CHAPTER VIII
Louis-Marie was really ill, though his complaint, it seemed, baffled diagnosis. He was sunk in an extreme debility, which from a moral had become a physical one. There appeared nothing wrong with him constitutionally; but he dreamt, and saw vampires, and the substance of his eternal illusions figured in “blood-boltered” forms. Nightly they sucked him, and daily his increasing wanness testified to their inhuman appetites. He faded to a frail image of himself, very pitiful in its suggestion of a sick prince of porcelain. Any sudden noise, like the opening of a door, was enough now to make him start and shake with terror. A footstep outside the window vibrated in his nerves for minutes after it had passed. His heart was become a very seismograph to record alarms. But the unexpected entrance of anyone into the room most perturbed him. A furtive aghast look, an artificial rally and instant physical collapse, were the almost certain consequences of such an intrusion. Once, at a chance mention of Bonito’s name, he sunk back in his chair as if under a stroke. Cartouche, who was present and distressfully concerned, attributed his state to a sort of hysterical resentment against that minister of ill-luck, and struggled to overlay some conscious contempt of it with a real anxious commiseration.
“Have you soothed him, reassured him?” he asked of Molly Bramble, when that frail sweet of Nature came down to him to report upon the invalid.
“I have left him asleep,” she said.
He tramped to and fro in the little room, pondering a psychologic problem.
“He fainted when I told him of another loss—a real poignant one that time. Here’s a mere slip of Fortune—a few ducats rolled into the gutter. He’s already recovered more than their equivalent in abstinence. Are these good people so utterly wanting in a sense of proportion?”
“Think what it meant to him, Cherry!”
“And what did it mean, Mollinda?”
“Why, to go a-courting, to be sure, with that in his hand to recommend him.”
“Does he think she needs that form of persuasion? I would not condescend to break my heart on such a mistress. He’s no worse off than he was.”