A Rogue's Tragedy by Bernard Capes — Read

The Château di Rocco stood well back, among pine woods, from the little village of Les Chables on the Argentière Road. Above it sloped the stony steeps of the Flegère; below were huddled neglected terraces, like dams to check the further descent of the house into the valley. It might, in its relation to the huge quarry which contained it, have been part of the mountain itself, a vast boulder torn away from its parent rock, and retaining in relief the form of the socket from which it had parted. Towers, pinnacles and walls, heaped up like an enormous ice-mould, seemed to have shaped themselves to the uproar of avalanches, and falling torrents, and the thunder of the wind which uproots whole hill-sides. Yet it was so old itself as to have withstood a legion of assaults and survived unshaken. It had been the stronghold of the di Roccos from the days when the passes of the Alps were a very active trust in the keeping of the border lords, and was still a formidable veteran of its stones.

Within, a world of sombre and tarnished magnificence witnessed to the hands of great mechanics of the past generations. Only the spirit which could minister to such traditions was debased beyond recall. What strain was responsible for its existing lord's, who could say? The miser, like the comet, is a recurrent phenomenon, eccentric in his orbit.