But Romaris was his--those aged oaks, torn by sea-winds and splashed with Atlantic spray, were all he had; and she was mistress here.
When a young man made his first appearance in the society of Paris who was called Réné Philippe Xavier, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, his personal appearance, which was singularly attractive, his manners, which were of extreme distinction, and his talents, which were great, made him at once successful in its highest society. He had a romantic history.
The son of that Marquis de Sabran who had fallen under the pikes of the mob of Carrier had been taken in secret out of the country by a faithful servant, smuggled on board a _chasse-marée_, which had carried him to an outward-bound sailing ship destined for the seaboard of America. The chaplain was devoted, the servant faithful. The boy was brought up well at a Jesuit college in Mexico, and placed in full possession, when he reached manhood, of his family papers and of such remnants of the family jewels as had been brought away with him. His identity as his father's only living son, and the sole representative of the Sabrans of Romaris, was fully established and confirmed before the French Consulate of the city. Instead of returning to his country, as his Jesuit tutors advised and desired, the youth, when he left college, gave the reins to a spirit of adventure and a passion for archæology and natural history. He was possessed beyond all with the desire to penetrate the mystery of the buried cities, and he had conceived a strong attachment to the flowery and romantic land of Guatemozin and of Montezuma. He plunged, therefore, into the interior of that country, and, half as a Jesuit lay-missionary, and half as an archeological explorer, let all his best years slip away under the twilight shadows of the virgin forests, and amidst the flowering wilderness of the banks of the great rivers, making endless notes upon the ancient and natural history of these solitudes, and gathering together an interminable store of tradition from the Indians and the half-breeds with whom he grew familiar. He went further and further away from the cities, and let longer and longer intervals elapse without his old friends and teachers hearing anything of him. All that was known of him was that he had married a beautiful Mexican woman, who was said to have in her the blood of the old royal race, and that he lived far from the steps of white men in the depths of the hills whence the Pacific was in sight. Once he went to the capital for the purpose of registering and baptizing his son by his Mexican wife. After that he was lost sight of by those who cared for him, and it was only known that he was compiling a history of those lost nations whose temples and tombs, amidst the wilderness, had so powerfully attracted his interest as a boy. A quarter of a century passed; his old friends died away one by one, nobody remained in the country who remembered or asked for him. The West is wide, and wild, and silent; endless wars and revolutions changed the surface of the country and the thoughts of men; the scholarly Marquis de Sabran, who only cared for a hieroglyphic, or an orchid, or a piece of archaic sculpture, passed away from the memories of the white men whose fellow student he had been. The land was soaked in blood, the treasures were given up to adventurers; the chiefs that each reigned their little hour, slew, and robbed, and burned, and fell in their turn shot like vultures or stabbed like sheep; and no one in that murderous _tohu-bohu_ had either time or patience to give to the thought of a student of perished altars and of swamp-flora. The college, even, where the Jesuits had sheltered him, had been sacked and set on fire, and the old men and the young men butchered indiscriminately. When six-and-twenty years later he returned to the capital to register the birth of his grandson there was no one who remembered his name. Another quarter of a century passed by, and when his young representative left the Western world for Paris he received a tender and ardent welcome from men and women to whom his name was still a talisman, and found a cordial recognition from that old nobility whose pride is so cautious and impregnable in its isolation and reserve. Everyone knew that the young Marquis de Sabran was the legitimate representative of the old race that had made its nest on the rocks with the sea birds through a dozen centuries: that he had but little wealth was rather to his credit than against it.
