And once I was made
very ill by a two-weeks' horror which I had: for she disappeared in her
skiff, I being at the Chateau, and she did not come back; and while she
was away there was a tempest that turned the lake into an angry ocean,
and, ah my good God, she did not come. At last, half-crazy at the vacant
days of misery which went by and by, and she did not come, I set out
upon a wild-goose quest, of her--of all the hopeless things the most
hopeless, for the world is great--and I sought and did not find her; and
after three days I turned back, recognising that I was mad to search the
infinite, and coming near the Chateau, I saw her wave her handkerchief
from the island-edge, for she divined that I had gone to seek her, and
she was watching for me: and when I took her hand, what did she say to
me, the Biblical simpleton?--'Oh you of little Faith!' says she. And she
had adventures to lisp, with all the _r_'s liquefied into _l_'s, and I
was with her all that day again.
Once a month perhaps she would knock at my outermost door, which I
mostly kept locked when at home, bringing me a sumptuously-dressed,
highly-spiced red trout or grayling, which I had not the heart to
refuse, and exquisitely she does them, all hot and spiced, applying
apparently to their preparation the taste which she applies to dress;
and her extraordinary luck in angling did not fail to supply her with
the finest specimens, though, for that matter, this lake, with its old
fish-hatcheries and fish-ladders, is not miserly in that way, swarming
now with the best lake trout, river trout, red trout, and with salmon,
of which last I have brought in one with the landing-net of, I should
say, thirty-five to forty pounds.
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