"Adieu, my dear," said Antoinette, dismissing her."Do not dream too much about your unknown charmer.I assure you he had a decided stoop in his shoulders.However, that makes small difference; if your heart speaks, I will see to arranging this affair for you." And she added, musingly, "How amusing it must be to marry other people!"The next morning Mlle.Moiseney made the acquaintance of her unknown charmer.Before leaving Bergun Mlle.Moriaz wished to make a sketch, and she had gone out early with her father.Mlle.Moiseney descended to the hotel /salon/, and, espying a piano, she opened it and played a /fantasia/ by Schumann; she was a tolerably good musician.When she had finished, Count Abel Larinski, the man with green eyes, who had entered the /salon/ without her hearing him, approached to thank her for the pleasure he had had in listening to her; but he begged to take the liberty to tell her that she failed to properly observe the movement, and had taken an /andantino/ for an /andante/.At her solicitation he took her place at the instrument, and executed the /andantino/ as few but professional artists could do.Mlle.Moiseney, ever ready with her enthusiasm, declared that he must be a Liszt or a Chopin, and implored him to play her something else, to which he consented with good grace.After this they talked about music and many other things.The man with the green eyes possessed one quality in common with Socrates, he was master in the art of interrogating, and Mlle.Moiseney loved to talk.The subject on which she discoursed most willingly was Mlle.Antoinette Moriaz; when she was started under this heading she became eloquent.At the end of half an hour Count Abel was thoroughly /au fait/ on the character and position of Mlle.Moriaz.He knew that she had a heart of gold, a mind free from all narrow prejudices, a generous soul, and a love for all that was chivalrous and heroic; he knew that two days of every week were devoted by her to visiting the poor, and that she looked upon these as natural creditors to whom it was her duty to make restitution.He knew also that Mlle.
Moriaz could all the better satisfy her charitable inclinations, as her mother had left her an income of one hundred thousand livres.He learned that she danced to perfection, that she drew like an angel, and that she read Italian and spoke English.This last seemed of mediocre importance to Count Abel.St.Paul said: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." The count was of St.Paul's opinion, and had Mlle.Moriaz known neither how to speak English, nor to draw, nor yet to dance, it would not in the least have diminished the esteem with which he honoured her.The main essential in his eyes was that she was benevolent to the poor, and that she cherished a little tenderness for heroes.
When he had learned, with an air of indifference, all that he cared to learn, he respectfully bowed himself away from Mlle.Moiseney, to whom he had not mentioned his name, and, buckling his haversack, he put it on his back, paid his bill, and set out on foot to make a hasty ascent of the culminating point of the Albula Pass, which leads into the Engadine Valley.One would have difficulty in finding throughout the Alps a more completely barren, rugged, desolate spot, than this portion of the Albula Pass.The highway lies among masses of rocks, heaped up in terrible disorder.Arrived at the culminating point, Count Abel felt the necessity of taking breath.He clambered up a little hillock, where he seated himself.At his feet were wide open the yawning jaws of a cavern, obstructed by great tufts of aconite (wolf's-bane), with sombre foliage; one would have said that they kept guard over some crime in which they had been accomplices.Count Abel contemplated the awful silence that surrounded him; everywhere enormous boulders, heaped together, or scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air.It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads.It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect of his work, did justice to it by breaking it into fragments with his gigantic hammer.
