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Updated: May 24, 2025
When I began to come to myself, I fancied I lay warm and soft in my own bed. "Is it possible I am at home?" I thought. The well-known scents of the garden seemed to come crowding in. I rubbed my eyes, and looked out: I lay on a bare stone, in the heart of a hateful city! I sprang from the bench. Had I indeed had a leopardess for my bedfellow, or had I but dreamed it?
When Cliges has heard these words that the other cries out, no smile had he in his heart; rather is it a marvel that frenzy does not seize him. Never was any wild beast: leopardess, or tigress, or lioness, who sees her young taken, so embittered, and furious, and lusting, for the fight as was Cliges who cares not to live if he fail his lady. Rather would he die than not have her.
I rose to go after the Little Ones, and instinctively sought the gate by which we had entered. I looked around me, but saw nothing of the leopardess. The street was rapidly filling with a fierce crowd. They saw me encumbered with my dead, but for a time dared not assail me. Ere I reached the gate, however, they had gathered courage. The women began to hustle me; I held on heedless.
Before the sun went down, I had set a watch over the princess outside the camp, and sentinels round it: intending to walk about it myself all night long, I told the rest of the army to go to sleep. They threw themselves on the grass and were asleep in a moment. When the moon rose I caught a glimpse of something white; it was the leopardess.
Immediately my brain was filled with an odour strange and delicate, which yet I did not altogether like. It made me doubt the princess afresh: had she medicated it? had she enchanted it? was she in any way working on me unlawfully? And how was there water in the palace, and not a drop in the city? I remembered the crushed paw of the leopardess, and sprang from the bath.
The preparations for our wedding shall be begun at once, and ten days hence, dear señor, you will be my husband." What could I say? I had, of course, no intention of marrying her I would as lief have married a leopardess. But had I given her a peremptory negative she might have had me laid by the heels without more ado, or worse.
The palms of stage-land stirred, the ferns swayed; between then: tall, vivid greenness came Joan with her tread and grace and watchful eyes of a leopardess, her loose, wild hair decked with flowers: these and her make-up and her thinness disguised her completely from Pierre, but again his heart came to his throat and, when she put her hands up to her mouth and called, his pulses gave a leap.
"Eureka!" cries the professional novel-reader, that far-sighted and keen-scented hound that snuffs a denouement afar off; and anon there rises before his eyes the vision of poor little Stella drinking in love and learning, especially love, from the divine eyes of the anything but divine Swift, of Shirley, the lioness, the pantheress, the leopardess, the beautiful, fierce creature, sitting, tamed, quiet, meek, by the side of Louis Moore, her tutor and master, and of all the legends of all the ages wherein Beauty has sat at the feet of Wisdom, and Love has crept in unawares, and spoiled the lesson while as yet half-unlearnt; so he cries, "She is going the way of all heroines.
I soon began to reflect, however, that no leopardess, no elephant, no hugest animal that in our world preceded man, could keep such a torrent flowing, except every artery in its body were open, and its huge system went on filling its vessels from fields and lakes and forests as fast as they emptied themselves: it could not be blood!
They mounted to their nests again, though with difficulty because of their burdens, and in a minute were fast asleep. Lona retired to her tree. I lay where I was, and slept the better that I thought most likely the white leopardess was still somewhere in the wood. I woke soon after the sun, and lay pondering.
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