Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/65

father's anger in order to be with her, and now I was no longer shy, the right words rushed from me in a torrent. Sometimes our love story was happy, more often it was a perfect bath of tears. Indeed, I think I must have had some inborn feeling for the stage, so frequently did I lead up to the most telling and lime-lit situations, on the very weakest of which a curtain could only go down to a thunder of applause. In this present drama there was a fathomless well of sentiment, of "love interest" of the most uncompromising type. I had read lately, in bound volumes of Temple Bur, one or two novels by Miss Rhoda Broughton, and as I lay there in my small room, with a text above my head, I was far from anxious to "keep innocency." On the contrary, I was one of those bold, dark, rugged, cynical creatures, one of those splendid ugly men, who carry in their breasts a smouldering fire of passion for some girl "with eyes like a shot partridge"; one of those men who gnaw the ends of their moustaches, and have behind them the remembrance of a fearful life. My name was Dare Stamer, or Paul Le Mesurier, and my heart was sombre and volcanic. The plot of our romance did not vary a great deal. We met; we loved; we quarrelled. I married somebody else—a cold, soulless, blonde beauty with magnificent shoulders—and Katherine sometimes went into a consumption, and sometimes did not, but in either case there was a last meeting between us, when the veils of falsehoods were torn aside, and for one wild, mad, delirious moment I held her in my arms, my lips pressed on hers. It was these wild, mad, delirious moments that so appealed to me. They followed one another thick and fast as rain-drops in a thundershower. I was ever at a climax. The room was brimmed up with lovers' tears and lovers' kisses, meetings and partings, yet never perhaps had the text above my head, though I was far from thinking so, been obeyed so literally and so successfully.