The dwarf followed me, and hovered about me more than ever. But I learned to bear with him on account of his being in the house with Astræa. Any body who was constantly in her society, and admitted to terms of intimacy with her, was welcome to me—as relics from the altar of a saint are welcome to the devotee, or a leaf snatched, from a tree in the haunts of home is welcome to the exile. It was a pleasure when I met him even to ask for Astræa, to have an excuse for uttering her name, or to hear him speak of her, or to speak of her myself, or to talk of any thing that we had before talked of together. Such are the resources, the feints, the stratagems, the foibles of love!
VI.
One night my indefatigable Mephistophiles took me to a tavern. He was in a vagrant mood, and I indulged him.
"Come, we shall see life to-night," he said.
"With all my heart," I replied. It was not much to my taste, but I fancied there was something unusual in his manner, and my curiosity was awakened to see what it would lead to.
We entered a bustling and brilliantly-lighted house. Numerous guests were scattered about at different tables, variously engaged in getting rid of time at the smallest possible cost of reflection. The dwarf sauntered through the room, whispered a waiter, and, beckoning me to follow, led the way up-stairs to a lesser apartment, where we found ourselves alone.
"You will not see much life here," I observed, rather surprised at his selection of a secluded room in preference to the lively salon through which we had just passed.
"We can make our own life," he answered, with a sarcastic twinge of the mouth, "and imagine more things in five minutes than we should see or hear below in a month."
I thought this very odd. It looked as if he had some concealed motive; but I acquiesced in his notion, and was secretly pleased, not less at the exchange of the din and riot for ease and quietness, than at the opportunity it opened to him for the free play of the humor, whatever it was, that I could plainly see was working upon him.
We drank freely—that was a great resource with him when he was in a mood of extravagance—talked rapidly about a chaos of things, laughed loudly, and in the pauses of the strange revel relapsed every now and then into silence and abstraction. During these brief and sudden intervals, the dwarf would amuse himself by drawing uncouth lines on the table, with his head hanging over them, as if his thoughts were elsewhere engaged, and the unintelligible pastime of his fingers were resorted to only to hide them.