Chapter VIII: Part II: The Lady’s Boudoir

The chamber was softly radiant with mother-o’-pearl colours, all so blended that by contrast a woman’s face might wear a heightened charm. Plants with pale leaves and white flowers filled the oriel; dusky mandarins leered in corners; chastened pictures hung on the silk-covered walls. Before each window was drawn a gleaming tissue.

Flavia rose from the piano with a great sigh: tears were rolling down her cheeks (evidently the song had suggested woe), and some fell on the brown cover of a volume that lay on the table. It was John Ravil’s _Venus’s Apple_, a romance which, he had once dreamed, was like to bring him fame. Flavia took it up and held it over her breast until it was warm. It should ever be the dearest book in the world! Although love was dead, gratitude remained. For his short hour her lover had been all-in-all; through him she had tasted of intellectual pleasures unknown before their meeting.

‘He will bear it well enough in time,’ she sighed; ‘it will give him strength for his work; he will use his Oriental richness no longer,--will curb his luxuriance, and develop an epigrammatic style, which, being coupled with that fine imaginativeness of his, must needs fillip him into popularity.’

The thought gave consolation, and she became herself again in mentally comparing the two lovers: the one saturnine, ugly, oppressive; the other bright, laughing, and handsome--her ideal of manhood. Sure ’twas only in an unwholesome dream that Ravil had been victor?

She raised the lid of her cedar desk and took his letters from their nest amidst dried rose-leaves. Then she sank back to her favourite chair, leaning almost in the same posture as in the miniature. The collection was unfastened and placed in her lap, and soon, with a few more sighs, she raised the sheets for a last reading.

Even for letters of passion they were extravagant: the weakness of his nature, his need of a restraining power, was manifest in each. They were almost hysterical: no man healthy in body and mind could have written them. Yet Flavia’s face grew troubled, and her lips moved pitifully.

‘Why did you look at me so,’ the first began, ‘look at our first greeting as if I had been by your side all my life? You brought a strange fluttering to my heart; you stopped my breath; the room whirled round and round. You must have thought me a very fool in the incoherent words I spoke. You may guess the cause; my oppressed brain had never permitted me even to imagine such beauty as yours.

‘Only once before in my life have I known such a feeling: I had read a story told of love and death under a southern sky. The hot malaria, the aroma of lilies, the thick water, seemed to envelop me, and I swooned. It was like rain on parched ground to find myself still in my own room, nodding my head to the bunch of yellow-flags I had bought of a child at the door.

‘But now I swoon again, and the awakening can only come at the transition into the next world’s darkness.

‘I am in love’s wine-press, shrieking at the weight that must descend and crush out new-born joy. Give me, in the name of God, one word of tenderness, and forget that I ever dared to lift my eyes.’

As Flavia read she smiled, as women smile upon a baby thrusting out a tiny fist with broken flowers. As free and natural a gift was Ravil’s love. Her eyes grew tender: she looked at her shoulder just as if his head were resting there.

‘Poor head, poor coarse hair!’ she said.

The next letter treated of some dereliction.

‘You have tortured me cruelly. When you rode past on the road, I stamped in the dust till my folly was manifest, even to myself. _Who is he? I insist on knowing._ When I saw him loose-mouthed and peering right into your pupils all the tigerish part of me sprang up, and I could have destroyed him for his temporary usurpation of my rights. How dared he look at you so? All night I lay awake, calling upon your name, praying for some miracle to bring you to my chamber.’

Flavia remembered her exultation when her fingers tore this sheet open: how she had been so merry as to sing and run and play like a young girl. She passed hastily over more, and came to that he had written after she had yielded him her honour. Her own letters had feebly echoed his at the time.

‘Sweetest and noblest,’ it ran, ‘life has changed. The dense veil that shrouded my future has been withdrawn. To-day I feel infinitely more inspired than ever I felt in my youth. A myriad rich ideas float from my brain, and were it not for very impatience of the hour of our meeting I would sit at my table and write some grand epic, or some romance that would shake the centre of every heart. Love! love!’

Flavia’s eyes glittered now; but grew languid quickly as she fell to picturing old scenes. The minutes passed and passed, ere she returned to her task. The letter she took had signs of a lover’s doubts.

‘I awaken in madness; for the dread that grows in my companionless nights deepens towards morning. Suppose that Flavia had never really loved me;--suppose that I had been only her last dearly-paid-for whim;--suppose,--nay, now I have written it my fears go in laughter. Flavia is the paragon: I alone understand her mystery. Any man less initiated in the secrets of her character might declare that to me her outward demeanour was cold. But I glory in her apparent lack of feeling, conscious that my position is impregnable, and that her passion, though chastened, is still powerful.’

The white shoulders were shrugged, ‘How lacking in discrimination!’ Before he had written thus she had been absolutely discourteous, whilst he had ever refused to understand. It was her remark, that change is necessary to existence, which had evoked this strange protest. Besides, she knew herself to be inconstant in thought. The hours spent in his company, which at first were almost unearthly in their speed of flight, were dull and wearisome now, and she had grown to hail the time of his departure with something akin to pleasure.

Six more letters were passed unopened--much less unread. Then she unfolded the last--his reply to her renunciation.

‘Flavia, it is hard to think that you of all the world should care to jest with me. That your letter is anything more than a jest I am struggling not to believe. After all your vows, breathed as you lay in my arms, whispered in a tone that made me vibrate like a harp-string, you should not play with my feelings. You know me, darling: it was unkind.

‘O God in heaven, I dare not believe it! I will not! I cannot! My mind is not large enough to take in so monstrous a truth!

‘We will meet to-morrow in the wood, and laugh together at the frightened fool you have made of me! and in revenge I will be sardonic and cruel.’