Over this bright province Britain raised her flag, but only
Medallion and a few others loved it for its own sake, or saluted it in
the English tongue.
In the drab velvety dust of these four corners, were gathered, one night
of July a generation ago, the children of the village and many of their
elders. All the events of that epoch were dated from the evening of this
particular day. Another day of note the parish cherished, but it was
merely a grave fulfilment of the first.
Upon the veranda-stoop of the Louis Quinze stood a man of apparently
about twenty-eight years of age. When you came to study him closely,
some sense of time and experience in his look told you that he might be
thirty-eight, though his few grey hairs seemed but to emphasise a certain
youthfulness in him. His eye was full, singularly clear, almost benign,
and yet at one moment it gave the impression of resolution, at another it
suggested the wayward abstraction of the dreamer. He was well-figured,
with a hand of peculiar whiteness, suggesting in its breadth more the man
of action than of meditation. But it was a contradiction; for, as you
saw it rise and fall, you were struck by its dramatic delicacy; as it
rested on the railing of the veranda, by its latent power. You faced
incongruity everywhere. His dress was bizarre, his face almost
classical, the brow clear and strong, the profile good to the mouth,
where there showed a combination of sensuousness and adventure.
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