“You would have sold yourself for gold wherewith to buy pleasure!” muttered she to herself.
“I was poor, lady; I must needs do something for my support.”
“Then why not follow humble labor? What need of wealth? Where had you learned its want, or acquired the taste to expend it? You could only have imitated rich men's vices, not their virtues, that sometimes ennoble them.”
The wild vehemence of her manner, as with an excessive rapidity she uttered these words, convinced me that her faculties were not under the right control of reason, and I followed her with an interest even heightened by that sad impression.
“You see no one, you speak to none,” said she, turning round suddenly, “else I should bid you forget that you have ever seen me.”
“Are we to meet again, Señhora?” said I, submissively, as I stood beside the door, of which she held the key in her hand.
“Yes—perhaps—I don't know;” and, so saying, she left me.
Two months crept over—and how slowly they went!—without my again seeing the Señhora. Were it not that the bouquets which each morning I fastened to the window-bars were removed before noon, I could have fancied that she had no other existence than what my dreamy imagination gave her. The heavy wooden “jalousies” were never opened; the door remained close locked; not a foot-tread marked the gravel near it. It was clear to me she had never crossed the threshold since the night I first saw her.
I fell into a plodding, melancholy mood. The tiresome routine of my daily life, its dull, unvarying monotony, began to wear into my soul, and I ceased either to think over the past or speculate on the future, but would sit for hours long in a moody revery, actually unconscious of everything.
Sometimes I would make an effort to throw off this despondency, and try, by recollection of the active energy of my own nature, to stir up myself to an effort of one kind or other; but the unbroken stillness, the vast motionless solitude around me, the companionless isolation in which I lived, would resume their influence, and with a weary sigh I would resign myself to a hopelessness that left no wish in the heart save for a speedy death.