there was not in Hotel Badrutt a single romantic-looking person.Very speedily she renounced her search.The bouquet pleased her; she kept it as a present fallen from the skies, and preserved the letter as a curiosity, without long troubling herself to know who had written it."Do not let us talk about it any more, it is doubtless some lunatic," she replied one day to Mlle.Moiseney, who kept constantly recurring to the incident whose mystery she burned to fathom.The good demoiselle had been tempted to stop people in the road to ask, "Was it you?" Perchance she might have suspected her Bergun unknown to have a hand in the affair, had she had the least idea that he was at Saint Moritz, where she never had met him.He came there, nevertheless, every day, but at his own time;besides, the hotels were full to overflowing, and it was very easy to lose one's self in the crowd.
To tell the truth, when Count Abel Larinski came to Saint Moritz he was far less occupied with Mlle.Moriaz than with a certain illustrious chemist.The air of the Engadine and the waters that tasted like ink had worked marvels: in a week M.Moriaz felt like a new man.There had come to him a most formidable appetite, and he could walk for hours at a time without becoming weary.He abused his growing strength by constantly strolling through the mountains without a guide, hammer in hand; and every day, in spite of the remonstrances of his daughter, he increased the length of his excursions.The more people know, the more inquisitive they become; and, when one is inquisitive, one can go to great lengths without feeling fatigue; one only becomes conscious of this after the exertion is over.M.Moriaz never for a moment suspected that he was accompanied, at a respectful distance, on these solitary expeditions, by a stranger, who, with eyes and ears both on the alert, watched over him like a providence.The most peculiar part of the affair was that this providence would gladly have caused him to take a misstep, or thrust him into some quagmire, in order to have the pleasure of drawing him out, and bearing him in his arms to the Hotel Badrutt."If only he could fall into a hole and break his leg!" Such was the daily wish of Count Abel Larinski; but /savants/ have great license allowed them.Although M.Moriaz was both corpulent and inclined to be absent-minded, he plunged into more than one quagmire without sticking fast, more than one marsh without having his progress impeded.
