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In The Second April
by
She had noticeably pinkened. “Oh, monsieur,” the girl cried, “you are laughing because you are afraid that I will laugh at what you are saying to me. Believe me, I have no desire to laugh. It frightens me, rather. I had thought that nowadays no man could behave with a foolishness so divine. I had thought all such extravagancy perished with the Launcelot and Palomides of your book. And I had thought–that in any event, you had no earthly right to call me Claire.”
“Superficially, the reproach is just,” he assented, “but what was the name your Palomides cried in battle, pray? Was it not Ysoude! when his searching sword had at last found the joints of his adversary’s armor, or when the foe’s helmet spouted blood? Ysoude! when the line of adverse spears wavered and broke, and the Saracen was victor? Was it not Ysoude! he murmured riding over alien hill and valley in pursuit of the Questing Beast?–‘the glatisant beast’? Assuredly, he cried Ysoude! and meantime La Beale Ysoude sits snug in Cornwall with Tristram, who dons his armor once in a while to roll Palomides in the sand coram populo. Still the name was sweet, and I protest the Saracen had a perfect right to mention it whenever he felt so inclined.”
“You jest at everything,” she lamented–“which is one of the many traits that I dislike in you.”
“Knowing your heart to be very tender,” he submitted, “I am endeavoring to present as jovial and callous an appearance as may be possible–to you, whom I love as Palomides loved Ysoude. Otherwise, you might be cruelly upset by your compassion and sympathy. Yet stay; is there not another similitude? Assuredly, for you love me much as Ysoude loved Palomides. What the deuce is all this lamentation to you? You do not value it the beard of an onion,–while of course grieving that your friendship should have been so utterly misconstrued, and wrongly interpreted,–and–trusting that nothing you have said or done has misled me–Oh, but I know you women!”
“Indeed, I sometimes wonder,” she reflected, “what sort of women you have been friends with hitherto? They must have been very patient of nonsense.”
“Ah, do you think so?–At all events, you interrupt my peroration. For we have fought, you and I, a–battle which is over, so far as I am concerned. And the other side has won. Well! Pompey was reckoned a very pretty fellow in his day, but he took to his heels at Pharsalia, for all that; and Hannibal, I have heard, did not have matters entirely his own way at Zama. Good men have been beaten before this. So, without stopping to cry over spilt milk,–heyho!” he interpolated, with a grimace, “it was uncommonly sweet milk, though,–let’s back to our tents and reckon up our wounds.”
“I am decidedly of the opinion,” she said, “that for all your talk you will find your heart unscratched.” Irony bewildered Claire, though she invariably recognized it, and gave it a polite smile.
John Bulmer said: “Faith, I do not intend to flatter your vanity by going into a decline on the spot. For in perfect frankness, I find no mortal wounds anywhere. No, we have it on the best authority that, while many men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, it was never for love. I am inclined to agree with Rosalind: an aneurism may be fatal, but a broken heart kills nobody. Lovers have died in divers manners since the antique world was made, but not the most luckless of them was slain by love. Even Palomides, as my book informs me, went abroad with Launcelot and probably died an old man here in France,–peaceably, in his bed, with the family physician in attendance, and every other circumstance becoming to a genteel demise. And I dare assert that long before this he had learned to chuckle over his youthful follies, and had protested to his wife that La Beale Ysoude squinted, or was freckled, or the like; and had insisted, laughingly, that the best of us must sow our wild oats. And at the last it was his wife who mixed his gruel and smoothed his pillow and sat up with him at night; so that if he died thinking of Madame Palomides rather than of La Beale Ysoude, who shall blame him? Not I, for one,” said John Bulmer, stoutly; “If it was not heroic, it was at least respectable, and, above all, natural; and I expect some day to gasp out a similar valedictory. No, not to-morrow at noon, I think: I shall probably get out of this, somehow. And when, in any event, I set about the process of dying, I may be thinking of you, O fair lost lady! and again I may not be thinking of you. Who can say? A fly, for instance, may have lighted upon my nose and his tickling may have distracted my ultimate thoughts. Meanwhile, I love you consumedly, and you do not care a snap of your fingers for me.”