Mora

“ Mora sank down wearily on the seat he had vacated. At that moment she felt as if she would have been grateful for the earth to open and swallow her up. She was appalled at the blackness of the gulf to the edge of which her husband had just dragged her. What should she do? Whither should she turn? To whom should she look for help? Alas! in all the wide world there was no one who could help her—least of all the man whose strong protecting love had seemed but yesterday as though it were able to shield her from every harm. ”

“ I had seen de la Mora on many a field, but never did he look stronger or nobler than on that night. His voice sounded full and clear despite the intensity of his suffering.
"Captain de Mouret, you are a soldier, a brave one, as my own eyes have witnessed, reputed a man of untarnished honour. Will you truly answer me one question upon the sacred Blood of Christ?" ”

“ He keeps his advantage, he thinks, by not forcing the note,—don't you see?" Traffle himself—under the quick glow of his rush—actually saw, more and more. "He's feeling his way,—he used that expression to me; and again, I haven't to tell you, any more than he really had to tell me, that with Mora one has to sit tight. He puts on us, in short, the responsibility." ”

“ I, for one, confess I miss the fun—put it only at the fun of our having had to wriggle so with shame, or, call it if you like, to live so under arms, against prying questions and the too easy exposure of our false explanations; which only proves, however, that, as I say, the worst that has happened to us appears to be that we're going to find life tame again—as tame as it was before ever Mora came into it so immensely to enrich and agitate it. ”

“ She would have liked him, he easily recognized, to burst with curiosity, or, better still, to grovel with it, before she should so much as throw him a sop; but just this artless pride in her it was that, by the very candour of its extravagance, presently helped him to a keen induction. He had only to ask himself what could have occurred that would most of all things conduce to puffing her up with triumph, and then to reflect that, thoroughly to fill that bill, as who should say, she must have had a contrite call from Mora. ”

“ MORA, or Morra (Ital. delay) , a game, universally popular in Italy, in which one player endeavours to guess instantly the number of fingers held up by the other. Ancient Egyptian sculptors represent a game of this kind, and it was played by the Romans, who called it micare digitis, or finger-flashing. It is known to the Chinese and to certain tribes of the Pacific Islands. ”

“ They had brought him there at the very best to patronise him, and now would simply have to reckon with his showing clearly for so much more a person "of the world" than they. Traffle, it was true, was becoming, under the precious initiation opened to him by Mora, whether directly or indirectly, much more a man of the world than ever yet: as much as that at least he could turn over in his secret soul while their visitor pursued. ”

“ Mora was, accurately speaking, no sharer of his blood, and he absolutely denied her the right not alone socially to dishonour, but, beyond a mere ruffle of the surface, morally to discompose, him; mixed with which rather awkwardly, not to say perhaps a bit perversely, was the sense that as the girl was showing up, unmistakably, for one of the most curious of "cases,"—the term Puddick himself had used about her she wouldn't be unlikely to reward some independent, some intelligent notice. ”

“ Then drawing up a footstool, she sat down on it, and took one of Mora’s hands in both hers.
‘The matter, dear! Nothing. What should be the matter?’ asked the latter with a fine assumption of indifference, but her under-lip trembled so much that she was fain to bite it.
‘That is just what I want to find out,’ answered Clarice. ‘For the last four days there has been a change in you, that puzzles me and makes me unhappy. You scarcely speak, you scarcely eat, you shut yourself up in your room; nothing seems to interest you. ”

“ Mora has ever been the classic game of the South, and indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that it was played by the ancestors of these dwellers in Magna Graecia hundreds of years before Pompeii was overthrown. The game, which requires nothing but the human fingers, bears no little resemblance to our own humble pastime of “Up Jenkin!” which may almost be described as a species of drawing-room mora; [pg 25] perhaps some Italian traveller in a past age may actually have introduced this form of the southern diversion into prosaic England. ”

“ Why the deuce did her stars, unless to make her worship gods entirely other than Jane Traffle's, rig her out with a name that puts such a premium on adventures? 'Mora Montravers,'—it paints the whole career for you! She is, one does feel, her name ”

“ In the very forefront, shoulder to shoulder, with a laugh and a parry, a lunge and a jest, fought the Chevalier de la Mora. Merry as a lad at play, resolute and quick, I could but stop betimes to wonder at the fellow. Gallant, gay and debonnair, he sang a rippling little air from soft Provence, and whirled his blade with such dainty skill that even the stoical Indians gazed in awe upon the laughing cavalier. Fighting through a bye-street, he met, steel to steel, a Spanish gentleman, within the sweep of whose sword lay half a dozen of our good fellows. ”

“ Bazzarini says it even includes ‘pallone’ and other games; but it is in common use for shooting small birds as for hunting quadrupeds. ↑
3 ‘Mora Saracena,’ a black Saracen woman; ‘mora’ is in constant use for a dark-coloured person. Senhor de Saraiva tells me that a so-called ‘Mora encantada’ figures as one of the favourite personages in Portuguese traditionary tales; but she is less often an actual Moor than a princess held in thrall by Moorish art, to be set free by Christian chivalry. She is often represented as bound at the bottom of a well. ”

“ About ten years ago, he found so little defence from the walls of his then residence Delow, against the attacks of the Felatahs, that he built the new town Mora, nearly facing the north, and situated under a semicircular ridge of very picturesque mountains. These natural barriers form a strong rampart on every side but one, and he has hitherto withstood the attempts of his enemies. It is rather a curious circumstance that no Shouaas are to be found in the Mandara dominions, nor any where to the south of them. ”

“ As good luck would have it, Jerome's friend, the Chevalier Charles de la Mora, was then at Sceaux, and came up early on learning of our arrival.
He was a splendid fellow of thirty-five, stalwart and unusually graceful for a man of his inches. His frank and cordial manner was his greatest charm to me, though a woman would doubtless have raved more over those dark, dreamy eyes, which while mild enough, betimes gave promise of fire and to spare. ”

“ During her short, solitary life she had never known anybody else, and had hardly exchanged words with a living soul, old or young. Poor little Morag had grown up utterly untaught. Like the pointers, her playmates, she had grown very clever in some things—in mountain knowledge, in dexterity of fingers and agility of limb. But there were wants in her nature utterly unsupplied, chambers in her heart and soul into which light had never penetrated. Made in the image of God, she had never heard His name; redeemed by Jesus Christ, she knew not that such a One had lived and died for men. ”

“ And Monsieur," the child straightened up proudly till she was quite a woman. "Monsieur, I come of a race as old as her own—and as honoured." "Charles is poor—the Chevalier de la Mora, you know. But now he goes to the colonies, and will take me with him."
It was a silly enough thing to do, but about here I stalked most unceremoniously off, leaving her to her sorrow and her tears. Since that day I have often smiled to think how foolishly do the wisest men deport themselves when they first begin to love. ”

“ Not even out on the morass was antiquity to be left in peace. He had now seen that even the grey tree-roots, older than the oldest raven, and firmly inwoven into the deep, bottomless morass—that even they had to yield before the sharp axes. ”

“ Nature looks pale and wan in its leaves, and her resources are nearly dried up in its extremities; its sap is tainted; a mortal sickness, slow as a consumption, and as sure in its consequences, has long since entered its frame, vitiating and destroying the wholesome juices there.
Step a few paces aside, and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now lie on the ground in sad confusion one upon the other, all shattered and fungus-grown, and a prey to millions of insects, which are busily employed in destroying them. ”

“ The beautiful forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty, and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure; the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle; the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their fill; the trees are garlanded with epiphytes and convolvuli, and anchored to the earth by a thousand vines. ”

“ The little girl had never thought of life as being difficult and dangerous, and did not feel the need of a friend and guide. Moreover, she did not like anything that made her feel serious, so she quickly closed the book, and, restoring it to its place on the shelf, ran away to the cottage door, warbling a gay song, as she plucked some berries from one of the old rowan trees to make a wreath for Morag, and crown her queen of gypsies. ”

“ Morag stood among the larch trees, bending under a heavy bundle of faggots, which she had been gathering, and which she had just managed to strap on her back. Hearing the sound of wheels on the road, she turned to look, but was only in time to catch a glimpse of the carriage, as it passed swiftly along by the old winding dyke. ”

“ Morāno, good, faithful man, come forward for but a moment out of the Golden Age and bow across all those centuries to the reader: say one farewell to him in your Spanish tongue, though the sound of it be no louder than the sound of shadows moving, and so back to the dim splendour of the past, for the Señor or Señora shall hear your name no more. ”

“ Poor Morag certainly presented a grotesque enough appearance as she stood there in the brightly-lighted hall, wrapped in the great tartan plaid, which was fastened behind, while the ends fell on the ground. And on her head she wore a little scarlet hood, a relic of her infancy, which she had taken from the depths of the old kist—feeling certain that Ellis would look on her more favorably if she wore a bonnet. But, unfortunately, the hood was of such small dimensions that it had a constant tendency towards the back of her neck, leaving her black elf-like locks streaming around. ”

“ Clifford thought, as he went forward to meet them among the white stems. The fair, high-born child in her white shimmering dress, with her graceful movements, her delicate, finely-cut features, her calm white brow, and deep dreamy, blue eyes, and at her side the little dark, keen Celt, with her black matted locks, her bright dark eyes, and her short firmly-knit limbs. Blanche's arm was thrown lovingly around Morag, and one of her long fair curls rested on the little brown neck of the mountain maiden, who timidly surveyed the formidable group in front. ”

“ Ellis had never taken the little native to her heart, in spite of her little mistress' frequent triumphant reminders that the ragged maiden of the fir-wood had proved no dangerous gypsy after all; but to-night she was most gracious, patting the trembling little Morag condescendingly on the head, as she led the way to Blanche's room, where Morag was summoned in the course of the evening. ”

“ The world with all its wonders seemed like a playroom to her, and the marvels of nature interested her, just as playthings had done in the old nursery days. To her, nature had never spoken in faint mysterious whispers of a beauty and glory higher than its own, as it had sometimes done to the lonely little maiden 107in her wild mountain home. Nor did Blanche understand, any more than Morag, that the God whose voice is in the storm, who shapes the grass and blanches the snow, is the same God who came to dwell upon earth ”

“ As soon as the strangers were gone a little distance, Morag laid down her work, and gliding up to the old fir-tree where she had stood to listen to Blanche's hymn, she leant against it, and shading her eyes with her hand she gazed wistfully after them as they disappeared among the pillars of pine. "The bonnie wee leddy, she's awa'. They'll no be lettin' her speak wi' the like o' me anither time," soliloquised Morag, who, like most solitary people, had the habit of speaking her thoughts aloud when alone. "That gran' like woman thocht I was a tramp. ”

“ He had already enquired with his sword behind the velvet curtains. He felt secure in the bulk of Morāno across the only door, at least from creatures of this world: and Morāno feared no longer either spirit or spell, believing that he had vanquished the Professor with his symbol, and all such allies as he may have had here or elsewhere. But not thus easily do we overcome the powers of evil. ”

“ What a horrid house you must have to live in! Papa says that it's a great shame of somebody—I forget who. I do wish that the sun might always shine, and then you could sit among those delicious pine-trees, instead of in-doors," and Blanche went on in a silvery torrent of words, while Morag gazed at her, eagerly listening in glad silence. ”