That affair of the Peak was a lesson, or I tried to make it one. ‘Leave Victoria alone,’ it seemed to say, ‘and keep your homage, respectful and other, to yourself. Victoria wants to tell you something, but does not know how to begin. Cannot you save her the trouble? You confuse her with your homage, respectful and other, and she wants you to leave her alone. Curly stops the way.
‘What matter that Curly is as vague as something in Orion! He has taken her heart with him into space. Leave her alone.
‘Do you want further proof of it? How many more times must you see her prostrate before his shrine in the thicket, as you saw her yesterday, when you dogged her footsteps like a spy? How many more times must you hear her cry, “Come back, come back, and help me!” between her passionate kisses of the bits of fetich on the boughs?
‘And, if there were no Curly, how would that avail? Victoria is not for you. Are you to stay here for ever? You know you are not. And how could you take Victoria away?
‘Victoria is a savage; and who would have her anything else? Will you put Pocahontas in crêpe de Chine and surah, in lace, embroideries, and gimp, and transplant her to the London drawing-rooms, to make sport for the London crowd? Are you looking forward to this: “A lady whose tall figure is well known in London society wore black silk, opening over a front of white silk muslin, draped from neck to feet, and confined at the waist with a pointed band of black velvet, fastened by a diamond clasp”?
‘It will not do.
‘Friendship is impossible on your side: when you are with her, you invariably play the fool. Keep out of her way.’
So, I am on longer Victoria’s shadow. I wander alone. I make up to the Ancient, and borrow his fowling piece, to pay my respects to the wild birds. The wild birds do not mind. I trouble them a good deal less than I trouble Victoria. It is an old fowling piece; how did men contrive to kill anything in the days when it was made, especially to kill one another? The slaughter of Malplaquet quite enhances one’s respect for the race, and takes rank with Stonehenge and the Pyramids among material marvels wrought by simple means.
I have kept this up for some days, and I am popping at a flock of gulls this morning, with so slight a breach of the good understanding between us that the flock increases, by the effect of intelligent curiosity, as the sport goes on, when Victoria stands between me and the light.
It is here that Victoria begins to be unaccountable: on the strength of this incident, I made the charge.