CHAPTER XXIII.

“UNTIL?”

And what a time I did have of it when I did get home, attended by an entire retinue. Mamma was sitting up for me, and Audrey, and also Jane. What a sensation my arrival caused, and were there not alarms and excursions. It must have been a singular procession, especially when one considers that for our part of the world it was a trifle late. I with the brown man’s sister in her brougham, the Duke in his sister’s cab, Walter Hammond in his own hansom, that bad old man in his wife’s carriage--he insisted on following in that injured female’s vehicle to my very doorstep,--the four in their omnibus. I daresay that remarks were made which would have been worth reporting. But I was beyond the reporting stage.

Was I not glad to find myself alone again in my own shabby little bedroom, and rid of Jane. It was not an easy task to be rid of Jane. Had I not got my foot against the door the instant I was through it, I should hardly have been rid of her at all. As it was, she tapped unceasingly at the panels, imploring from without to be allowed to assist me to undress. She had assisted me to dress; that was sufficient, at any rate, for me. But it was no use telling her so; in tones which grew more and more lachrymose she continued to entreat for some time after I had declined to indulge in further parley.

What a relief it was to sit on the edge of the bed and get Jane’s shoes off--at last! I should have liked to have dropped on to the counterpane, and gone to sleep just as I was; I was so tired. When one is accustomed to retire early--I was generally in bed and fast asleep hours before the others were--and to no excitement, to have so much excitement crammed into a single night is fatiguing. I know I found it so. It was only because my conscience would not let me get into bed with my clothes on that I undressed at all. As I struggled with refractory tapes and buttons--and they were all refractory then--I told myself that I was an idiot to allow myself to be a slave to habit, and call it conscience, when my eyes would not keep open.

Yet when I got into bed, with my clothes honestly off, I could not sleep. I suppose I was over-tired. I certainly was over-tired. Like a constantly shifting phantasmagoria, the events of the night passed backwards and forwards through my brain. It was such an upheaval of the whole course of nature that I should be courted, a thing to be desired by men. Since what time? Since, say three o’clock, the whole world, so far as I was concerned, had been turned upside down; the order of nature had been changed, a miracle had been worked--I had become all those things which I had never been before. That it was no delusion, I, and others, had had assurance enough and to spare. I had seen it in the way in which men looked at me, in the way in which they spoke to me, hunted me when they could. In plain English, it seemed as if I had acquired a sudden capacity to drive men mad. I had always suspected that not much was required to do that. Now it appeared that it only needed me. There was proof plain as Holy Writ that the writing on the paper----

At the thought of the scrap of paper, I was out of bed again in half a twinkling, nearly wide awake. Where was it? I re-lit the gas, looked for it, found it still among the litter on the dressing-table. There was the mystic, magic, incredible sentence, in the small clear writing, which somehow reminded me of the writing in which they put one’s name upon one’s visiting-card.

“Your wish shall be gratified until----”

“Until?”

Why, surely, when I saw it last no “until” was there. It certainly was not when I saw it first. Was the sentence really still being written? Then the scribe was pretty slow. If such were the case what was to follow after “until”?

“Until”--satiety ensued, and I had had enough of it? Could I turn off my power at pleasure, and, having done so, turn it on again? How? Would the secret of that somewhat delicate operation also be revealed? “Until”--I was married? I might be married in a few hours, if I chose, to the Duke of Chelmsford, that deliciously impertinent brown man. Should I not be able to crow over mamma and the girls if I were? Would it not be a magnificent instance of Cinderella up-to-date? Though no one could speak of the girls as “ugly sisters.” “Until”--I was old? Some people might regard twenty-two as old. I myself sometimes feel as if bowed down by the weight of years. What was the period in life at which it was universally agreed that folks were old, even by the folks themselves? I knew that mamma considered herself quite young. If it were left to me to fix the age at which I might be reckoned old, I might say after the expiration of a century, and, even from the little I had seen of things, I believe that some people esteemed themselves comparatively juvenile even then. Fancy men of all ranks and ages making love to a real old lady! Would it not be dreadful? “Until”--I died? I was not sure that I should like to be regarded as an object of desire by every male creature I encountered, quite until the end. I might have had a great deal more than enough of them long ere that. Especially if they continued to press themselves upon me as eagerly as they had done that night. Indeed, it was extremely probable, if only death could put a period to their persecution, that I might welcome with rapture a suicide’s grave.

I put out the gas again, and, with the scrap of paper between my fingers, returned to bed, the problem of the unfinished sentence yet unsolved. And I have a vague idea that I fell fast asleep as soon as I was between the sheets a second time--the missing words still missing.