She shook her reins, and started her horse into a gallop.
I rode with so much assurance now that I could admire her fine figure with my faculties entirely unengaged by the cares of the highway. How well she sat her horse! How gracefully her form responded to the movement of the animal! She was a finer woman than Conny. There was a tartness, too, in her speech that made her language relishable, with a spiciness I could not remember tasting in Conny’s conversation. I was both piqued and amused by the very cool way in which she had disposed of these sentiments of mine, of which, after all, she could only suspect the evanescence.
Only the other day I was thinking I would rather marry Lucifer than such a shrew, and now nothing hindered me from expressing my admiration, in terms that would have borrowed a very soft significance from my heart, but the apprehension of a curt and contemptuous rebuff.
Again and again I will repeat, it was all owing to Conny. She had me once securely; she might have kept me for ever. Why hadn’t she answered my letter? One tender sentence would have made me her slave again. Echo not, Eugenio, the remark of Theresa that I had no right to expect a favour of any kind from Conny. An answer to my letter I could claim, not as a favour, but as a right. Two lines would have sufficed me. Yea, my bare address on an envelope would have told me I was not forgotten—that my tender breathings were remembered. Didn’t she know the risk she ran by treating me neglectfully at the time that Theresa was my companion; at the time that a fine, a handsome, and an amiable woman was the sole female society I frequented? You starve your dog, and call him unfaithful, because he takes up his quarters in the house of a neighbour where he is affectionately caressed and plentifully fed! What vile logic is here? Treat me well and I’ll love thee. Answer me my long and amorous letter, and I’ll be true. Hint that thy heart is not insensible to the pleadings of my passion, and I’ll adore. But leave me to quit thee, chewing the airiest cud of unsubstantial hope, suffer me to depart, making no sign, to be absent and illuminate my desolate fancies with no gleam from thy careless heart—What wonder if I am found wanting? What marvel if I discover in eyes as splendid as thine, in hair as abundant though darker, in speech more vivacious, intelligent and characteristic, in manners as womanly, as gentle, as dignified, a magic that leads me from thy altar, oh faithless one, on which no fire burns, to another shrine, whereon it may be my rapture to kindle an inextinguishable flame?
CHAPTER II.
Justice. “Why, you little truant, how durst you wander so far from the house without my leave?”
The Scheming Lieutenant.
Whether it was because Theresa had told her papa that I was in love with Conny, or because he was too fastidious to refer to the subject, my uncle never once throughout my visit had a word to say about his brother’s scheme. He was highly gratified—as was plainly visible in his broad countenance—to see how well I got on with Theresa; but this satisfaction I considered entirely the result of his hospitable feelings. Whilst his daughter misbehaved herself and snubbed me, he had spoken in her praise, for then she stood in need of it; but on her dropping her mocking manners and exhibiting herself as an agreeable, lady-like girl, he said no more about her, good nor bad. It was indeed as if he had exclaimed—“There she is, my boy: she is now herself; and you must find out what you want to know without any help from me. If you fall in love with her, bon; if she falls in love with you, bon again. If you don’t fall in love with each other, still bon. I’ll not trumpet her praises. I am entirely at your service when you want a companion; but I am decidedly unwilling to lose time I might be very usefully employing, in helping a young man and a young woman to love each other.”
I thought none the worse of him for holding aloof from his daughter’s and my business.