One unbroken flood of golden sunlight lay like a fallen silken veil
over the points and peaks of the downs, over the swelling sides and the
soft rolling dip of the valley, and the still September blue stretched
cloudless overhead. It was the late afternoon of the thirteenth, a day
that had been hot, oppressive, stifling in town, but here was simply
warm, still, and tranquil.
All through the early hours of the day a parallel--if one may use the
idea--oppression to the heat in the stirless air had weighed upon me.
We had been married that morning, and before the ceremony my one
sensation had been that of strain, during it tense anxiety, and
afterwards reproach, and none of these are pleasant emotions. When I
looked back to the morning, now, it seemed to be in the far distance; I
don't know why, but ages seemed to have elapsed in the hours of this
day.
Lucia had come up to the altar, her face whiter, more absolutely
colourless than the veil over it, and my heart sank with apprehension
as I first caught sight of her. Never, except in death, and already
with the coffin enclosing it, have I seen a face so pallid. She walked
steadily--she was a woman who always walked well, as a swan swims well,
by nature--and the graceful figure passed on calmly towards us.
She kept the lids drooped over her eyes, and her white lips were closed
firmly in repose. It seemed like a statue moving, and for a second I
felt as if the church, the people, she, I, the whole scene were unreal,
and my own blood changing into stone. The next second she was beside
me, and then she suddenly lifted her eyes.
They glowed upon me as if there were actual fire stirring in the
lustrous black pupils, and they gave back the joyous beat to my pulses,
and sent my blood flowing onward again. The glance made us both human
directly. But how anxious I felt all the time. Would she faint? I asked
myself, desperately, over and over again. The colour of her face was
terrifying, and the hand she gave me for the ring was cold as the touch
of snow, and trembled convulsively. How long it all seemed! and how I
loathed the prayers and the hymns, and sickened at the address! What
earthly good is it to match words against a man's passion? As it is, it
is, and no admonitions will alter it. However, all was over at last,
and we were in the vestry. Lucia could not write her name; she tried,
for no woman had less affectation and more self-command than she had,
but the tremulousness of the fingers would not be controlled, and the
mere effort agitated her so that she fell back in the chair, quivering,
till each point of lace in her dress shook, and every eye could see the
violent heart-beats under her bodice.
"Don't sign it, dearest!" I exclaimed, feeling like a murderer as I
looked into the blanched, nervous face, and widely-dilated eyes.
There was a blank pause for a moment of sympathy and apprehension, as
her shaking hand dropped the pen, and then the clergyman picked it up
and finished the half-written name. I felt a sharp self-reproach, and
Dick did not mend matters as he turned from her to me and said, in an
indignant mutter,--
"She is not in a fit state to be married at all, Victor!"
He looked at me as if I were committing a crime, and I coloured and
felt like a brute. Then there was the long breakfast, and the
reception, and, as I say, it seemed as if centuries were rolling over
my head in each five minutes, but now it was all done with; the burden
of other's society had slipped from us, and the weight of my own
oppression I seemed to have left, together with the sullen heat of town
air. In all the journey down Lucia had been recovering. The scarlet had
been coming back to her lips, and as the first breath of air came to
us, straight from the heart of the smiling, sun-lit valley, they parted
in a laugh, the light leapt up in the soft azure eyes, the rose-colour
under the skin, and she bent forward to me and said, impulsively,--
"Victor, if you want to know, I feel perfectly happy!"
"And I, too, you darling!" I said, smiling back into the brilliant face.
"It seems quite a new thing to feel. I don't ever remember feeling
happy until now, and I am five-and-twenty. Think, a whole third of an
ordinary lifetime passed before I have known it!"
I laughed.
"Well, you are going to begin now, at any-rate," I said.
"Yes; I think so," she answered, both the carmine lips still curved in
smiles. "But still it is late to begin. It is not wise; one should
begin at fifteen--ten years back."
"Begin what?" I said, laughing.
"To be happy."
"By all means," I answered. "Begin as soon as you get the chance; but I
think most people do. Only it is the chance that is generally wanting!"
"I don't know," Lucia said, looking away from me through the window,
where the flying sunny slopes of the valley sped by. "People muddle
away their chances of happiness in life. Ten years ago, when I was
fifteen and you were twenty--well, we might have married then, and felt
all that we feel now a whole ten years ago, which I have passed without
a single happy day."
A shade of sadness came into the eyes, and darkened them as she spoke.
"But why do you think of that now?" I asked. "It is no use. The ten
years have gone beyond recall, and, if you have not been happy, you
have something to show for the time. You have been working."
"Yes," Lucia repeated; "I have been working."
There was silence. I hoped I had recalled to her thoughts the great
canvas that stood complete in her studio. For myself, I knew that the
keenest touch of pleasure that stirred my frame now was held in the
ever-present thought that this day saw the birth of my work in Paris.
Not for worlds would I have hinted this to Lucia. To have breathed a
word that assigned even a part of my pleasure at the moment to anything
but the possession of herself was the last thing that I would have done.
Every pleasure is kin to every other, and they each tend to enhance and
strengthen another, so that in reality this inner pleasure of my
thoughts that reverted constantly to the Paris publishers was no enemy,
not even a rival, but rather a coadjutor of the passionate, personal
pleasure in the woman beside me. The brain already intoxicated with one
pleasant emotion lends itself more, not less, readily to another, just
as a brutal lover inflames his love with wine. In precisely the same
way, my passion for Lucia was inflamed by the wine of gratified
ambition. All the same, I said nothing touching on the book for fear
lest she should misunderstand me, nor hinted--that which I felt
myself--that this scene put back ten years, when I was full of vague
ambitions and unaccomplished plans, would not have possessed the zest
it had for me now.
Man, unfortunately, is not the desirer of one thing at a time, but of
many things, and the gratification of a single desire is not enough to
content him. If a person is both hungry and thirsty, you cannot satisfy
him, however kindly you may supply him with bread. Another line of
thought that ran side by side with this in my brain, as I watched the
shadow pass over the girl's face as she thought of her ten lost years,
was, that had we had these sensations at fifteen and twenty they would
certainly not have out-lasted us till now! But this also I would not
say. The passing of our passions, however we may recognise it as
philosophers, is not pleasant to us as lovers.
"Oh! there is our house, I believe!" said Lucia, suddenly, as we neared
the station.
"Yes; you can just see it from the line, I know," I answered, looking
through the window. "What a glorious evening!"
All before our eyes lay in the still, liquid golden light, and through
the burnished haze that seemed to slope obliquely between us and it we
saw the square white house, lying a little blow the level of the line,
and all but hidden behind a delicate, intricate profusion of light
green foliage. Behind it rose a rolling slope, clothed half-way up with
a copse of young larch trees, whose slender stems sent long shadows
down the whole length of its side, falling across the sun-baked,
waving, brown-and-yellow grasses, and the red cows, lying lower down
the slope, drowsy, as all else seemed in the mellow sunlight.
At the side of the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage
drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of
tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there
single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these
on the lawn should be indigenous, and almost every country out of
Europe was represented by one lovely forest denizen.
The crytomera, the cedar of Japan, raised its delicate rosy crest here
under the blue of an English sky; a young Turkish cypress shot like a
dart from the ground and threw its narrow shadow straight as a spear
across the emerald turf; and farther on a small squat tree, from China,
unfurled smooth, glossy, polished leaves of lightest green, and
thick-lipped succulent scarlet flowers, indolently to the kiss of the
British sun. We caught a passing glimpse of it, and Lucia drew in her
breath softly, with pleasure.
"How lovely! What a pretty house, Victor!" she said.
"Yes; I know it is supposed to be a very charming place."
"And don't you think so, too?" she asked, turning to me, and the side
light from the window caught the curly hair under the velvet hat brim
and turned it into gold.
"I haven't got a very keen artistic eye, Lucia, I think. Certainly not
for houses," I answered, laughing, and looking straight into those eyes
of lapis lazuli and then away. "But I adore this one, as it is going to
give me the happiest hours in my life!"
And I met her eyes. A slow flush mounted into Lucia's face, and then
she seemed to tear her gaze from mine with difficulty and turned to the
window, so that I could not see her face; her ear, however, betrayed
her all the same, for the painful blush reached even there, and flooded
its white, pink-tinted porcelain with scarlet.
A second after, the train was at a standstill, drawn up at the platform
of the station. It was very quiet, and even the train coming in hardly
seemed to disturb the sleepy stillness that hung over the strips of
asphalt, the beds of hollyhocks and lilac bushes against the
whitewashed walls, where the rural fancy of the stationmaster had gone
so far as to range a row of straw bee-hives.
There were few passengers by the train, and little luggage except our
own. The single porter, the stationmaster, some workmen, and a few
market women, with white aprons and baskets of eggs on their arms,
stared wonderingly at Lucia as she stood with the golden sunlight
pouring down upon her light hair and brilliant face, and the glory of
Parisian fashion embodied in her dress.
My friend's carriage had come to meet the train, and I left her for a
moment to speak to the footman about our luggage. As I walked back up
the platform she was standing three-quarter ways towards me, the
attitude which displays best that most alluring line in a woman's
figure, the line from under the arms to the waist.
In Lucia it was specially striking, not straight, but like the back of
a Z, a sharp, smooth slope to the low waist, and formed a perfect
harmony with the two curves of the hips, and the long fall of the skirt
beneath. All my frame--every limb and muscle--quickened with keen
pleasure as my eye met the familiar lines, as yet familiar to one sense
only, and then followed the inevitable, involuntary rush of exultant
remembrance of my absolute possession now.
I let it come and flood my brain with a half-drunken satisfaction, and
the phrase formed itself on my lips, "Well, hang it, my to-morrow has
come at last!" As I came up to her I saw her eyes were fixed upon me
with a searching gaze. I thanked heaven Lucia was not one of the
horrible, modern women, if indeed they exist outside a lady's novel,
who are always analysing you and your emotions, and testing the depth
of your inferiority to themselves. I believed she was only studying and
weighing my outer appearance, of which I was far more confident than of
the inner personality. So I met the blue, soft-shaded eyes in the flare
of the sunlight without embarrassment, and smiled back into them as I
joined her.
"Well, darling, now come," I said; "I think I have made that idiot
understand your hand-bag is not to be shaken!"
Lucia pushed a little pale gloved hand through my arm, impetuously, and
said, as we turned to follow the decline of the platform towards the
carriage,--
"Victor! you are so good-looking!"
I laughed. I was right, then. She had only been thinking of the
exterior. What a comfort! A few steps had brought us to the carriage
door, and the servant was holding it open. I waited to answer her till
we had started, but when she had got in, and I had followed, she threw
herself back on the cushions and put one hand on my shoulder, and
before I could speak she went on in a low voice,--
"Yes! It is very charming now, of course; but all the same you have
nearly killed me!"
The words were spoken with such a bitter, tremulous vehemence, that I
turned and looked at her in startled silence. Her eyes still passed
keenly backwards and forwards over my face.
"Oh, yes! if you knew one-tenth of what I have suffered this last year!
how I have coveted--longed. It doesn't matter what I say to you now,
does it! Oh, I am so glad that all this terrible repression and
restraint is done away with, and that we are free to do and say what we
like! I am so glad I am your wife at last!"
The trembling, excited accents, springing straight from her thoughts,
and poured into my ear from her warm, parting lips, stirred my own
tolerably well-governed feelings to a painful intensity, and I felt
only too sharply that I, at any rate, had not done with self-restraint.
I said nothing. I was rendered dumb by the riot within me, but I pushed
my arm round her waist and drew her against me.
The violence and want of tenderness in the action pleased her, perhaps,
being a woman. The waist yielded gladly, and the whole form sank
against me with relaxed and satisfied pleasure.
We neither of us spoke again until the carriage drew up between the
bright green of the larches, stabbed through with long shafts of light,
and before the shallow steps and open windows of the house. On each
side of the steps stood, not classic urns to remind one irresistibly of
graveyards, but honest, bright, terracotta, human-looking flower-pots,
from which rose or trailed the loveliest plants a skilful gardener
could wrest from September. A white peacock paced majestically across
the red gravel towards the larches, and underneath these, swinging
exuberantly on suspended perches, with the strips and bars of sunlight
flashing on their glittering feathers, chattered together nearly a
dozen Oriental parrots.
Lucia looked at the scene with an artist's quick eye, and I heard an
instinctive murmur about its making a pretty sketch.
I told her she would be otherwise occupied now than in making sketches,
and we both laughed as we passed up the steps together.
In the hall hovered, like two evil shadows, her maid and my valet,
lying in wait for us to remind us of clothes and the serious duties of
life. I saw Lucia carried off from me with despairing eyes, knowing it
would be ages before I saw her again.
It did not take me long to get into another suit, and then I returned
to the dining-room, and roamed about from end to end, too restless to
sit down to glance at the papers that lay on the different tables, or
even to light up a cigar. I walked about aimlessly, longing for the
woman's presence beside me again.
It was a very large room--two, properly, knocked into one--with a
window looking to the front and the carriage-drive, and another at the
side, opening, with French glass doors, on to the low stone terrace
which overlooked the lawn.
Through these I wandered at last on to the terrace, and rested my arms
on the low balustrade, looking with unseeing eyes across the lawn, with
its tropical trees standing motionless in the golden haze. Everything
around me was very still, and a peculiar strained calm seemed to be
upon me also--the calm of an intense desire, hushed and expectant, in
all the blood.
A swift, hurried step came on to the terrace, and I turned instantly.
The light fell all over her, the living incarnation of my long drawn
out hopes and dreams. She had changed her dress to a light dinner-silk.
The bodice was modest--I mean by that, it was unobtrusive--very. Excess
of nervous excitement, the wealth of evening sunlight, and her fashion
of dressing made her dazzling to look upon, and I stood for a second in
silence.
She misunderstood my pause and glance, and a rush of hot colour came
into her face, and the tears suddenly started to her eyes.
"You don't like my dress," she exclaimed. "I told Celine she was
cutting it too low!"
A step forward and I had her in my arms. Ah! what were dreams to the
keen, sharp delight of feeling her there--alive, and in the
flesh--throbbing and pulsating against me? I declared the dress was
perfect, that I would not have the bodice half an inch higher for
anything, that she looked adorable, and so on, until she was comforted.
The tears passed into laughter, and the flush died away; but she
trembled against me distressingly, and her lips quivered nervously.
I held her to me, but she seemed to flutter uncertainly in my clasp,
just as a bird flutters wildly without aim at the limit of its
tethering cord, and when I released her she sank into the wire chair at
our side with a look of exhaustion stamped on the soft, delicate face.
I saw that it would require all my tact and care to make this evening a
success, and I determined that it should be one for her. Standing there
beside her, looking down on her light head, I made a rough, mental
examination of my thoughts. I seized those that had anything of self in
them, rolled them hastily together, and thrust them into an obscure
corner of my brain out of hearing, to leave the better part of my love
for her free to guide me.
I drew a chair close to her and sat down, letting my arm rest along the
top rail of hers, behind the soft head, which, after a minute, sank
gently back upon it with a movement of tired relief. We neither spoke,
and the perfect, sunny calm of the evening air, the silence, and the
physical rest seemed to soothe her. When the servant came on to the
terrace to announce the dinner, she had recovered, and her arm on mine
was warm and firm.
As soon as we had finished dinner, she rose restlessly from the table
and looked at me with a hesitating air. I smiled back at her, but it
hurt me inwardly this want of confidence, this lack of familiarity she
seemed to have. This sort of hesitation before she made the simplest
request, the start and flush when I spoke suddenly to her, this
timidity of me now, hurt and puzzled me. I, who had taught my dog
implicit trust, seemed to have missed the way with the woman.
I remembered Paris: my own harshness to her there came back upon me
like a blow. The indelible impression of my hardness had been given
then, and she dreaded it now. She had been conquered then; her will and
desire had been broken down to mine; she had been forced to yield and
to suffer; she had appealed to me and found me inflexible, relentless;
and now I had the fruits of my victory. The woman I loved, though she
might love me, feared me instinctively, as the once well-beaten dog
ever afterwards fears its master.
To me, who hated victory, who loathed subduing others, and the price
they bring of fear and shrinking, the realisation of her feeling
towards me was like a sudden physical pain. I got up from the table
feeling my face grow white with sharp distress. I hardly knew at the
moment how to express my thoughts; besides, I knew words would be of no
avail. An impression given is a scar upon the mind like a scar upon the
flesh. She fixed her eyes on my face with a sort of apprehension in
them, that was extremely bitter to me.
"What were you going to say, dearest?" I said, merely, with a faint
smile; "go on."
"Oh, nothing much!" she said, hastily, flushing and paling almost in
the same moment; "only I feel so restless. Come and show me all the
rest of the house, will you?"
I assented, and we passed out of the dining-room into the hall and up
the shallow flight of stairs. I put my right hand on the banister and
my left arm round her waist, and the whole sweet figure beside me, and
the white neck and ear so near me, drove out the thoughts of a minute
back, and I only laughed as I felt her waist contract convulsively as I
touched it.
"Would you like to take my arm better?" I said, mockingly, and drew her
round to me so that the soft face was just beneath my own. In the
subdued light of the staircase she lifted her lids, and I saw her eyes,
gleaming and sparkling, brimming over with gaiety and pleasure, and the
arm next me she raised and twisted close round my neck.
"No, Victor; here is the place for my arm now! You won't push it away
as you did in Paris, will you?"
The words hurt cruelly. Could I never obliterate that wretched memory?
It was vivid with her; it clung to me. It seemed a shadow dogging my
present pleasure. I stopped suddenly on the staircase and took her
wholly into my arms. All the supple form yielded at my touch, till it
leaned hard against my own; the face, pallid with excitement, was
raised to mine; the glitter of her eyes swam before my vision as I
caught it from beneath the half-drooped lids; the lips, parted in a
faint breath, then closed as mine joined them. As they touched, no
consciousness was left except that both our lives seemed mingling,
panting, fainting on our lips.
The pain that is pleasure, and the pleasure that is pain, thrilled and
pierced every nerve as I held her and felt those lips under mine, her
heart beat under my heart, her weak arms twisted round my throat. When
at last my lips set hers free, on fire with the passion of my own, they
moved in a half-delirious murmur,--
"Victor, you don't know how I love you!"
I have no distinct recollection of passing up the remaining stairs, but
we did reach the landing, and a second or two later were standing in
the drawing-room. I think she said it was pretty, and so on, but I
hardly heard, my head was reeling, and all my senses dull, her figure
leant a little against me, and the pressure of her arm was upon mine.
After the drawing-room, the reading-room, and a breakfast-room, all
opening from the same corridor, had been passed through, there were
still two rooms unexplored on that floor. I turned the handle of the
nearer door, and then pushed it open.
Lucia stepped on to the threshold, and then I felt her arm start
violently in mine, and she drew back with a sharp, instinctive movement.
I looked down upon her and murmured,--
"Our room, dearest."
The colour blazed all over the fair skin, till it seemed scorching it,
and tears startled into the dismayed eyes, which she turned from me
confusedly, as she shrank back into the passage.
I was startled, and a chill seemed to fall upon me, and penetrate
deeper as a grey pallor succeeded to the burning flush, and she had to
lay one trembling hand on my arm again for actual support.
"Victor, it is nothing!" she said, hurriedly, forcing a smile to her
lips.
"It--it--startled me."
She made a nervous step forward, as if she would have forced herself to
enter the room with me, but I collected myself with a great effort, and
gently drew the door shut.
"There is another sitting-room a little farther on; come and look at
it," I said, quietly, in a light, indifferent tone, as if we were
meeting in society for the first time.
I drew her on past the door, feeling her hand fluttering on my arm, and
her feet uncertain beside my own. Inwardly I was alarmed--dismayed. Her
extreme nervousness, and the physical effect upon her, frightened me.
With crushing force and clearness came back to me the remembrance of
the fearless, eager, unrestrained abandonment of body and mind, the gay
exuberance of careless passion, with all the vigour of youth and health
in it, that had leapt up to meet my caress a year ago,--and been
refused. We passed on to a door on the other side of the corridor,
which opened to another sitting-room. A lovely evening had given way to
a lovelier night. Beyond the long window panes, set open to the still
air, we caught sight of the sinking golden crescent of the moon towards
the south; above and all round, to the low horizon, the sky was
crowded, sparkling, and brilliant with stars. I moved two chairs close
up to the open window, but she stood by the sill and leaned forward to
the night air.
"You think me very silly?" she said, with her head turned away from me.
"I think you are not well, dearest," I said, gently.
There was silence. Words seemed frozen on my lips. A sort of terror
filled me of exciting or embarrassing her. I stood beside the window
frame watching her. After a minute or two she dropped back into a chair
and looked up at me with a laugh.
"I think I am all right, only you startled me! By the way, Victor, if
anything ever does happen to me, you will remember you have your work
and your talent to turn to, won't you? I mean you would not do anything
desperate. I want you to promise me that."
She lay back in the easy chair, burying her light head and polished
white shoulder in the velvet cushion, and swinging one little foot idly
as she looked up smiling for her answer. The bright light in the room
fell full upon her, and I looked down upon this brilliant piece of
life, full of glowing tints and warm pulses and subtle powers, and my
brain flamed with the pleasure of the senses. I hardly noted her words.
"Dear little girl!" I said, smiling back into her eyes. "I refuse to
think of such things at all!"
"Oh, well, it doesn't matter! I don't expect you would," she said,
laughing, the colour leaping up in her cheeks, and the vivid blue
deepening behind her lashes. "Come and make much of me now while you
have got me."
Her whole face and form were instinct with a delicious invitation, and
I bent down to and over her, filled with the delight of the moment. We
made one chair do for both of us, and looked through the window at
intervals to escape each other's eyes, and laughed at nothing, and
talked a very extraordinary astronomy. At last, with her soft fingers
in my hair and on my throat, and her white arm above the elbow clasped
in my hand, speech, even laughter, grew choked in dense feelings for
all the command I kept upon myself; and we sat in silence, hearing each
other's breath, feeling each pulse that beat in the other's throat and
breast.
There had been a long silence when the last star of Orion slid over the
horizon, followed by my impatient eyes. I looked at my watch. I hardly
know why I did it then. It was an involuntary action rather than a
conscious one. I did not say anything as I replaced it, but she glanced
sharply at me, and I saw her lips whitened.
I knew the intense excitement that was moving her, it spoke to me in
every line of her form--in her eyes, torn wide open by it, in the faint
gleam of sweat that showed on the white forehead. I was not blind to
it, but the tumult within me, made all the greater by the sight of it,
left me insensible to its danger for her.
She got up from where we were sitting, and began to walk restlessly
round the table. I wheeled my chair slightly round so that I could
watch her. Nothing struck me particularly as I did so except the
extreme grace and attraction in the moving form. The heavy silk skirt
dragged backwards and forwards over the carpet almost soundless, the
moonlight and gaslight alternately gleaming on its folds. Each time
that she came between me and the table my eyes followed with dizzy
delight the soft side curve of her breast, the lines of the exquisite
waist, the white idle hand that sometimes touched the edge of my chair
arm, sometimes not, as she passed. One of these times I caught it and
detained her, and looked up at her face, but the light was behind her,
and only fell on the bright hair.
"Why do you walk about so?" I asked.
"I don't know. Victor, I feel very strange. I hope nothing is going to
happen. I never felt quite like this before;" and she broke her hand
loose from me and passed on.
I sprang up and followed her, and put my arm round her.
"Going to happen, dearest! What do you mean? Do you feel ill?"
I looked at her. She was very white, and her lips were parted and pale.
There was a distressed and strangely absent look upon her face which
startled me, though I had no clue to its significance.
"Yes, very ill," she answered, her eyes wandering away from my anxious
ones looking down at her, as we stood for a moment together.
Then she gently pushed away my arm and continued her walk.
"You know my heart always does beat and hurt if I am very happy, or
very excited, or any thing, but it's never been quite so bad as this
before." And then, catching the distress upon my face, she added, "I
daresay this is nothing. It will go off. I think it is only hysterical.
Don't look so unhappy!" And a faint smile swept over her pallid face.
She made her way to the sideboard and drank some water standing there.
Then she continued to move slowly round the room, both hands pressed
beneath her left breast, and her delicate eyebrows contracted into one
dark line across her colourless face.
"I overworked myself so tremendously just lately," she said, after a
minute, "after--well, after I came to you in Paris. I shall take a long
rest now. I hope I shall get strong again. When one is as delicate as
this, life is not worth having."
And then, before I could answer, she stopped suddenly, and looked
across the room at me with dilated eyes.
"Is there any brandy I could have?" she asked, abruptly.
My handbag stood in the corner of the room. There was a flask of brandy
there. In two seconds I had got it out and was beside her with the
traveling-glass half filled.
She took it with a fluttering, uncertain hand, and drank a little, but
not even then did the colour come back to her lips--they were apart and
grey. She set the glass down on the table with a wandering, undecided
movement, and then turned towards me and linked two ice-cold hands
round my neck,--
"Hold me up! I am sinking!" and her head fell heavily against my
shoulder.
I clasped my arm firmly round her waist. I was startled, distressed,
alarmed, but still, even then, I did not think there was any serious
danger. I thought she was hysterical, as she had said; over-strained,
and over-excited. I thought at most this was a fainting attack. I
thought--God knows what I thought. I must have been blind.
She put her hand to her throat, and I saw she wanted air. Supporting
her, I crossed to the window, and stood where the cool night breeze
came blowing in upon her face. My hand followed hers to her bodice, and
I loosened all the delicate lace ruffles round it that it had never
been my privilege to touch till now, and that were no whiter than the
lovely breast from which I unloosed them.
So we stood for a few seconds, her lids were drooped over her eyes. At
intervals, it seemed to me, her heart gave great single, convulsive
throbs that thudded through both our beings.
Then suddenly she tore her eyes wide open, and fixed them in an
unreasoning agony upon me. A straining, fearful effort seemed in them.
I pressed her to me.
"What is it, dearest?" I said quietly, trying to recall her to herself.
"Why do you look at me so?"
"Because I cannot see you! I have lost my sight! Oh, Victor, I am
DYING!"
The words were a strained cry of terrified anguish, and they cleft
through my brain like the stroke of an axe. With blinding suddenness I
knew then what was coming. My heart seemed turned into stone. Only
Reason rejected the truth. The gong stood on the table close beside us.
I stretched out my arm and struck it furiously, my eyes fixed in terror
on her face. The Great Change was there; the shadow already of
dissolution. The door was thrust open and a servant hurried in.
"A doctor!" I said to him, "quick for your life."
But I saw, before any doctor could reach us, she would have gone from
me. I strained my arms round her.
"Speak to me, my darling, speak," I said wildly, raising the dying head
higher on my breast.
Both her hands were clasped hard upon her heart. A frightful agony was
reflected in the bloodless face, but for the moment death retreated.
"Victor! To think I am dying! I shall never paint again! Oh, don't let
me go! Keep me! oh, keep me with you!"
My brain seemed bursting as I heard her. The only prayer of my life
broke then in a frenzy from my lips, "Great God! spare her!"
"Hold me up! oh, keep me, Victor! I am dying."
"Dearest, you are fainting!"
There was no answer. Heavier and heavier the pressure grew on my
breast, the arm slid heavily from my shoulders, the head fell slowly
backwards on my arm. I looked into her eyes. They were black as I had
seen them long ago in the studio. Fearfully, terribly dilated they
were, and in their depths was that look as if the soul were listening
to a far-off summons, calling, calling to it, to depart.
"My life! Speak to me once more! One word!"
Probably my voice did not reach her. For her already the silence held
but that one imperious command. My brief rule of this spirit was over.
It no longer heeded me. She no longer answered me. Her eyes were still
fixed upon me in helpless horror, terror, and despair; but they knew me
no longer. The unwilling soul had already started on its journey, and
its earthly love was no more to it than its earthly form. I held her
motionless, my eyes on hers, then I saw a glaze, a slow glaze fit upon
them, they set in it, and it told me she was dead.
Without a struggle, without a spasm, without a deeper breath to mark
the severance, her soul had drifted away from me, out of her body that
I held in my arms. Without a farewell, without a word, without any
knowledge of the second when the life had fled, without a sound beyond
that despairing, terrified appeal to me to keep her. I stood rigid,
petrified, my arms locked round her like iron bands. I heard the door
open and steps. Then I saw the doctor before me. He gave one glance at
the drooping head.
"Lay her down flat," he said.
I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into the
corridor to the opposite room--our room, and laid her on the bed. He
followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back and stood
beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying before my eyes in
darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night? There was the room, full
of warm, shaded light; there was the bed, and on it a passive woman's
figure, and another man bent over it and tore aside the bodice and
unclasped the white stays.
I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them, and
beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then beneath it.
The shade grew colder on his face. There was an intense silence in the
room, then the words came across it, "Quite extinct." My ears seemed to
fill with sounds, the ground to rise upward, the bed to heave, and I
went forward blindly and tore his hand from her breast and pushed him
from the bed.
"Then go and leave us," I said, and I heard my own voice as from a
great distance.
He looked at me, and his face and everything around was dark before my
eyes.
"Will you kindly go out of this room?" I repeated, and he walked to the
door.
I opened it, he passed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to
the bed. The weight of nerveless, passive beauty on it had crushed a
depression in its whiteness, the head had sunk down sideways to the
pillow as in tired sleep. Across the throat and breast, over and
amongst the disturbed laces of her dress, and on the parted gleaming
satin of her stays fell a flood of rose-coloured light. One shoulder
rose from it and caught a shadow; another shade lay lower in the
dimples of the elbow; the inside of the arm looked warm. The throat,
the round soft throat, seemed glowing; the fallen head, the passive
arms, the whole outstretched form seemed relaxed in the abandonment of
sleep. Had I often seen her in my dreams like this? This was but the
realisation of my dreams. I bent over her, then threw myself wildly
upon the bed beside her, and drew her into my arms.
"Lucia! my Lucia!" The sweet face almost seemed to smile as I drew the
head to me, and a soft curl of hair fell upon my arm as I pushed it
round her neck and pressed her breast to mine. It came softly and
unresistingly, just so much as my arm pressed it, with terrible
compliance. The throat chilled through my arm to the bone, numbed it.
I laid my other hand upon her neck, pushed it lower till it rested
above her heart, and enclosed one breast, nerveless, pulseless, and
cold, colder than any snow. Slowly it chilled through my fingers. I
smoothed one passive arm--how cold. Then my hand sought her waist, and
my arm leant upon her hip--as once in Paris--and here the coldness held
and froze me.
Through her silk skirt it penetrated; the damp, eternal coldness
pierced through my quivering, living arm; it seemed dividing my veins
like steel.
It was a dead woman that I clasped: a corpse. I strained my eyes down
upon her face, that seemed but asleep.
"Lucia?"
And the word was one frenzied, senseless question; and the sweet mouth
seemed to smile back, in its last eternal smile, my answer,--
"Yes, I am Lucia, and you possess me now."
Like a torrent dammed up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent
desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my
burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling
lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a
frenzy of vain, fruitless longing and stayed--frozen there.
When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed, but
yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I went to
the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my own fearful
memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming with me, and,
when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its edge, as he had
stood beside me at the altar.
A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single
grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron
chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from post
to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its arms
against a background of cypresses.
I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret,
the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been
shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that,
once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose like
a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering,
deadening waves standing at her grave. I stared half blindly at the
words on the stone--"Wife of V. Hilton." Wife! What a mockery!
I looked, and that slab of white marble--spotless and relentless--that
barred her into the grave, seemed to my still half-unstable brain
symbolical of that last year of virgin purity of life that had broken
her strength to bear. That spiked iron linked round the helpless dust
seemed like the chains of repression that had tortured and crushed the
soft ardent nature. That arrogant cross, stretching its arms
threateningly above the lonely tomb, seemed the cross upon which we had
crucified--she and I--the desires of the flesh. And at its foot, I
read,--"She sleeps to waken to a glad to-morrow." And then a bitter
laugh burst from my lips.
"Who put that?" I asked. "Great God! that that word should follow me
even here!"
Dick took my arm.
"We know nothing. There may be a to-morrow;" at which I merely laughed
again.
"Wife of V. Hilton!" I repeated, reading from the stone. "If she had
been, Dick, it would not have been so hard."
Dick said nothing. After a time he urged me to come away from the grave.
"Where? To what?" I asked him; and we both stood silent, gazing upon
her cross.
* * * * *
Months have passed by, and Dick consoles me still, and tells me I shall
refind the zest of life by and by, later on, in the future, to-morrow.