"Victor—your officer—Signor Conran."
"Why, he lives in Valetta, of course."
"Can I find him there?"
"I dare say, if you want him."
"Want him! Oh, Santa Maria! is not his absence death? Can I find him?"
"Oh, yes, I dare say. Anybody will show you Conran's rooms."
"Thank you."
With that, this mysterious young lady left me, and I turned in through the window again. Heavy and the men were playing at lansquenet, that most perilous, rapid, and bewitching of all the resistless Card Circes. There was no Marchioness, and having done it once with impunity, I thought I might do it again, and lifted the amber curtain that divided the boudoir from the drawing-room. What did I behold? Oh! torture unexampled! Oh! fiendish agony! There was Little Grand—self-conceited, insulting, impertinent, abominable, unendurable Little Grand—on the amber satin couch, with the Marchioness leaning her head on his shoulder, and looking up in his thrice-confounded face with her most adorable smile, my smile, that had beamed, and, as I thought, beamed only upon me!
If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two are synonymous.
How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!