“A plan.”
“Yes, I will tell you. First I must fetch my child. I feel as if they wanted to take her from me, as if you and she and I were in danger....”
“Fetch her now, at once.”
“It is only ten o’clock. There is time to go and return quickly. I have spoken to Lorenzo, our best coachman, and the carriage is waiting. Will you promise to wait here till I return?”
“Yes, I promise,” said Leon looking at her but beyond her. “Fly and fetch Monina; bring her quickly; I too am afraid....”
“Till then do not stir from hence....”
She went away through the museum.
Leon for a long time could not restore order in his mind. Before deciding on any definite course of action it was necessary to form a clear idea of the situation in its true aspect and proportions, without regarding it as better or as worse than it really was. But in spite of every effort he could not think with any kind of lucidity; all mental discipline was lost to him. His utter physical exhaustion and the moral chaos that had come upon him had resulted in a sort of lethargy, in which his brain was lulled to sleep while his senses ran riot in feverish disorder. We have once before seen him in a similar mood.
The room seemed to assume a circular shape, for his eyes were incapable of taking exact note of what they saw, and the walls spun round him and with them in a giddy whirl the objects that adorned them. These were for the most part engravings, plates, jars, medals and plaster reliefs of the time of the French Directoire, when a revolution in taste took place as a trivial corollary to the revolution in politics. After cutting off heads the mania for innovation set to work to reform hats. Industry had no mind to retire in favour of liberty, and on the top of the mound of skulls piled up during the reign of terror, it stuck a dress-maker’s doll.
There were men tightly buttoned into impossible coats, choked in yards of neck-cloth, and crowned with incredible hats. Some carried knotted sticks, others twisted canes; they were curled like the Furies and shod like dancing-masters. Some had huge chains with seals like bell-clappers hanging from their pockets; in some it was difficult to distinguish their legs from their skirts, or where the man ended and his clothes began. They looked like objects in a nightmare, chimeras, the distorted metamorphosis of human beings into long-legged wading birds with glasses on their bills and buskins on their feet. The women displayed more than their ankles in tightly-drawn stockings, and on their heads wore towers of felt, fur and feathers, buckram, and ribbands; mounds, weather-cocks, pagodas, spires or tubs. If a crowd of witches had set up for being fashionable they might have appeared in such a guise.