XVI
More than a fortnight had passed since D'Albert placed his amorous epistle on Théodore's table, and yet there was no perceptible change in the latter's demeanor.—D'Albert did not know to what to attribute that silence;—it seemed as if Théodore had no knowledge of the letter; the pitiable D'Albert believed that it had been destroyed or lost; and yet it was difficult to see how that could be, for Théodore had returned to the room a moment after, and it would have been a most extraordinary thing if he had failed to notice a large paper lying by itself in the middle of the table, in such a way as to attract the most absent-minded glance.
Or was it that Théodore was really a man and not a woman, as D'Albert had imagined—or, in case she was a woman, had she such a pronounced aversion for him, such contempt, that she would not even deign to take the trouble to reply to him?—The poor fellow, who had not had, like ourselves, the privilege of looking through the portfolio of la belle Maupin's confidante, Graciosa, was not in a condition to decide affirmatively or negatively any of these important questions, and he wavered sadly in the most wretched irresolution.
One evening he was in his room, with his forehead pressed against the window, gazing gloomily, without seeing them, at the chestnut-trees in the park, already partly bare of leaves and bright red in spots. The horizon was swimming in a thick haze, night was already descending, rather gray than black, and cautiously placing its velvet feet on the tree-tops;—a large swan amorously dipped her neck and shoulders again and again in the steaming water of the stream, and her white body resembled in the shadow a large star of snow.—She was the only living creature that gave life to that dull landscape.
D'Albert was musing as sadly as a disappointed man can muse at five o'clock on a cloudy autumn afternoon, with no music but the whistling of a shrill north wind and no other outlook than the skeleton of a leafless forest.
He was thinking of throwing himself into the river, but the water seemed very black and cold, and the swan's example only half persuaded him; of blowing out his brains, but he had neither pistol nor powder, and he would have been sorry if he had; of taking a new mistress, or even two—an ominous resolution! but he knew nobody who suited him, or, for that matter, who did not suit him.—He carried his despair so far as to think of renewing his relations with women who were perfectly unendurable to him and whom he had had his lackeys drive out of his house with horse-whips. He ended by deciding upon something even more ghastly—writing a second letter.
O sextuple idiot!
He was at that point in his meditations when he felt upon his shoulder—a hand—like a little dove alighting on a palm-tree.—The simile halts a little in that D'Albert's shoulder bore but slight resemblance to a palm; no matter, we retain it from a sentiment of pure Orientalism.
The hand was attached to the end of an arm which corresponded with a shoulder forming part of a body, which body was nothing more nor less than Théodore-Rosalind, Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, or Madelaine de Maupin, to give her her true name.
Who was surprised?—Neither you nor I, for you and I were fully prepared for this visit; but D'Albert, who had not the slightest expectation of it.—He gave a little cry of surprise half-way between oh! and ah! However, I have the best of reasons for thinking that it was nearer an ah! than an oh!
Chapter XVI — He was at that point in his meditations when he felt upon his shoulder—a hand—like a little dove alighting on a palm-tree.— *** The hand was attached to the end of an arm which corresponded with a shoulder forming part of a body, which body was nothing more nor less than Théodore-Rosalind, Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, or Madelaine de Maupin, to give her her true name.
It was Rosalind herself, so fair and radiant that she lighted up the whole room,—with the strings of pearls in her hair, her prismatic dress, her ample lace sleeves, her red-heeled shoes, her lovely peacock's-feather fan,—in a word, just as she was on the day of the play. But there was this important and decisive difference, that she had neither neckerchief nor wimple nor ruff nor anything at all to conceal from his eyes those two charming hostile twin brothers,—who, alas! are only too often inclined to be reconciled.
A breast entirely bare, as white and transparent as antique marble, of the purest and most exquisite form, protruded boldly from a very scanty corsage and seemed to challenge kisses. It was a very reassuring sight; and D'Albert was quickly reassured, and gave way in all confidence to his wildest emotions.
"Well, Orlando, do you not recognize your Rosalind?" said the fair one, with the most charming smile; "or have you left your love hanging with your sonnets on the bushes in the forest of Arden? Are you really cured of the disease for which you asked me so persistently for a remedy? I am very much afraid so."
"Oh, no! Rosalind, I am sicker than ever. I am in the death-agony; I am dead, or nearly so."
"You look very well for a corpse, and many living men have not so good a color as you."
"What a week I have passed!—You can't imagine it, Rosalind. I hope that it will be worth at least a thousand years of purgatory to me in the other world.—But, if I may venture to ask you, why did you not answer sooner?"
"Why?—I am not quite sure, unless it was just because.—If that reason doesn't strike you as satisfactory, here are three others not so good; you can take your choice: first, because, in the excitement of your passion, you forgot to write legibly and it took me more than a week to guess what your letter was about;—secondly, because my modesty could not accustom itself in less time to the ridiculous idea of taking a dithyrambic poet for a lover; and thirdly, because I was not sorry to find out if you would blow out your brains, poison yourself with opium, or hang yourself with your garter.—There you are."
"You wicked jester!—You did well to come to-day, I assure you, for you might not have found me to-morrow."
"Really! poor boy!—Don't put on such a disconsolate expression, for I shall be touched too, and that would make me stupider in my single person than all the animals that were in the ark with the late Noah.—If I once open the flood-gates of my sentimentality, you will be submerged, I warn you.—Just now I gave you three bad reasons, I offer you now three good kisses; will you accept, on condition that you are to forget the reasons for the kisses?—I owe you that much, and more."
As she spoke, the lovely girl stepped up to the doleful lover and threw her beautiful bare arms around his neck.—D'Albert kissed her effusively on both cheeks and on the mouth.—The last kiss lasted longer than the others and might well have counted for four.—Rosalind saw that all that she had done hitherto was mere child's play. Her debt paid, she sat on D'Albert's knee, still deeply moved, and said, passing her hands through his hair:
"All my cruelty is exhausted, my sweet friend; I took this fortnight to satisfy my natural ferocity; I will confess that it seemed very long to me. Don't be conceited because I speak frankly, but that is the truth.—I put myself in your hands, take your revenge for my past rigor.—If you were a fool, I would not say this to you, nor indeed would I say anything else, for I don't care for fools.—It would have been very easy for me to make you believe that I was tremendously incensed by your boldness and that you would not have a sufficient store of platonic sighs and highly concentrated rhapsodies to obtain forgiveness for an offence with which I was well pleased; I might, like other women, have haggled with you for a long while and given you in instalments what I give you freely and all at once; but I do not think you would have loved me a single hair's breadth more.—I do not ask you for an oath of everlasting love nor for any extravagant protestations.—Love me as much as God pleases.—I will do the same for my part.—I will not call you a perfidious villain when you cease to love me.—You will have the kindness also to spare me the odious corresponding titles, if I should happen to leave you.—I shall simply be a woman who has ceased to love you—nothing more.—It isn't necessary for us to hate each other all our lives because we have lain together for a night or two.—Whatever happens, and wherever my destiny may guide me, I swear to you, and this is an oath one can keep, that I will always retain a delightful memory of you, and, even if I am no longer your mistress, that I will always be your friend as I have been your comrade.—For you I have laid aside my man's clothes for to-night; to-morrow morning I shall resume them again for all.—Remember that I am Rosalind only at night, and that through the day I am and can be only plain Théodore de Sérannes—"
The conclusion of the sentence was stifled by a kiss, succeeded by many others, which they ceased to count and of which we will not undertake to furnish an exact reckoning, because it would certainly be a little long and perhaps very immoral—in the eyes of some people—for, so far as we are concerned, we know of nothing more moral and more sacred under heaven than the caresses of a man and a woman, when both are young and beautiful.
As D'Albert's solicitations became more passionate and more earnest, Théodore's lovely face, instead of expanding and beaming, assumed an expression of dignified melancholy which caused her lover some anxiety.
"Why, my dear sovereign, have you the chaste and solemn air of an antique Diana, when you should display the smiling lips of Venus rising from the sea?"
"You see, D'Albert, I resemble the huntress, Diana, more than anything else on earth.—When I was very young, I assumed this masculine costume for reasons which it would be tedious and useless to tell you.—You alone have divined my sex—and if I have made conquests, they have been of women only, superfluous conquests by which I have more than once been embarrassed.—In a word, although it may seem absurd and incredible, I am a virgin—as spotless as the snow of the Himalayas, as the Moon before she had lain with Endymion, as Mary before she made the acquaintance of the heavenly dove, and I am serious like everybody who is about to do something that can never be undone.—I am about to undergo a metamorphosis, a transformation.—To change the name of maiden for the name of woman, to have not that to give to-morrow which I had yesterday; something that I do not know and am going to learn; an important leaf turned in the book of life.—That is why I am sad, my friend, and not because of anything for which you are to blame."
As she spoke, she put aside the young man's long hair with her two lovely hands, and pressed her softly clinging lips to his pale forehead.
D'Albert, deeply moved by the gentle, solemn tone in which she delivered her speech, took her hands and kissed all the fingers, one after another,—then gently broke the fastenings of her dress so that the corsage opened and the two white treasures appeared in all their splendor: upon that gleaming bosom, as pure as silver, bloomed the two loveliest roses in paradise. He softly pressed his mouth to the blushing points and so ran over the whole surface. Rosalind, with inexhaustible good nature, allowed him to do as he pleased, and tried to return his caresses as exactly as possible.
"You must find me very awkward and very cold, my poor D'Albert; but I hardly know what I am to do;—you will have much trouble to teach me, and really I am putting a very hard task upon you."
D'Albert made the simplest of all replies, he did not reply at all,—and embracing her with increased passion, he covered her bare shoulders and breast with kisses. The half-fainting girl's hair became unfastened, and her dress fell to her feet as if by enchantment. She stood like a white phantom with a simple chemise of the most transparent linen. The happy lover knelt and had soon tossed the two pretty little red-heeled shoes into opposite corners of the room;—the stockings with embroidered clocks followed them close.
The chemise, endowed with a happy spirit of emulation, did not lag behind the dress: first it slipped from the shoulders before she thought of preventing it; then, taking advantage of a moment when the arms were perpendicular, it escaped from them with much address and fell as far as the hips, whose waving contour half stopped it.—Thereupon Rosalind noticed the perfidy of her last garment and raised her knee a little to prevent it from falling altogether.—In that pose she was a perfect copy of the marble statues of goddesses, whose intelligent drapery, grieved to conceal so many charms, regretfully envelops the shapely thighs, and by well-planned treachery stops just below the place it is intended to hide.—But as the chemise was not of marble, and its folds did not sustain it, it continued its triumphal descent, fell upon the dress and lay in a circle at its mistress's feet like a great white greyhound.
Chapter XVI — The chemise, endowed with a happy spirit of emulation, did not lag behind the dress: first it slipped from the shoulders before she thought of preventing it; then, taking advantage of a moment when the arms were perpendicular, it escaped from them with much address and fell as far as the hips, whose waving contour half stopped it.
Of course, there was a very simple means of avoiding all this confusion; namely, by holding the fleeing garment with the hand; but that idea, natural as it was, did not occur to our modest heroine.
She was left, therefore, without any veil, her fallen clothing forming a sort of pedestal, in all the transparent splendor of her lovely nudity, in the soft light of an alabaster lamp that D'Albert had lighted.
D'Albert, fairly dazzled, gazed at her in ecstasy.
"I am cold," she said, folding her arms across her breast.
"Oh! one moment more! I pray you!"
Rosalind unfolded her arms, rested the tip of her finger on the back of a chair, and stood perfectly still; she leaned slightly to one side in order to bring out all the grace of the undulating line;—she seemed in no wise embarrassed, and the imperceptible flush on her cheek did not deepen a single shade: but the somewhat hurried beating of her heart made the contour of her left bosom tremble.
The young enthusiast in beauty could not feast his eyes enough on such a spectacle: we must say, to the unbounded praise of Rosalind, that this time the reality surpassed his dream, and that he was not conscious of the slightest disillusionment.
Everything was combined in the lovely body posing before him;—delicacy and strength, form and coloring, the outlines of a Grecian statue of the most glorious days of the art, and the tones of a Titian.—He saw there, palpable and crystallized, the misty chimera he had tried so many times to check in its flight—he was not compelled, as he had complained so bitterly to his friend Silvio, to confine his glances to some special well-formed portion of the body, and not to look beyond it, under penalty of seeing something horrible, and his amorous eyes descended from the head to the feet and ascended from the feet to the head, always softly caressed by a harmonious, correctly proportioned line.
The knees were wonderfully pure, the ankles slender and shapely, the legs and thighs built upon a noble, superb model, the belly as lustrous as agate, the hips supple and strong, a bosom that might well tempt the gods to come down from heaven to kiss it, arms and shoulders of the most magnificent shape;—a torrent of beautiful brown hair, curling slightly, as in the heads drawn by the old masters, fell in tiny waves along a back of polished ivory, marvellously heightening the effect of its whiteness.
The painter satisfied, the lover gained the upper hand; for, however great one's love of art, there are things which one cannot long remain contented in looking at.
He took the fair one in his arms and carried her to the bed; in a twinkling he had undressed himself and jumped in beside her.
Our fair reader of the gentler sex would surely look askance at her lover if we should disclose the formidable figure attained by D'Albert's love, assisted by Rosalind's curiosity. Let her remember the most completely filled and the most delightful of her own nights, the night when—the night she would remember a hundred thousand days if she did not die long before; let her put the book beside her and count upon her pretty white fingers how many times he who loved her best loved her that night, and thus fill the gap which we leave in this glorious history.
Rosalind was extremely well disposed, and made astonishing progress in that one night.—The artlessness of body which wondered at everything, and the finesse of mind which wondered at nothing, formed a most alluring and fascinating contrast.—D'Albert was enchanted, bewildered, transported, and would have liked the night to last forty-eight hours, like that in which Hercules was conceived.—Toward morning, however, despite an infinity of the most amorous kisses, and caresses, and endearments, well adapted to keep a man awake, he was obliged, after a superhuman effort, to take a little rest. Sweet, luxurious slumber touched his eyelids with the end of its wing, his head sank and he fell asleep between his fair mistress's bosoms.—She gazed at him for some time with an air of profound and melancholy meditation; then, as the dawn cast its first rays through the curtains, she raised him gently, laid him beside her, rose and passed lightly over his body.
She seized her clothes and dressed in haste, then, returning to the bed, leaned over D'Albert, who was still sleeping, and kissed both his eyes on their long silky lashes.—That done, she left the room, walking backward and still looking at him.
Instead of returning to her room, she went to Rosette's.—What she said there, what she did there, I have never been able to learn, although I have striven most conscientiously to do so.—I have not found among Graciosa's papers or D'Albert's or Silvio's anything relating to that visit. But one of Rosette's maids told me of this singular circumstance: although her mistress did not lay with her lover that night, her bed was rumpled and tossed about and bore the impressions of two bodies.—Furthermore, she showed me two pearls exactly like those Théodore wore in his hair when he played Rosalind. She had found them in the bed when she made it. I state the fact and leave the reader to draw whatever deductions he may choose therefrom; for my own part I have made a thousand conjectures each more unreasonable than the last, and so ridiculous that I really do not dare to write them even in the most virtuously periphrastic style.
It was quite noon when Théodore left Rosette's chamber.—He did not appear at dinner or supper.—D'Albert and Rosette did not seem surprised.—He went to bed early, and the next morning, at daybreak, without a word to any one, he saddled his horse and his page's and left the chateau, telling a servant not to expect him at dinner, and that he might not return for some days.
D'Albert and Rosette were greatly astonished, and did not know how to account for this sudden disappearance—especially D'Albert, who, by the prowess he displayed the first night, thought he had well earned a second. Toward the end of the week, the unhappy, disappointed lover received a letter from Théodore which we propose to transcribe. I am afraid it will not satisfy my readers of either sex; but the letter was written so and not otherwise, and this glorious romance shall have no other conclusion.