The surprising thing was that I was not surprised. My unconscious self seemed to have recognised the fact that he was there all the time, whilst the conscious self was sublimely indifferent to everything but the cards.
Then I did just what I would have done had a cry of "Fire" been raised—cast my cards on the table, and left the room, walking hurriedly, but not so hurriedly as to express what the old Marquis d'Ampreville once described as ungentlemanly alarm.
Now, Lichtenberg was not a member of the Mirlitons; and as I was a pretty regular frequenter of the place during certain hours of the day, and as he had taken his place at the card-table at which I was playing, the suggestion became almost a certainty that he had come there to meet me.
"I am a living man with a will. No dead Fate working by law shall drag me against my will or move me to another purpose than my own." I had said that on the night of the 1st of October. Well, there was something more than a dead Fate here, a thing working by law. There was the will of Von Lichtenberg; and as I walked down the Boulevard des Italiens, away from the club, the gin seemed to have closed more tightly around me.
It is unpleasant to feel not that you are going to meet your fate, but that your fate is coming to meet you; to swim from a danger, yet find the tide slowly and remorselessly driving you towards it.
Now, what was this danger I dreaded? Impossible to say; but I felt surely in my soul that far more destructive to my happiness and my life than Vogel, or the fantastic old woman who lived in the wood and made whistles of glass, silver, and gold for children to play upon, was this man Carl von Lichtenberg. That, just as Eloise had brought me the flowers of childhood perfumed and dew-wet in her hands, Carl von Lichtenberg was bringing me flowers from an unknown land, flowers scentless as immortelles, sorrowful as death.
Why should I, young and happy, and rich, with all the joy of life in me, with a clear conscience and a healthy mind: why should I be troubled by the tragic and the fateful? As day by day men turn the pages of their life-story, men ask of God this question, receiving only the Author's reply: "Read on."
The next day I had the extra knowledge that not only was Von Lichtenberg's will against me, but the tattle of fools.
The affair at the Mirlitons had been talked about. The loungers about the card-table had seen me look up, stare at the Baron, fling my cards down, and leave the room.
I had, it seemed, put a public affront on him.