Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together.  He could not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands.  He said it:—­he could not have done the thing.  So the best he could do was to let them go.  Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter, that he caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway.  Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a beggar for his friend!  He would have given something to have an English ear near him as he watched them rounding under the mountain they were about to climb.

CHAPTER IX

Concerning the black goddess fortune and the worship of her, together with an introduction of some of her VOTARIES

In those early days of Fortune’s pregnant alternations of colour between the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring of the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest’ of the ante-chambers of Hades.  Thither in the ripeness of the year trooped the devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and annually among them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for nowhere else had she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to a slumber by gales.

She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed, fearless of a sting; the lady petted them as her swans.  It surprised her to a gentle contempt of men and women, that they should be ruffled either by love or play.  A withholding from the scene will naturally arouse disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in our element.  And who could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual good luck?  Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their mutability:  and Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a droning husband, if constancy were practised by them.  Observe the staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded of their faithfulness.