“I love you. Couldn’t you love me a little? A little only? I would be your slave. Your slave; I’d be your slave,” she kept repeating.
What things she said! I listened to her, feeling pity—yes, pity no doubt—but still more, a profound embarrassment and with it anger against the person who had thrust me into this untenable position.
“It’s no good,” I protested. “It’s impossible.”
She only began again, desperately.
How much further the scene might have prolonged itself and what might have happened if it had been protracted, I do not know. Luckily, however, an extraordinary commotion suddenly broke loose in the hotel. Doors slammed, voices were raised, there was the noise of feet along the corridors and on the stairs. Startled and alarmed, Mrs. Aldwinkle got up, went to the door, opened it a crack and looked into the passage. Some one hurried past; hastily she closed it again. When the coast was clear, she slipped out into the passage and tiptoed away, leaving me alone.
The commotion was caused by the beginning of Miss Elver’s death-agony. Providence, having decided that my education had gone far enough, had broken off the lesson. The means it employed were, I must say, rather violent. A vain man might have been gratified by the reflection that one woman had been made miserable in order that he might be taught a lesson, while another had died—like King John, of a surfeit of lampreys—in order that the lesson might be interrupted before it was carried too disagreeably far. But as it happens, I am not particularly vain.
CHAPTER VIII
From the first nobody put very much faith in the local doctor; the mere look of him was enough to inspire mistrust. But when across the patient’s prostrate and comatose body he chattily confided that he had taken his degree at the University of Siena, Mr. Cardan decided that it was time to send for somebody else.
“Siena’s notorious,” he whispered. “It’s the place where the imbeciles who can’t get their degrees at Bologna, or Rome, or Pisa go and have themselves made doctors.”