XVI
It was already more than a fortnight since D'Albert had laid his amorous epistle on Theodore's table, and yet there seemed to be no change in the manner of the latter. D'Albert did not know how to account for this silence; one would have imagined that Theodore had had no knowledge of the letter; the rueful D'Albert thought that it had gone astray or been lost; yet this was difficult of explanation, for Theodore had re-entered his room a moment afterwards, and it would have been very extraordinary if he had not perceived a large paper placed quite by itself in the middle of a table so as to attract the notice of the most inattentive.
Or was Theodore perhaps really a man and not a woman at all, as D'Albert had imagined to himself? or, supposing her a woman, had she so decided a feeling of aversion to him, or such a contempt for him that she would not condescend even to take the trouble of giving him a reply? The poor young man who had not, like ourselves, the advantage of searching the portfolio of Graciosa, the confidante of the fair Mademoiselle de Maupin, was not in a position to decide any of these important questions either in the affirmative or in the negative, and he was mournfully wavering in the most wretched irresolution.
One evening he was in his room, his brow pressed with melancholy against the window-pane, and was looking, without seeing them, at the already bare and reddened chestnut trees in the park. The distance was bathed in a thick mist, a grey rather than black night was falling, and cautiously placing its velvety feet on the summits of the trees; a large swan was amorously dipping and redipping its neck and shoulders in the steaming water of the river, and its whiteness made it appear in the shadow like a large star of snow. It was the only living thing to give a little animation to the gloomy landscape.
D'Albert was thinking as sadly as a disappointed man can think at five o'clock on a misty autumn evening with a somewhat sharp north wind for music, and the wigless skeleton of a forest for a prospect.
He thought of throwing himself into the river, but the water seemed very black and cold to him, and the swan's example only half persuaded him; of blowing his brains out, but he had neither pistol nor powder, and he would have been very sorry to have had them; of taking a new mistress, or, sinister resolution, even two! but he knew none who would suit him-even none who would not suit him. In his despair he went so far as to wish to resume his connection with women who were perfectly insupportable to him, and whom he had had horsewhipped out of his house by his footman. He ended by resolving upon something much more frightful, — to write a second letter.
O sextuple booby!
He was at this stage in his meditations, when he felt a hand place itself on his shoulder, like a little dove descending on a palm-tree. The comparison halts somewhat inasmuch as D'Albert's shoulder bore a very slight resemblance to a palm-tree; but all the same, we shall keep it in a spirit of pure Orientalism.
The hand was at the extremity of an arm which corresponded to a shoulder forming part of a body, which was nothing else but Theodore-Rosalind, Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, or Madelaine de Maupin, to call her by her real name.
Who was astonished? Neither I nor yon, for you and I had long been prepared for this visit; but D'Albert who had not been expecting it in the least. He gave a little cry of surprise half-way between oh! and ah! Nevertheless I have the best reasons for believing that it was more like ah! than oh!
It was indeed Rosalind, so beautiful and radiant that she lit up the whole room, with her strings of pearls in her hair, her prismatic dress, her laces, her red-heeled shoes, her handsome fan of peacock's plumes, such, in short, as she had been on the day of the performance. Only, — and this was an important and decisive difference, — she wore neither gorget, nor chemisette, nor ruff, nor anything that effectually hid those two charming unfriendly brothers, who, alas! have only too often a tendency to become reconciled.
A lovely, panting bosom, white, transparent, like an ancient marble, of the purest and most exquisite cut, projected boldly from a very low corsage, and seemed to challenge kisses. It was a most reassuring sight; accordingly D'Albert was very quickly reassured, and he abandoned himself in all confidence to his most disorderly emotions.
“Well! Orlando, do you not recognize your Rosalind?” said the fair one with the most charming smile; “or have you, perhaps, left your love hanging with your sonnets on some bushes in the forest of Arden? Are you really cured of the sickness for which you requested a remedy from me with such earnestness? I am very much afraid so.”
“Oh no! Rosalind, I am more sick than ever. I am in extremity; I am dead, or very nearly!”
“You have not a bad appearance for a dead man; many living persons do not look so well.”
“What a week I have spent! You cannot imagine it, Rosalind. I hope that it will be equivalent to a thousand years of purgatory to me in the next world. But if I dare ask you, why did you not reply to me sooner?”
“Why? I scarcely know, unless it be just because I did not. However, if this motive does not appear a valid one to you, here are three others not nearly so good, from which you shall choose: first, because carried away by your passion you forgot to write legibly, and it took me more than a week to make out what your letter was about; next, because my modesty could not reconcile itself in a shorter time to such an absurd idea as to take a dithyrambic poet for a lover; and then because I was not sorry to see whether you would blow your brains out, or poison yourself with opium, or hang yourself with your garter. There!”
“Naughty banterer! I assure you that you have done well to come to-day, for perhaps you would not have found me to-morrow.”
“Really! poor fellow! Do not assume such a doleful air, for I should also be affected, and that would make me more stupid in myself alone than all the animals that were in the ark with the deceased Noah. If once I open the sluice for my sensibility, I warn you that you will be drowned. Just now I gave you three bad reasons, I now offer you three good kisses; will you accept them, on the condition that you forget the reasons for the kisses? I owe you quite as much as that and more.”
As she uttered these words the fair infanta advanced towards the mournful lover, and threw her beautiful bare arms round his neck. D'Albert kissed her effusively on the cheeks and mouth. This last kiss had a longer duration than the others, and might have been counted as four. Rosalind saw that all that she had done until then had been only pure childishness. Her debt discharged, she sat down, still greatly moved, on D'Albert's knees, and, passing her fingers through his hair, she said to him:
“All my cruelties are exhausted, sweet friend; I took the fortnight to satisfy my natural ferocity; I will confess to you that I found it long. Don't become a coxcomb because I am frank, but it is true. I place myself in your hands, revenge yourself for my past harshness. If you were a fool I should not say this, or even anything else to you, for I do not like fools. It would have been very easy for me to make you believe that I was prodigiously shocked by your boldness, and that all your Platonic sighs and your most quintessential nonsense were not sufficient to procure your forgiveness for a thing of which I was very glad; I might, like another, have bargained with you for a long time and retailed to you what I am now granting you freely and at once; but I do not think that this would have increased your love for me by the thickness of a single hair.
“I do not ask of you an oath of. eternal love nor any exaggerated protestation. Love me as much as heaven ordains-I will do as much on my side. I will not call you a traitor or a wretch when you have ceased to love me. You will also have the kindness to spare me the corresponding odious titles, should I happen to leave you. I shall be merely a woman who has ceased to love you, — nothing more. It is not necessary to hate each other all through life because of a night or two passed together. Whatever may happen, and wherever destiny may drive me, I swear to you, and this is a promise that can be kept, that I shall always preserve a charming recollection of you, and, that if I am no longer your mistress, I shall be your friend as I have been your comrade. For you I have laid aside my male attire to-night; I shall resume it to-morrow for all. Think that I am only Rosalind at night, and that throughout the day I am and can be only Theodore de Serannes-
The sentence she was about to utter was stifled by a kiss followed by many others, which were no longer counted and of which we shall not give an exact catalogue, because it would certainly be rather tedious and perhaps very immoral-for some people; as to ourselves, we think nothing more moral and sacred under heaven than the caresses of man and woman, when both are handsome and young.
As D'Albert's importunities became more amorous and eager, Theodore's beautiful face, instead of being smiling and radiant, assumed an expression of proud melancholy which caused her lover some disquiet
