Adam and Eve were driven from Eden for their guilt; but it was Innocence that lost our Eden for Rosalys and me. In our egregious innocence, we had determined that I should call upon Aunt Elizabeth in the morning, and formally demand her sanction to our engagement! Do I need to recount the history of that interview? Of my aunt’s incredulity, that gradually changed to scorn and anger? Of how I was fleered at and flouted, and taunted with my youth, and called a fool and a coxcomb, and sent about my business with the information that the portals of the Palazzo Zacchinelli would remain eternally closed against me for the future, and that my people “would be written to"? I was not even allowed to see my cousin to say good-bye. “And mind you, we’ll have no letter writing,” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “I shall forbid Rosalys to receive any letters from you.”
Guilt (we are taught) can be annulled, and its punishment remitted, if we do heartily repent. But innocence? Goodness knows how heartily I repented; yet I never found that a pennyweight of the punishment was remitted. At the week’s end I got a letter from my people recalling me to Paris. And I never saw Rosalys again. And some years afterwards she married an Italian, a nephew of Cardinal Badascalchi. And in 1887, at Viareggio, she died....
Eh bien, voilà! There is the little inachieved, the little unfulfilled romance, written for me in her name, Cousin Rosalys. What of it? Oh, nothing—except—except... Oh, nothing. ”All good things come to him who waits.” Perhaps. But we know how apt they are to come too late; and—sometimes they come too early.
FLOWER O’ THE CLOVE
I
In the first-floor sitting-room of a lodging-house in Great College Street, Westminster, a young man—he was tall and thin, with a good deal of rather longish light-coloured hair, somewhat tumbled about; and he wore a pince-nez, and was in slippers and the oldest of tattered coats—a man of thirty-something was seated at a writing-table, diligently scribbling at what an accustomed eye might have recognised as “copy,” and negligently allowing the smoke from a cigarette to curl round and stain the thumb and forefinger of his idle hand, when the lodging-house maid-servant opened his door, and announced excitedly, “A lady to see you, sir.”
With the air of one taken altogether by surprise, and at a cruel disadvantage, the writer dropped his pen, and jumped up. He was in slippers and a disgraceful coat, not to dwell upon the condition of his hair. “You ought to have kept her downstairs until———” he began, frowning upon the maid; and at that point his visitor entered the room.