"Love! Love! Love! With heart and soul, and brain on fire. Love! so that for the creature I adore--have learnt to worship, I would--ah! what would I not do? Cast my body beneath that creature, plunge through fire or water--Oh!" he exclaimed, breaking off as suddenly as he had begun, "Oh! I am a fool! A fool! A fool!"
"But, surely," I said, "surely, with such as you are, that love does not go unrequited. If you have spoken to the object of this passion, told of this love you say you bear--and are believed--it must be returned. Such love as yours would not be simulated, must therefore be appreciated."
"Simulated!" he exclaimed. "Simulated. It cannot be simulated, not assumed like a mountebank's robe ere he plays a part. Any one can paint a flame, any tawdry daubster of an inn signboard, but not even Murillo himself could paint the heat. And my love is heat--not--not flame."
"And the lady? The lady?" I asked almost impatiently. "Surely she does--she must--return this love."
Volatile as he was, and, changing his mood again in a moment, he looked slyly at me under the dark locks, twanged the viol again and burst into another song, different from the one he had but recently finished, the song which I had previously known him to sing:
"Oh! have you heard of a Spanish lady,
How she wooed an Englishman?"
"I am an Englishman now, you know, Mervan," interrupting the song. Then going on:
"Garments gay and rich as may be,
Decked with jewels, she had on."
"Did she woo you, then?" I asked, as he paused a moment.
For answer he sang again: