Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/87

Rh running with torches by the side of her coroneted carriage. He knew that she was in love with him,—at least, she said so. Of everything else he was ignorant. He knew her title, but not her name. He knew her wishes, but he knew nothing of her life. Was she married? Was she a widow or a maiden? Was she free? To what family did she belong? Were there snares, traps, dangers about her? Of the immorality existing on the heights of society; the caves on those summits, in which savage charmers dream amid the scattered skeletons of the loves which they have already preyed upon; of the extent of tragic cynicism to which the experiments of a woman may attain who believes herself to be beyond the reach of man,—of such things as these Gwynplaine had no idea. Nor had he even in his mind materials out of which to build up a conjecture, information concerning such things being very scanty in the social depths in which he lived. Still, he detected a shadow; he felt that a mist hung over all this brightness. Did he understand it? No. Could he guess at it? Still less. What was there behind that letter? One pair of folding-doors opening before him as another pair closed behind him, thus causing him a vague anxiety. On the one side an avowal; on the other an enigma,—avowal and enigma, which, like two mouths, one tempting, the other threatening, pronounce the same word, "Dare!"

Never had perfidious chance taken its measures better, nor timed more fitly the moment of temptation. Gwynplaine, moved by the influences of springtime, and by the sap rising in all things, was prompt to dream the dream of the flesh. The old Adam, who is not to be stamped out, and over whom none of us can triumph, was awaking in that backward youth, still a boy at twenty-four. It was just at the most stormy moment