“Madame desires to thank you sincerely,” said the maid. “She is much impressed by your consideration and kindness.”
“I will return in a couple of hours,” said I, with a most doctorial sententiousness, and in reality eagerly desiring to be alone, and in the privacy of my own room, before I should break out in those wild ecstasies which I felt were struggling within me for utterance.
I sat down to make a clean breast of it in these confessions, but I must ask my reader to let me pass over unrecorded the extravagances I gave way to when once more alone.
There are men—I am one of them—who require, constitutionally require, to be in love. That necessity which Don Quixote proclaimed to be a condition of knightly existence,—the devotion to a mistress,—is an essential to certain natures. This species of temperament pertained to me in my boyhood. It has followed me through life with many pains and suffering, but also with great compensations. I have ever been a poor man,—my friends can tell that I have not been a lucky one,—and yet to be rich and fortunate together, I would not resign that ecstasy, that sentiment of love, which, though its object may have changed, has still power to warm up the embers of my heart, and send through me a glow that revives the days of my hot youth and my high hopes.
I was now in love, and cared as little for Boards of Directors and resolutions passed in committee as for the ordinances of the Grand Lama. It might rain mandamuses and warrants, they had no power to trouble me. As I wended my way to No. 4 with my bowl of ice, I felt like a votary bearing his offering to the shrine of his patron saint. My gift might lie on the altar, but the incense of my devotion soared up to heaven.
I would gladly have visited her every hour, but she would only permit me to come twice a day. I was also timid, and when Virginie said my ten minutes was up I was dismissed. I tried to bribe Virginie, but the unworthy creature imagined, with the levity of her nation, I had designs on her own affections, and threatened to denounce me to her mistress,—a menace which cost me much mortification and more money.
I don't know that the cure made great progress,—perhaps I have learned since why this was so; at all events, I pursued my treatment with assiduity, and was rewarded with a few soft-voiced words, as thus: “How kind you are!” “What a gentle hand you have!” “How pleasant that ice is!” At length she was able to move about the room. I wished to offer my arm, but she declined. Virginie was strong enough to support her. How I detested that woman! But for her, how many more opportunities had I enjoyed of offering small services and attentions! Her very presence was a perpetual restraint. She never took her eyes off me while I was in the room with her mistress,—black-beady, inexpressive eyes for the most part, but with something devilish in their inscrutability that always frightened me. That she saw the passion that was consuming me, that she read me in my alternate paroxysm of delight or despair, was plain enough to me; but I could not make her my friend. She would take my presents freely, but always with the air of one whose silence was worth buying at any price, but whose co-operation or assistance no sum could compass. Her very mode of accepting my gifts had something that smote terror into me. She never thanked me, nor even affected gratitude. She would shake her head mournfully and gloomily, as though matters had come to a pretty pass between us, and as though some dreadful reckoning must one day be expected to account for all this corruption. “Ah, Monsieur Gosslett,” said she one day with a sigh, “what a precipice we are all standing beside! Have you thought of the ruin you are leading us to?” These were very strange words; and though I took my watch and chain from my pocket, and gave them to her in order to induce her to explain her meaning, she only burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Was I then the happiest of mortals or the most wretched? Such was the problem that drove sleep that long night from my eyelids, and found me still trying to solve it when the day broke.
Days would often pass now without Mrs. Dacre permitting me to visit her, and then Virginie significantly hinted that she was right in this,—that it was for my good as well as her own, and so on. I mourned over my banishment and bewailed it bitterly. “One would think, sir, you forget my mistress was married,” said Virginie to me one day; and I protest it was no more than the truth. I had completely, utterly forgotten it; and the stern fact thus abruptly announced almost felled me to the earth.
Mrs. Dacre had promised to take a drive with me as soon as she felt able to bear the motion of a carriage; but though I often recalled the pledge, she found excuses of one kind or other to defer performance, and as I now rarely saw her, she would write me a line, sometimes two lines, on a scrap of paper, which Virginie would lay open on my table and generally shake her head very meaningly as I read it.
If Mrs. Dacre's notes were very brief, they were not less enigmatical,—she was the strangest writer that ever put pen to paper. Thus, to give an instance: the ice application she always referred to as “my coldness,” and she would say, “How long is your coldness to continue? have I not had enough of it yet? This coldness is becoming tiresome, and if it be continued, how am I to go out with you?” In another note, referring to our intended drive, she says, “If it is a question of running away, I must have a word to say first; for though I believe you have no fears on that score, I am not so courageous.” Virginie had been telling stories about my ponies; they were frisky, it is true, and it was thus her mistress alluded to them. Some disparagement of me as a whip provoked this remark from her: “As the time draws nearer, I ask myself, Shall I trust myself to your guidance? Who can say what may come of it?”