In the rush for those welcome journals, so long expected, so eagerly seized, all other topics were instantaneously submerged. Long before he could reach the end of the street, General St. Josephs was utterly forgotten by his brother officers and friends.
Still he thought he had never been so happy in his life. The word is used advisedly, for surely experience teaches us that real happiness consists in tranquillity and repose, in the slumber rather than the dream, in the lassitude that soothes the patient, not the fever-fit of which it is the result. Can a man be considered happy who is not comfortable? and how is comfort compatible with anxiety, loss of appetite, nervous tremors, giddiness, involuntary blushing, and the many symptoms of disorder, who could be cured heretofore by advertisement, and which are the invariable accompaniments of an epidemic, invincible by pill or potion, and yielding only to the homœopathic treatment of marriage.
In this desperate remedy St. Josephs was anxious to experimentalise, and without delay. Yet his tact was supreme. Since the memorable walk in Kensington Gardens, when he laid her under such heavy obligations, his demeanour had been more that of a friend than a lover—more, perhaps, that of a loyal and devoted subject to his sovereign mistress, than either. She wondered why he never asked her, what she had done with all that money? Why, when she alluded to the subject, he winced and started, as from a touch on a raw wound. Once she very nearly told him all. They were in a box at the Opera, so far unobserved that the couple who had accompanied them seemed wholly engrossed with each other. Satanella longed to make her confession—ease her conscience of its burden, perhaps, though such a thought was cruel and unjust—shake the yoke from off his neck. She had even got as far as, "I've never half thanked you, General—" when there came a tap at the box-door. Enter an irreproachable dandy, then a confusion of tongues, a laugh, a solo, injunctions to silence, and the opportunity was gone. Could she ever find courage to seek for it again?
Nevertheless, day by day she dwelt more on her admirer's forbearance, his care, his tenderness, his chivalrous devotion. Though he never pressed the point, it seemed an understood thing that they were engaged. She had forbidden him to visit her before luncheon, but he spent his afternoons in her drawing-room; and, on rare occasions, was admitted in the evening, when an elderly lady, supposed to be Blanche's cousin, came to act chaperone. The walks in Kensington Gardens had been discontinued. Her heart could not but smite her sometimes, to think that she never gave him but one, when she wanted him to do her a favour.
Had he been more exacting, she would have felt less self-reproach, but his patience and good humour cut her to the quick.
"You brute!" she would say, pushing her hair back, and frowning at her own handsome face in the glass. "You worse than brute! Unfeeling, unfeminine, I wish you were dead!—I wish you were dead!"
She had lost her rich colour now, and the hollow eyes were beginning to look very large and sad, under their black arching brows.
Perhaps it was the General's greatest delight to hear her sing. This indulgence she accorded him only of an evening, when the cousin invariably went to sleep, and her admirer sat in an armchair with the daily paper before his face. She insisted on this screen, and this attitude, never permitting him to stand by the pianoforte, nor turn over the leaves, nor undergo any exertion of mind or body that should break the charm. Who knows what golden visions gladdened the war-worn soldier's heart while he leaned back and listened, spellbound by the tones he loved? Dreams of domestic happiness and peaceful joys, and a calm untroubled future, when doubts and fears should be over, and he could make this glorious creature wholly and exclusively his own.
