Moths by Ouida — page 238: what you’re looking at

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

224 ) MOTHS. when before her in the creation of Beethoven, of Mozart, and of Meyerbeer. : A little later that morning a jager brought to. the Kaiser inn hotela grand golden eagle, shot so that it had died instantane- ously and been picked up upon the snow in all its beauty of plumage, without a feather ruffled. He brought also a large cluster of edelweiss from the summit of Thorstein, and a letter, The letter was to Madame de Sonnaz from Correze. She was sitting opposite to Vere on the balcony that fronted the bridge. : ‘‘From Der Freischutz!” she said, witha laugh. ‘‘He has not shot his own arm off, like Roger, that is evident.” Vere did not raise her head from her lace-work. It had been written in the hamlet hut under the Dachstein- spitze, and was in pencil. After graceful opening compliments, © in which no one knew better than himself how to make the com- monplace triviality of formula seem spontaneous and fresh, it went on: ‘‘T have shot a nobler creature than myself: men generally do when they shoot at all. Emblematic of the Napoleonic cause to which Madame la Duchesse has dedicated herself—inasmuch as it has lived on carrion, and, though golden, it will be rotten in a day, or at best stuffed with straw—I desire to lay it at the feet of Madame Jeanne, where its murderer has ever longed, but never dared, to prostrate himself. I offer the edelweiss to Madame la Princesse Zouroff, as it is well known to be her emblem. It has no other value than that of representing her by living at an alti- tude where nothing but snow and the star-rays presume to share its solitude.” : He said, in conclusion, that his hunting-trip having taken up the five days which he had allotted himself for Ischl, he feared he should see neither of them again until they met in Paris in winter, as his engagements took him at once to the Hague, and thence to Dresden, where there were special performances in honor of one of the gods of his old faith—Gluck. ‘* Very pretty,” reflected the Duchesse Jeanne as she read. ‘‘I suppose he reached the edelweiss himself, or he could scarcely have gathered it. I suppose Vera will understand that part of the ‘embleni.’” ) : But, though she thought so, she did not say so: she was @ courageous woman, but not quite courageous enough for that. She gave the edelweiss and the note together to her companion, aud only said with a little smile, ‘‘Correze always writes such pretty notes. It is an accomplishment that has its dangers. There is scarcely a good-looking woman in Paris who has not a .bundle, more or less big, of his letters—all with that tell-tale suggestive device of his—that silver Love, with one wing caught in a thorn-bush of roses: he drew it himself. You saw it on his ~ flag at the Kermesse, Oh, of course it is not on this paper. He scribbled this in some chalet of the Dachstein. I will have my eagle stuffed, and it shall have real rubies for eyes, and I will put it in my dining-room in Paris, and Correze for his sins shall sit underneath it and pledge the Violet and the Bee. Not that \ > Ggom G 00 q > . e 7 . a4 s ‘ ; : v ; UF ; ; id ‘ ‘ ’ ow { i ; < . riwpitd : 17) 7 v duit a €O