Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete

								

by which it had been renewed. But Evelyn did not heed her; and the
moment they arrived at the rectory, she hastened to shut herself in her
room, and write the account of her adventure to her mother. How
often, in her girlish reveries, had she thought of that incident, that
stranger! And now, by such a chance, and after so many years, to meet
the Unknown by his own hearth! and that Unknown to be Maltravers! It was
as if a dream had come true. While she was yet musing--and the letter
not yet begun--she heard the sound of joy-bells in the distance. At
once she divined the cause; it was the welcome of the wanderer to his
solitary home!

CHAPTER IV.


MAIS en connaissant votre condition naturelle, usez des moyens
qui lui sont propres, et ne pretendez pas regner par une autre
voie que par celle qui vous fait roi.*--PASCAL.


* "But in understanding your natural condition, use the means

    which are proper to it; and pretend not to govern by any other

    way than by that which constitutes you governor."
IN the heart as in the ocean, the great tides ebb and flow. The waves
which had once urged on the spirit of Ernest Maltravers to the rocks and
shoals of active life had long since receded back upon the calm depths,
and left the strand bare. With a melancholy and disappointed mind, he
had quitted the land of his birth; and new scenes, strange and wild, had
risen before his wandering gaze. Wearied with civilization, and sated
with many of the triumphs for which civilized men drudge and toil,
and disquiet themselves in vain, he had plunged amongst hordes, scarce
redeemed from primeval barbarism. The adventures through which he
had passed, and in which life itself could only be preserved by wary
vigilance and ready energies, had forced him, for a while, from the
indulgence of morbid contemplations. His heart, indeed, had been left
inactive; but his intellect and his physical powers had been kept in
hourly exercise. He returned to the world of his equals with a mind
laden with the treasures of a various and vast experience, and with much
of the same gloomy moral as that which, on emerging from the Catacombs,
assured the restless speculations of Rasselas of the vanity of human
life and the folly of moral aspirations.
Ernest Maltravers, never a faultless or completed character, falling
short in practice of his own capacities, moral and intellectual, from
his very desire to overpass the limits of the Great and Good, was
seemingly as far as heretofore from the grand secret of life. It was not
so in reality; his mind had acquired what before it wanted,--hardness;
and we are nearer to true virtue and true happiness when we demand too
little from men than when we exact too much.
Nevertheless, partly from the strange life that had thrown him amongst
men whom safety itself made it necessary to command despotically,
partly from the habit of power and disdain of the world, his nature was
incrusted with a stern imperiousness of manner, often approaching to the