Let me only think of you; only dream of you; let me only look at you; let my eyes, like those of a fawning, loving cur, never leave your eyes; let them never look elsewhere; nothing should make them turn away from you, when I am in your dear presence.
I am very sensitive about the hair. You must order me to let it down, and then comb it out, pulling it roughly until the tears come in my eyes, and if I weep, punish me for my silly sensibility. You will do that, will you not? I wish to suffer for you, my desired master.
Have you not dreamt worse sufferings than these?
If so, will you kindly tell me of them, so that I may think of the suffering in reserve for me, and get my mind used to fresh divine torture.
Do not forget your little riding-whip. Shall I bring one myself?
If I had my own way, this letter would never be done, but it would end by wearying you. I finish here regretfully. To write to you is a great joy for me.
I place my head beneath your feet, which I feel on my face, crushing my cheeks with your boot heels. I feel your hand twisting and tearing my flesh; then you pinch me. I feel your hand smartly slapping both cheeks, while I am on my knees, my arms strapped tightly behind me. I feel the stinging hush of your whip cutting into my flesh at long intervals, so as to make your pleasure last longer, and tears roll down my cheeks, in spite of all my efforts, as, to punish me for loving you too much, you tear off the hair that hides my sex. Each time I must say to you: “Thank you, master!” If I forget, your dear hand shall slap my face as hard as it can strike, and always my eyes are fixed on yours: softly, tenderly, and submissively. I am your enduring obedient slave,
LOUISE.
This new passion did not prevent me nursing my poor Lily at home, and working at my chemical inventions, while I took as much exercise as I could in the open air. I seemed to get younger and gayer, as I would leave my bed as early as possible, and stride merrily along, drunk with the lightness of the pure morning air, my good old Smike careering joyfully round me.
Good health means gaiety, and my greatest trouble was the beggarly lightness of my banking account, now that my poor invalid seemed a trifle better.
Now and again, I thought of the Lily of Sonis, and I felt that there was something very strange in her conduct.
I had said in my last letter to her that I would try to elucidate the mystery, and having, as I expected, no answer, I began to ask myself what steps I ought to take to unravel the puzzle. All my old powers of reasoning, that I thought I had left for ever in my bed of pain, came gradually back to me, and I saw that Mademoiselle Arvel had no real tenderness for me.
I had never read her letters over again, although I had often said to myself that I would do so. I had them all, as I have given them here, dated, and tied up in a bundle.
One afternoon, my new mistress, Louise, failed to keep an appointment, and having a moment to myself, I got the packet of Lilian's letters out of a drawer of my desk, and read them all carefully through, one by one.
Then I began to vaguely sketch in my mind all the little criticisms that I have spread over these pages, and I found the explanation of many things she had said to me and which I had let pass at the time.
When she told me that rigmarole story about the fifty francs supposed to have come from Madame Muller, and how she wrote to her Mamma in Normandy, that she had got some money, and had paid a bill with it, without showing any papers to her vigilant parent, I had smelt a rat. But I was so stupid in my blind passion, that my suspicions did not take a proper shape, until I reflected upon the letter of the twenty-sixth of April, wherein she said that she had written to me on her return to Paris from the South, and that the letter had been probably mislaid.
I jumped to the conclusion that when she denied having received the unregistered missive, containing the fifty-franc note, she was telling a deliberate lie.
When she came to lunch with Lord Fontarcy and myself in Paris, she expected more than she got. She evidently hoped for some present from my friend. When I sent the money, torn from me by a threat, she was disgusted at the smallness of the sum, and never acknowledged it, nor wrote to me from London.
Then, when I dropped her a line five weeks afterwards, which was weak on my part, she got me invited to Sonis, and to excuse her fault, she worked the missing letter dodge again.
Two missing letters in ten months! She lied.
When I first made love to her and offered her caresses without danger of pregnancy, she answered that she would want “something else,” i.e., money.
After our first meeting in November 1897, when she left me at the railway station, I noticed her uneasy look. She was thinking of the five pounds she said she had lost in London, and was no doubt saying to herself: “Is he not going to give me something?”
Laugh at me, kind reader, if it so please you, but at that time I should not have dared to have offered her money.
When I write and tell her my grief at being suspected of paltry mendacity, she replies immediately that she is ready to marry me. She would have no hesitation in linking her existence to a blackguard who would lie to a woman for two sovereigns.
I could only find one excuse for her. She suffers from anemia or chlorosis. There is evidently psychopathic deterioration, and she is a neurotic subject.
Masturbation and unnatural practices before the age of puberty have produced neurasthenia, with its attendant symptoms. It is a clear case of hysteria.
No doubt she had been often received in her mother's bed, and Arvel had played with her as a mere child. The mother shut her eyes to his behavior, finding that his passion for her daughter kept him at home.
She cooked for him, and allowed her girl to romp with him. Here is the explanation of the door of communication being taken down between the two rooms.
Raoul has also had funny little games with his sister. As children, Arvel encouraged them. Now that Lilian is a woman, he becomes jealous of the lad. They were not always well off, and pigged together in one small lodging. And Charlotte, who sleeps with both sister and brother in turn? When they are all three in London, what barriers of shame can exist between them? And, to cap all, when Papa is in England with both girls and no mother by, what goes on then?
No wonder Mamma was jealous of her daughter at the beginning of the summer.
And Lilian's lie to me is easy to explain. On the eleventh of November she is in the height of her flow. She has a fit of weeping, a mental and emotional sign of irritability and instability, impairing her integrity, and rendering an unbalanced individual like this morbid girl capable of any villany while in such an emotional state.
If she were still a virgin, she would not be long, before she got penetrated by the male, and perhaps the work was being done as I wrote these lines, at the end of November, 1898.
All the best and most sacred part of my love was gone. Lust alone remained. The idea of her being the mistress of her mother's old lover still excited me. I bow my head, as I confess that the thought of this loathsome liaison stirred up my secret erotic longings, even as the plan of the visit to a brothel might inflame a man of tranquil spirit. He knows that he is going there to choose a mercenary, common female who will give him an imitation of love for a few coins. It is disgusting, and he is well aware of it, but he goes there all the same. He is sensually excited and that is enough for him.
So I felt with regard to Lilian, but I was saved, as I began to judge her, and what was better, I judged myself.
I felt strong, and proof against her wiles, or any future lies, for what harm can come to a man from wicked womanly intrigues, which he despises himself and has no vanity for the sirens to play upon?
But I never forgot this particular lie of Lilian's. I may pardon her perhaps some day, for who and what am I, that I should refuse to forgive a neurasthenic woman? But forget it-never!