A silly business on all sides.

CHAPTER XXXIII

WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING

The surgeon, who attended us both, loudly admired our mutual delicacy in sparing arteries and vital organs:  but a bullet cuts a rougher pathway than the neat steel blade, and I was prostrate when the prince came to press my hand on his departure for his quarters at Laibach.  The utterly unreasonable nature of a duel was manifested by his declaring to me, that he was now satisfied I did not mean to insult him and then laugh at him.  We must regard it rather as a sudorific for feverish blood and brains.  I felt my wound acutely, seeing his brisk step when he retired.  Having overthrown me bodily, it threw my heart back to its first emotions, and I yearned to set eyes on my father, with a haunting sense that I had of late injured him and owed him reparation.  It vanished after he had been in my room an hour, to return when he had quitted it, and incessantly and inexplicably it went and came in this manner.  He was depressed.  I longed for drollery, relieved only by chance allusions to my beloved one, whereas he could not conceal his wish to turn the stupid duel to account.

‘Pencil a line to her,’ he entreated me, and dictated his idea of a moving line, adding urgently, that the crippled letters would be affecting to her, as to the Great Frederick his last review of his invalid veterans.  ’Your name—­the signature of your name alone, darling Richie,’ and he traced a crooked scrawl with a forefinger,—­“Still, dearest angel, in contempt of death and blood, I am yours to eternity, Harry Lepel Richmond, sometimes called Roy—­a point for your decision in the future, should the breath everlastingly devoted to the most celestial of her sex, continue to animate the frame that would rise on wings to say adieu! adieu!”—­Richie, just a sentence?’

He was distracting.

His natural tenderness and neatness of hand qualified him for spreading peace in a sick-room; but he was too full of life and his scheme, and knowing me out of danger, he could not forbear giving his despondency an outlet.  I heard him exclaim in big sighs:  ‘Heavens! how near!’ and again, ‘She must hear of it!’ Never was man so incorrigibly dramatic.

He would walk up to a bookcase and take down a volume, when the interjectional fit waxed violent, flip the pages, affecting a perplexity he would assuredly have been struck by had he perused them, and read, as he did once,—­’Italy, the land of the sun! and she is to be hurried away there, and we are left to groan.  The conspiracy is infamous!  One of the Family takes it upon himself to murder us! and she is to be hurried out of hearing!  And so we are to have the blood of the Roys spilt for nothing?—­no!’ and he shut up the book with a report, and bounded to my side to beg pardon of me.  From his particular abuse of the margravine, the iteration of certain phrases, which he uttered to denounce and defy them, I gathered that an interview had passed between the two, and that she had notified a blockade against all letters addressed to the princess.  He half admitted having rushed to the palace on his road to me.