Bohemian Days: Three American TalesTownsend, George Alfred
General
Bohemian Days: Three American Tales
Townsend, George Alfred
Fiction; Poetry
The room in the fifth story was very cold now. He tried to read in bed,
but the novel had no meaning in it. He walked up and down the balcony in
the November night, where he had often explained the motions of the
stars to her. They seemed to miss her now, and peeped inquisitively. He
looked into the bureau and wardrobe, half ashamed of the hope that she
had left some _souvenir_. There was not even a letter. She had torn a
leaf, on which she had written her name, out of his diary. The sketches
he had made of her were gone; if she had only taken her remembrance out
of his heart, it would have been well. Then he reasoned, with himself,
sensibly and consistently. It was a bad passion at first. How would it
have shamed his father and mother had they heard of it! Its continuance
was even more pernicious, making him profligate and idle; introducing
him to light pleasures and companies; enfeebling him, morally and
physically; diverting him from the beautiful arts; weakening his
parental love; divorcing him from grand themes and thoughts. He could
never marry this woman. Their heart-strings must have been wrung by some
final parting; and now that she had been proved untrue, was it not most
unmanly that he should permit her to stand even in the threshold of his
mind? It was a good riddance, he said, pacing the floor in the
firelight; but just then he glanced into the great mirror, and stood
fixed to mark the pallor of his face. Say what he might, laugh as he
did, with a hollow sound, that absent girl had stirred the very
fountains of his feelings. Not learned, not beautiful, not anything to
anybody but him--there was yet the difference between her love and her
deceit, which made him content or wretched.
He felt this so keenly that he lifted his voice and cursed--himself,
her, society, mankind. Then he cried like a child, and called himself a
calf, and laughed bitterly, and cried again.
There was no sleep for him that night. He drank brandy again in the
morning, and walked to the banker's. His remittance awaited him, and he
came out of the Rue de la Paix with thirty gold napoleons in his pocket.
He met all the Americans at breakfast at Trappe's in the Palais Royal,
and strolling to the morgue with a part of them, kept on to Vincennes,
and spent a wretched day in the forest. At the Place de la Bastille,
returning, he got into a cabriolet alone and searched ineffectually
along the Rue Rivoli for a companion who would ride with him. "Go
through the Rue de Beaux Arts!" he said, as they crossed Pont Neuf. This
is a quiet street in the Latin Quarter filled with cheap _pensions_, in
one of which dwelt Fanchette. His heart was wedged in his throat as he
saw at the window little Suzette sewing. She wore one of the dresses he
had given her. Her face was old and piteous; she was red-eyed and worked
wearily, looking into the street like one on a rainy day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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