He had loved a girl whom he had intended to marry. That was the only romance of his life, and we shall speak of it in due course. There was nothing left for him to love save Salvator. He did love him; but always with reservations, with pain, and a kind of bitterness, when he thought that his friend was incapable of being as unhappy as he was.

Six months after the second catastrophe, undoubtedly the more cruel and real of the two, Prince de Roswald was traversing Italy in a post-chaise, carried along by his enterprising friend in a whirlwind of hot dust. Salvator had a need for pleasure and gaiety, yet he sacrificed everything for the sake of the one whom others referred to as “his spoilt child”. “Say my dearest child,” he would reply. “For however cherished Roswald has been by his mother and me, neither his heart nor his character have been spoiled. He has become neither exacting, nor despotic, nor ungrateful, nor capricious. He is appreciative of the slightest attentions, and is more grateful than he need be for my devotion.”

This was a generous admission, but it was true. Karol had no small defects. He had only one – large, unintentional and fatal: mental intolerance. He was incapable of opening the floodgates of compassion fully, in general charity, when judging things human. He was one of those who believe that virtue consists in abstaining from evil and who do not understand the most sublime message of the Gospel (which they incidentally profess to the letter) and that is the love of the repentant sinner which creates more joy in Heaven than the perseverance of a hundred just men, and the faith in the return of the lost sheep; in short, the very spirit of Jesus which is evident in all His teaching and pervades all He says: namely, that he who loves is greater, even if he strays, than the one who walks undeviating along a cold, lonely path.

In daily life Karol behaved with the greatest charm; all forms of kindness assumed unusual grace with him and when he expressed his gratitude it was with a deep emotion which repaid friendship with interest Even in his grief, which seemed eternal and of which he refused to foresee the end, he bore a semblance of resignation, as if he had yielded to Salvator’s wish to keep him alive.

The fact is that his delicate health was not deeply affected and his life was not threatened by any serious decline; but the habit of languishing and never testing his strength had given him the belief that he would not long survive his mother. He was ready to imagine that he felt himself dying every day and, with this thought in mind, he accepted Salvator’s attentions and concealed from him, how little, according to his judgement, remained of the time during which he could take advantage of his solicitude. He had much fortitude and if he did not accept the idea of an early death with the heroic unconcern of youth, he at least cherished the expectation of it with something of a mixture of bitterness and pleasure.

In this conviction he detached himself more and more each day from humanity, of which he believed he no longer formed part All the wickedness that existed on this earth became remote to him. Apparently, so he thought, God had not given him the mission of being perturbed by it and combating it, since He had measured out to him so few days on this earth. He regarded this as a favour granted to the virtues of his mother, and when he saw the suffering which was part of the punishment for men’s sins, he thanked Heaven for granting him that suffering which would purify and absolve him from all the blemishes of original sin. At such times he leapt forward in imagination towards the other world and was lost in mysterious dreams. Basically all this was a synthesis of Catholic dogma; but in the details it was his poet’s fancy which was giving itself free rein. For it must be said that if his instincts and principles of behaviour were absolute, his religious beliefs were very vague, and this was the effect of an education entirely consisting of emotion and inspiration, where the arid work of examination, the rights of reason and logic – that guiding thread through the labyrinth – counted for nothing at all.

As he had not pursued and developed any course of study on his own, there were great gaps in his mind which his mother had filled, as best she could, by invoking the impenetrable wisdom of God and the insufficiency granted to men That, too, was Catholic teaching. Younger and more of an artist than his mother, Karol had idealised his own ignorance; he had, so to speak, furnished the frightful void with romantic ideas; angels, stars, a sublime flight through space, an unknown place where his soul would repose side by side with that of his mother and his betrothed. So much for Paradise. As for Hell, he could not believe in it; but unwilling to deny its existence, he did not think about it. He felt pure and full of trust as far as concerned himself. If he had been driven to say where he relegated guilty souls, he would have sited their torments amid the turbulent waves of the sea, in the storm on high places, in the sinister noises of autumn nights, in eternal unrest. The misty, insinuating poetry of Ossian had been his companion together with the Rite of Rome.

The firm, open hand of Salvator dared not test all the strings of this subtle and complicated instrument. Therefore he could not fully realise the extent to which this exceptional being was both strong and weak, immense and incomplete, terrible and exquisite, tenacious and unstable. If in order to love him he would have had to know him completely, he would have abandoned the task very quickly, for one requires a whole lifetime to understand such natures; and even then one only succeeds, through endless study and patience, in ascertaining the mechanism of their intimate lives. The cause of their contradictions always escapes us.

One day, as they were going from Milan to Venice, they found themselves not far from a lake which sparkled in the setting sun like a diamond in the green landscape.

“Let us go no further to-day,” said Salvator, who had observed signs of fatigue on the face of his young friend. “Our daily journeys are too long, and we exhausted ourselves, both body and mind, yesterday, admiring Lake Como.”

“Ah, I don’t regret it,” replied Karol.