"Because he has been, sire."
"A good safeguard, but of no use to me."
"Why, no, not at present," answered Varvilliers.
The carriage drew up at his lodgings. I was not inclined for sleep, and readily acceded to his request that I should pay him a visit. Having dismissed the carriage (I was but a little way from my own house), I mounted the stairs and found myself in a very snug room. He put me in an armchair and gave me a cigar. We talked long and intimately as the hours of the night rolled on. He spoke, half in reminiscence, half in merry rhapsody, of the joys of living, the delight of throwing the reins on the neck of youth. As I looked at his trim figure, his handsome face, merry eyes, and dashing air, all that he said seemed very reasonable and very right; there was a good defence for it at the bar of nature's tribunal. It was honest too, free from cant, affectation, and pretence; it was a recognition of facts, and enlisted truth on its side. It needed no arguing, and he gave it none; the spirit that inspired also vindicated it. I could not help recalling the agonies and struggles which my passion for the Countess von Sempach had occasioned me. At first I thought that I would tell him about this affair, but I found myself ashamed. And I was ashamed because I had resisted the passion; it would have been very easy to tell him had I yielded. But the merry eyes would twinkle in amusement at my high-strung folly, as I had seen them twinkle at my brother-in-law's stolidity. He said something incidentally which led me to fancy that he had heard about the Countess and had received a mistaken impression of the facts; I did not correct what appeared to be his idea. I neither confirmed nor contradicted it. I said to myself that it was nothing to me what notion he had of my conduct; in reality I did not desire him to know the truth. I clung to the conviction that I could justify what had seemed my hard-won victory, but I did not feel as though I could justify it to him. He would laugh, be a little puzzled, and dismiss the matter as inexplicable. His own creed was not swathed in clouds, nor dim, nor hard clearly to see and picture; it was all very straightforward. Properly it was no creed; it was a course of action based on a mode of feeling which neither demanded nor was patient of defence or explanation. The circumstances of my life were such that never before had I been brought into contact with a similar temperament or a similar practice. When they were thus suddenly presented to me they seemed endowed with a most attractive simplicity, with a naturalness, with what I must call a wholesomeness; the objections I felt to be overstrained, unreal, morbid. Varvilliers' feet were on firm ground; on what shaking uncertain bog of mingled impulses, emotions, fancies, and delusions might not those who blamed him be found themselves to stand?
I am confident that he spoke without premeditation, with no desire to win a proselyte, merely as man to man, in unaffected intimacy. I think that he was rather sorry for me, having detected a gloominess in my view of life and a tendency to moody and fretful introspection. Once or twice he referred, in passing jest, to the difference of national characteristics, the German tendency to make love by crying (so he put it) as contrasted with the laughing philosophy of his own country. At the end he apologized for talking so much, and pointed out to me a photograph of Coralie that stood on the mantelpiece more than half-hidden by letters and papers, saying, "I suppose she set me off; somehow she seems to me a sort of embodiment of the thing."
It was three o'clock when I left him; even then I went reluctantly, traversing again in my mind the field that his tongue had easily and lightly covered, and reverting to the girl who, as he said, was a sort of embodiment of the thing. The phrase was definite enough for its purpose, and struck home with an undeniable truth. He and she were the sort of people to live in that sort of world, and to stand as its representatives. A feeling came over me that it was a fair fine world, where life need not be a struggle, where a man need not live alone, where he would not be striving always after what he could never achieve, waging always a war in which he should never conquer, staking all his joys against most uncertain shadowy prizes, which to win would bring no satisfaction. I cried out suddenly, as I walked by myself through the night, "There's no pleasure in my life." That protest summed up my wrongs. There was no pleasure in my life. There was everything else, but not that, not pure, unmixed, simple pleasure. Had I no right to some? I was very tired of trying to fill my place, of subordinating myself to my position, of being always Augustin the King. I was weary of my own ideal. I felt that I ought to be allowed to escape from it sometimes, to be, as it were, incognito in soul as well as in body, so that what I thought and did should not be reckoned as the work of the King's mind or the act of the King's hand. I envied intensely the lot and the temper of my friend Varvilliers. When I reached the palace and entered it, it seemed to me as though I were returning to a prison. Its walls shut me off from that free existence whose sweetness I had tasted, and forbade me to roam in the fields whither youth beckoned and curiosity lured me. That joy could never be mine. My burden was ever with me; the woman I had loved was gone; the girl I must be made husband to was soon to come. I was not and could not be as other young men.
That all this, the conversation with Varvilliers, its effect on me, my restless discontent and angry protests against my fate, should follow on meeting Coralie Mansoni at supper will not seem strange to anybody who remembers her.
CHAPTER XV.
THE HAIR-DRESSER WAITS.
When my years and my mood are considered, it may appear that I had enough to do in keeping my own life in the channel of wisdom and discretion. So it seemed to myself, and I was rather amused at being called upon to exert a good influence or even a wholesome authority over William Adolphus; it was so short a time since he had been summoned to perform a like office toward me. Yet after breakfast the next day Victoria came to me, dressed in a subdued style and speaking in low tones; she has always possessed a dramatic instinct. She had been, it seemed, unable to remain unconscious of the gossip afoot; of her own feelings she preferred to say nothing (she repeated this observation several times); what she thought about was the credit of the family; and of the family, she took leave to remind me, I was (I think she said, by God's will) the head. I could not resist remarking how times had changed; less than a year ago she had sent William Adolphus, sober, staid, panoplied in the armour of contented marriage, to wrestle with my errant desires. Victoria flushed and became just a little less meek.