Maltravers had probably left his native land forever, he
imagined it extremely probable that the latter would now consent to
the sale, and he begged Vargrave to forward a letter from him to that
effect.

Vargrave made some excuse, for he felt that nothing could be more
indelicate than such an application forwarded through his hands at such
a time; and Doltimore, who had accidentally heard De Montaigne confess
that he knew the address of Maltravers, quietly sent his letter to the
Frenchman, and, without mentioning its contents, begged him to forward
it. De Montaigne did so. Now it is very strange how slight men and
slight incidents bear on the great events of life; but that simple
letter was instrumental to a new revolution in the strange history of
Maltravers.

CHAPTER II.

QUID frustra simulacra fugacia captas?--
Quod petis est nusquam.*--OVID: _Met._ iii. 432.

* "Why, in vain, do you catch at fleeting shadows?
That which you seek is nowhere."

TO no clime dedicated to the indulgence of majestic griefs or to the
soft melancholy of regret--not to thy glaciers, or thy dark-blue lakes,
beautiful Switzerland, mother of many exiles; nor to thy fairer earth
and gentler heaven, sweet Italy,--fled the agonized Maltravers. Once,
in his wanderings, he had chanced to pass by a landscape so steeped in
sullen and desolate gloom, that it had made a powerful and uneffaced
impression upon his mind: it was amidst those swamps and morasses that
formerly surrounded the castle of Gil de Retz, the ambitious Lord, the
dreaded Necromancer, who perished at the stake, after a career of such
power and splendour as seemed almost to justify the dark belief in his
preternatural agencies.*

* See, for description of this scenery, and the fate of De Retz,
the high-wrought and glowing romance by Mr. Ritchie called
"The Magician."

Here, in a lonely and wretched inn, remote from other habitations,
Maltravers fixed himself. In gentler griefs there is a sort of luxury
in bodily discomfort; in his inexorable and unmitigated anguish, bodily
discomfort was not felt. There is a kind of magnetism in extreme woe,
by which the body itself seems laid asleep, and knows no distinction
between the bed of Damiens and the rose-couch of the Sybarite. He left
his carriage and servants at a post-house some miles distant. He came
to this dreary abode alone; and in that wintry season, and that most
disconsolate scene, his gloomy soul