Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living
wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.

The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a
sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,--the bare experience
seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The
interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with
Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at
Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a
native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black
yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ended at three in the morning on
rice-brandy and betel served by unreal women with chalked faces and
vermilion-spotted lips, simpering and melancholy. By day, there was
work, or now and then a lesson with Dr. Earle's teacher, a little aged
Chinaman of intricate, refined, and plaintive courtesy. Under his
guidance Rudolph learned rapidly, taking to study as a prodigal might
take to drink. And with increasing knowledge came increasing
tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at
every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo-milk.

Then, too, came the mild excitement of moving into his own house, the
Portuguese nunnery. Through its desolate, lime-coated spaces, his meagre
belongings were scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their
words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for
thought. The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a
cry from the river, or the sing-song of a "boy" improvising some endless
ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and
peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the
stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze
to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray to flowing brass;--all