“Nay, nay, Loo, no fear of that!”
“On the contrary, papa, every hope of it! The best thing I could ask for would be oblivion.”
“My dear Loo,” said he, impressively, “the world has not got one half so good a memory as you fancy. It is our own foolish timidity—what certain folk call conscience—that suggests the idea how people are talking of us, and, like the valet in the comedy, we begin confessing our sins before we 're accused of them!”
“I know that is your theory, papa,” said she, laughing, “and that one ought always to 'die innocent.'”
“Of course, my dear. It is only the jail chaplain benefits by what is called 'a full disclosure of the terrible tragedy.'”
“I hear my carriage creeping up quietly to the door,” said she, listening. “Be sure you let me see you early tomorrow. Good-night.”
CHAPTER XXXVI. A GRAVE SCENE IN LIGHT COMPANY
Moralists have often found a fruitful theme in the utter barrenness of all the appliances men employ for their pleasures. What failures follow them, what weariness, what satiety and heart-sickness! The feast of Belshazzar everywhere!
To the mere eye nothing could be more splendid, nothing more suggestive of enjoyment, than the Pergola of Florence when brilliantly lighted and thronged with a gay and merry company. Character figures in every variety fancy or caprice could suggest—Turks, Styrians, Highlanders, Doges, Dervishes, and Devils—abounded, with Pifferari from Calabria, Muleteers, Matadors, and Conjurers; Boyards from Tobolsk jostled Male Crusaders, and Demons that might have terrified St. Anthony flitted past with Sisters of Charity! Strange parody upon the incongruities of our every-day life, costume serving but to typify the moral incompatibilities which are ever at work in our actual existence! for are not the people we see linked together—are not the social groupings we witness—just as widely separated by every instinct and every sentiment as are these characters in all their motley? Are the two yonder, as they sit at the fireside, not as remote from each other as though centuries had rolled between them? They toil along, it is true, together; they drag the same burden, but with different hopes and fears and motives. Bethink you “the friends so linked together” are like-minded? No, it is all masquerade; and the motley is that same easy conventionality by which we hope to escape undetected and unknown!