Quest of the Golden Girl Part 21

But, alas! my dream of universal irresistibility was but short-lived, for next afternoon, as William and I sat out at some cafe together, I found myself the object of chaff.

"Well," said William, "how goes the love-affair?"

I flushed somewhat indignantly at his manner with sanct.i.ties.

"I see!" he said, "I see! You are already corded and labelled, and will be s.h.i.+pped over by the next mail,--'To Miss Semiramis Wilc.o.x, 1001 99th St., Philadelphia, U.S.A. Man with care.' Well, I did think you'd got an eye in your head. Look here, don't be a fool! I suppose she said you were the first and last. The last you certainly were.

There are limits even to the speed of American girls; but the first, my boy! You are more like the twelfth, to my ocular knowledge. Here comes Dubois the poet. He can tell you something about Miss Semiramis.

Eh! Dubois, you know Miss Semiramis Wilc.o.x, don't you?"

The Frenchman smiled and shrugged.

"Un peu," he said.

"Don't be an a.s.s and get angry," William continued; "it's all for your own good."

"The little Semiramis has been seducing my susceptible friend here.

Like many of us, he has been captivated by her naturalness, her naivete, her clear good eyes,--that look of nature that is always art!

May I relate the idyl of your tragic pa.s.sion, dear Dubois, as an object lesson?"

The Frenchman bowed, and signed William to proceed.

"You dined with us one evening, and you thus met for the first time.

You sat together at table. What happened with the fish?"

"She swore I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen,--and I am not beautiful, as you perceive."

If not beautiful, the poet was certainly true.

"What happened at the entree?"

"Oh, long before that we were pressing our feet under the table."

"And the coffee--"

"Mon Dieu! we were Tristram and Yseult, we were all the great lovers in the Pantheon of love."

"And what then?"

"Oh, we went to the Cafe d'Harcourt--mon ami."

"Did she wear a veil?" I asked.

"Oui, certainement!"

"And did you say, 'Why do you wear a veil,--setting a black cloud before the eyes and gates of heaven'?"

"The very words," said the Frenchman.

"And did she say, 'Yes, but the veil can be raised?'"

"She did, mon pauvre ami," said the poet.

"And did you raise it?"

"I did," said the poet.

"And so did I," I answered. And as I spoke, there was a crash of white marble in my soul, and lo! Love had fallen from his pedestal and been broken into a thousand pieces,--a heavy, dead thing he lay upon the threshold of my heart.

We had appointed a secret meeting in the salon of the pension that afternoon. I was not there! (Nor, as I afterwards learnt, was Semiramis.) When we did meet, I was brutally cold. I evaded all her moves; but when at last I decided to give her a hearing, I confess it needed all my cynicism to resist her air of innocence, of pathetic devotion.

If I couldn't love her, she said, might she go on loving me? Might she write to me sometimes? She would be content if now and again I would send her a little word. Perhaps in time I would grow to believe in her love, etc.

The heart-broken abandonment with which she said this was a sore trial to me; but though love may be deceived, vanity is ever vigilant, and vanity saved me. Yet I left her with an aching sense of having been a brute, and on the morning of my departure from Paris, as I said good-bye to William and Dora, I spoke somewhat seriously of Semiramis.

Dora, Dora-like, had believed in her all along,--not having enjoyed William's opportunities of studying her,--and she reproached me with being rather hard-hearted.

"Nonsense," said William, "if she really cared, wouldn't she have been up to bid you good-bye?"

The words were hardly gone from his lips when there came a little knock at the door. It was Semiramis; she had come to say good-bye. Was it in nature not to be touched? "Good-bye," she said, as we stood a moment alone in the hall. "I shall always think of you; you shall not be to me as a s.h.i.+p that has pa.s.sed in the night, though to me you have behaved very like an iceberg."

We parted in tears and kisses, and I lived for some weeks with that sense of having been a Nero, till two months after I received a much glazed and silvered card to the usual effect.

And so I ceased to repine for the wound I had made in the heart of Semiramis Wilc.o.x.

Of another whom I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable bra.s.s plate on the door of your little flat--"Mademoiselle Deschapelles--Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true enough. For you were in truth a very hard-working little dressmaker, and I well remember how impressed I was to sit beside you, as you plied your needle on some gown that must be finished by the evening, and meditate on the quaint contrast between your almost Puritanic industry and your innocent love of pleasure. I don't think I ever met a more conscientious little woman than little Pauline Deschapelles.

There was but one drawback to our intercourse. She didn't know a word of English, and I couldn't speak a word of French. So we had to make s.h.i.+ft to love without either language. But sometimes Pauline would throw down her st.i.tching in amused impatience, and, going to her dainty secretaire, write me a little message in the simplest baby French--which I would answer in French which would knit her brows for a moment or two, and then send her off in peals of laughter.

It WAS French! I know. Among the bric-a-brac of my heart I still cherish some of those little slips of paper with which we made international love--question and answer.

"Vous allez m'oublier, et ne plus penser a moi--ni me voir. Les hommes--egoistes--menteurs, pas dire la verite..." so ran the questions, considerably devoid of auxiliary verbs and such details of construction.

"Je serais jamais t'oublier," ran the frightful answers!

Dear Pauline! Shall I ever see her again? She was but twenty-six.

She may still live.

CHAPTER XIV

END OF BOOK THREE

So ended my pilgrimage. I had wandered far, had loved many, but I came back to London without the Golden Girl. I had begun my pilgrimage with a vision, and it was with a vision that I ended it. From all my goings to and fro upon the earth, I had brought back only the image of a woman's face,--the face of that strange woman of the moorland, still haunting my dreams of the night and the day.

It was autumn in my old garden, damp and forsaken, and the mulberry-tree was hung with little yellow s.h.i.+elds. My books looked weary of awaiting me, and they and the whole lonely house begged me to take them where sometimes they might be handled by human fingers, mellowed by lamplight, cheered by friendly laughter.

The very chairs begged mutely to be sat upon, the chill white beds to be slept in. Yes, the very furniture seemed even lonelier than myself.