Sylva

She had taken clothes, lingerie and toilet things with her. To go where? Certainly not very far; she was still too unsure of herself to travel alone, or to go up to town. Jeremy’s hut? I realized with a happy sigh of relief that I no longer feared she might have joined him. That period lay well in the past. I shall cut short the account of my searches and deductions, for in any case they did not have much time to operate. A message from the innkeeper told me that the runaway was at the Unicorn. He had not dared refuse her a room but was afraid there might be trouble and preferred to let me know. He did not add that Sylva had not a brass farthing on her.

After some thought I decided not to force her to come back at once. Instead I sent Mrs. Bumley to reconnoiter. They had a long talk together, necessarily difficult and confused, from which, however, Nanny was able to grasp the gist. For Sylva, I was “Bonny,” that is to say, her father, brother, protector, and according to what she had digested of the doctrines of the Church-the cardinal virtues, the links of parentage, sin, hell and all the rest-she could not admit that I might be the father of the child she was carrying. She simply denied it, with the most stubborn energy, and she was still dim-witted enough to believe with a fierce candor that what she denied did not exist. Roused to impatience by such pigheadedness, Nanny suddenly brushed aside the obstacles of various kinds that had hitherto restrained her, and launched out into a full explanation of love, pleasure, and the rest.

Sylva let her talk, her eyes fixed on her, and when Nanny caught her breath and her chin began to quiver between her sagging cheeks, the young girl simply said, “I know.” There was nothing more to be got out of her. Nanny came home most discomfited and exceedingly displeased with herself.

During the following days Sylva refused to see even Nanny. Then she changed her mind and received her. On the condition, however, that I should not come with her, she said. In the course of those days of waiting, I could measure the power of my love for Sylva. I remember few periods in my life when I reached such a degree of feverish bewilderment, hopeless distress, indecision and stupor. A hundred times I resolved to bring her back by force, a hundred times an inner voice warned me not to do anything of the kind. I had great misgivings of the danger she was in, all alone in that inn, amidst all those village bumpkins whose heads would be turned by her simplicity and beauty. But at the same time I guessed that if I compelled her to come back there was a risk of turning her against me for a long time. Moreover, Nanny calmed my fears a little.

“In the first place,” she said, “you can be sure that your little vixen loves you-even if her brand-new heart has not yet told her how.”

Besides, good old Nanny made friends with the innkeeper’s wife, who kept an eye on Sylva as if she were her own daughter. And finally, Nanny herself went to the Unicorn every day, to continue her role as an educator. She thus had an eye on the male patrons and their comings and goings. But she hesitated for a long while, she told me, before owning up to her worries for me on account of a very assiduous, new visitor at the inn: my friend J. F. Walburton’s younger son. I knew the boy well: a handsome lad. And the girl-quite ingenuously, according to Nanny, and without thinking of any harm-smilingly tolerated his advances.

If my candid Sylva had been a cunning woman of the world, she could not have chosen a shrewder course of action to sweep away my ultimate and cowardly hesitations. But perhaps she had become both worldly-wise and a woman? Perhaps her departure this time was one of those feminine ruses, in which women pretend they are running away from a man’s love when what they really want in secret, sometimes even without admitting it to themselves, is to exasperate him to his breaking point? However this may be, there I was, reluctantly deprived of her presence, worried, jealous, dependent for the least scrap of news on Nanny as an intermediary (and suspecting her of connivance).

If what Sylva wanted was to open my eyes to the power and true nature of my affection for her, she succeeded in this most marvelously, for I no longer slept and only thought of one thing: our marriage. I had plenty of leisure during those sleepless nights to realize with striking clarity what she would henceforth mean in my life. No longer only a woman (as for thinking of her as a vixen, a fox bitch still, I would have blushed with shame), no longer only a human being, but at last a “person”; yes, Sylva was now quite simply the one person on earth I loved, the person I wanted to live with, whom I would never yield to another, whom I would marry against the whole world, for I simply could no longer live without her.