blows. And there might have been some truth in his protestations. Very
soon he began to make overtures of friendship to his eldest stepson, my
maternal grandfather; and when these were peremptorily rejected he went
on renewing them again and again with characteristic obstinacy. For
years he persisted in his efforts at reconciliation, promising my
grandfather to execute a will in his favour if he only would be friends
again to the extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close
neighbourhood for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in
an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather was an
ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free from
hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded
Benedictines who directed the only public school of some standing then
in the south, he had also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth
century. In him Christian charity was joined to a philosophical
indulgence for the failings of human nature. But the memory of these
miserably anxious early years, his young man's years robbed of all
generous illusions by the cynicism of the sordid lawsuit, stood in the
way of forgiveness. He never succumbed to the fascination of the great
shoot; and X, his heart set to the last on reconciliation with the draft
of the will ready for signature kept by his bedside, died intestate.
The fortune thus acquired and augmented by a wise and careful management
passed to some distant relatives whom he had never seen and who even did
not bear his name.

Meantime the blessing of general peace descended upon Europe. Mr.
Nicholas B., bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative, the "fearless"
Austrian officer, departed from Galicia, and without going near his
native place, where the odious lawsuit was still going on, proceeded
straight to Warsaw and entered the army of the newly constituted Polish
kingdom under the sceptre of Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.