When she was not telling me the story of her loves, and her father, mother, and step-father, she filled in the time by telling me about some man she called Frank, who had a pretty-faced wife addicted to the bad habit known as secret drinking.
"Trouble?" she wandered on. "Oh, I've had such lots and lots of it that I'm beginning to feel very old already. Troubles, I always think, are divided into two classes—one controlled by a big-horned, cloven-hoofed devil, and the other by the snippy little devil that flashes in and out of our hearts. The big devil is usually placed upon us by others. It follows us. Sometimes we can evade it, but at others it catches us up on its horns and gives us a toss. We come down into the dust, crumpled, with all courage, ambition and hope absorbed in despair. We pick ourselves up in desperation. All that is best in us is so deadened that even our consciences cannot hear a whisper; or, on the other hand, we steel ourselves, and make a resolve which lifts us to a moral and mental victory, and to all that is noblest in ourselves and humanity."
I laughed, admitting that there was much truth in her words.
"And the other—the little imp?" I asked.
"The other—this insane perversity of human nature, gets hold on us whether we will or not. It makes us for the time ignore all that is best in ourselves and in others—it is part of us. Though we know well it resides within ourselves, it will cause our tears to flow and our sorrows to accumulate, it is a fictitious substance, with possibly a mint of happiness underlying it. We are always conscious of it, but insanity makes us ignore it for so long that the little imp completes its work, and the opportunity is lost. But why are we moralising?" she added. "Let's try and get to sleep, shall we?"
To this I willingly acquiesced, for truth to tell, I did not give credence to a single word of the rather romantic story she had related regarding herself, her friends, and her jealous guardian. In these post-Grundian days I had met women of her stamp many times before. The only way to make them feel is to tell them the truth, devoid of all flattery.
She struck me as a woman with a past—her whole appearance pointed to this conclusion. Now a woman with a chequered past and an untrammelled present is always more or less interesting to women, as well as to men. She is a mystery. The mystery is that men cannot quite believe a smart woman with knowledge, cut loose from all fetters, to be proof against flattery. She queens it, while they study her. Interest in a woman is only one step from love for her—a fact with which we, the fairer sex, are very well acquainted.
Ulrica had once expressed an opinion that pasts were not so bad if it were not for the memories that cling to them; not, of course, that the pasts of either of us had been anything out of the ordinary. Memories that cling to others, or the hints of a "past," certainly make you of interest to men, as well as a menace to the imagination of other women; but the memories that hover about yourself are sometimes like truths—brutal.
Memories! As I lay there upon my hard and narrow bed, being whirled through those suffocating tunnels in the cliffs beside the Mediterranean, I could not somehow get away from memory. The story this mysterious woman had related had awakened all the sad recollections of my own life. It seemed as though an avalanche of cruel truths was sweeping down upon my heart. At every instant memory struck a blow that left a scar deep and unsightly as any made by the knife. There was tragedy in every one. The first that came to me was a day long ago. Ah me! I was young then—a child in fears, a novice in experience—on that day when I admitted to Ernest my deep and fervent affection. How brief it all had been! I had, alas! now awakened to the hard realities of life, and to the anguish the heart is capable of holding. The sweetest part of love, the absolute trust, had died long ago. My heart had lost its lightness, never to return, for his love toward me was dead. His fond tenderness of those bygone days was only a memory.
Yet he must have loved me! With me it had been the love of my womanhood, the love that is born with youth, that overlooks, forgives, and loves again, that gives friendship, truth and loyalty. What, I wondered, were his thoughts when we had encountered each other at Monte Carlo? He showed neither interest nor regret. No. He had cast me aside, leaving me to endure that crushing sorrow and brain torture which had been the cause of my long illness. He remembered nothing. To him our love was a mere incident. It is no exaggeration to describe memory as the scar of truth's cruel wound.