'Do you good; take some of the starch out of you. You had the temerity to browbeat and insult me, when first you came to Andermatt. Now I have served you out, and I may tell you this to your consolation, that it is a lucky thing for you that you had your fall and contusions. But for that I would have turned you inside out, and twisted your silly head off your shoulders. I intended to do it, for no man offends me and escapes stings. I am content to leave you as you are, black and blue, and disjointed, like a wretch on the rack.'
She was stretching his mind on the rack and disjointing that as well, sitting, leaning against the wall, and working the mechanism.
'Mr. Pennycomequick, I heard about you from your wife before you arrived; how different you proved to the idea I had formed, you have too much conceit to imagine. I found a wooden man, with his limbs affixed to his trunk by pegs, with a wooden face, wooden ideas, wooden manners—and when this wooden figure-head had the audacity to insult me——'
Philip exclaimed, 'What I said was true. You yourself admitted its truth, when you told me your story.'
'My dear dolt!' said Miss Durham, 'I admit it. But who likes to have the truth skewered on a bayonet, and rammed down his throat? And now—what I say would splutter about like Japanese fireworks and do no one any harm, were it not that it is true, true in every word, and this it is that turns each word into duck-shot, with which I pepper you—through the wall.'
It was a wonder that next day Signora Lombardi did not find the sheets of No. 18 singed, so hot did Philip become between them with offended modesty, with anger, anguish, and shame.
'The game is up, so I do not mind showing you my hand,' cried Artemisia. She had folded her arms over her breast, and leaned back, with her head against the wall, and talked hastily, passionately. 'That little wife of yours, who is a thousand times too good for you, and whom I pity, yoked to such a fellow as yourself, she told me that it was not possible for you to come to love me, because she was your wife. Not, she hastened to explain, that she esteemed herself irresistible, and very superior, but because she had such a towering opinion of your rectitude, equal to your own of yourself. That was as much as daring me to attempt the conquest; and your own absurd self-esteem was another provocation. When you threw down the glove I accepted the challenge, and you know how in an hour or two I had spun you round like a teetotum.'
She stayed talking to laugh. As she laughed she shook the wall, and the wall rattled Philip's bed, and the rattling bed rattled his aching joints; but he felt these pains no more in the intensity of the agony of shame that he endured in his racked mind.
'You were quite fetching!' she continued. 'When you held out your hand and offered to be my stay, I was obliged to jump up. With all my powers of self-control I could hardly keep from boxing your ears and sending you into the lake for your impudence. However, I had no wish that the transformation scene should come off too soon. I intended to lead you on through other follies till I had ruined your reputation and your self-respect. But the fates have been against me; I cannot wait longer here. I abandon you to yourself and to your good little wife. I cannot waste time over you. I have other matters to attend to; better game to pursue than such a wooden leaping frog as you.' She stood up from her chair, and went to the window; it commanded a bleak prospect. She could not see the returning party on it. The girls Labarte had perhaps found the desired minerals and would not desist from collecting till they had each enough to form a parure of Tremoline.
Artemisia returned to her seat against the wall, and said, 'As for that romance I told you about myself, believe of it as much or as little as you please. When you tell your own story, with your autobiography, the little episode of Artemisia Durham will not be found in it. We only remember and write of ourselves as we would like others to know us, not as we are. Is it not so?'