was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and not acceptable
in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a
different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made
timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that there sprang up
as much comradeship between us as our different habits would allow;
and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve together, or
took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the monologues
in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment and
discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and
the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind
was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we
talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they
love us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion
with a strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my
subsequent life.
This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,
which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered
suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.
Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually
breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to
take longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered
days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--
"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you
home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall
go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and
we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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