The lamps burned in a subdued way under their dark, rose-coloured shades, the trail of the women's skirts hardly made any sound on the thick carpet, the room was large, and the piano that was being played mildly at the other end of it failed to disturb our conversation.
"Well, now, then?"
I leant over the back of Lucia's low easy-chair and waited eagerly for her answer. It was the second night after my return to England. I had dined with the Grants, and now in this dim, secluded corner of the drawing-room I had the first opportunity of serious conversation with her.
"I don't know, Victor; not at present."
"Lucia! what do you mean!"
"What I say, dearest," she answered quietly.
Looking down on her I could see, beneath a confusion of black eyelashes and dark eyebrow, that the blue eyes looked straight out in front of her, her arm lay along the wicker side-rest of the chair, languid, indolent, relaxed.
"But why?" I said. "Why not at once? Tell me."
She was silent for some time, then she said,—
"When I came to you last year I urged our marriage, and you said it could not be; now you urge it, and I say it cannot be. That's all."
I bit my lips suddenly, and I was glad she was not looking at me. I was silent, too, for a minute; then I said,—
"But surely you are not thinking of punishing me for that; of avenging yourself? You knew all the circumstances, and you acquiesced in my decision. You would not now think of revenge—it is so unlike you!"
"Oh no, no! You misunderstood me. How can you think I should occupy myself with a ridiculous, petty idea of revenge?" and she laughed a slight, fatigued laugh. "No, I merely meant that Chance had so arranged it."
"But how, then? There is no obstacle now."
"Not on your side; no."
"Then what is it, dearest, on yours?"
She did not answer me for a long time, and then it was seemingly with reluctance, and a slight flush crept into her pale face as she said merely the two words,—
"My health."
I hardly know exactly what sensation her answer roused in me, but I think it was nearer relief than any other. In those few seconds of silence all sorts of apprehensions and fears had crowded in upon me. Her health! What barrier need that make between us? And in that moment of selfish passion that was all I heeded.
"What has that to do with our marriage?" I asked, laughing, and bending down farther over her. "You don't mean that you are too ill to go through the ceremony. Come!"
She met my gaze fully, and then laughed too. After a second she said,—
"If you disbelieve me and think I am making up, you can at any rate tell from my looks that I am ill—any man can see that."
I looked at her critically now, remembering my feeling of shock when I had first seen her on my return. Yes; I remembered I had thought her looking fearfully overworked and exhausted, and now I looked at her again with redoubled anxiety.
From the black lace of her dinner dress, cut as low as vanity dared to dictate, and with but one narrow black strip supporting it on her shoulders, her white throat and breast and light head rose like dawn out of the night ocean. The milky arms that lay idly along the chair were as smooth, as downy, but far less dimpled than when I had seen them in Paris. Round the throat I could trace now the clavicles, formerly invisible, and lower, at the edge of her bodice, the depression in the centre of the soft breast was wider. Yes; she was very much thinner, and the face above only confirmed the impression of illness. It was pale, and looked slightly swollen; the eyes were dilated and surrounded with blue shades; the lips were red, almost unnaturally so, to the point of soreness, as they get to look in fever.
"Well, have you come to your conclusion?" she said, as she raised her eyes suddenly and intercepted mine surveying her.
I coloured slightly, looked away, and then said merely, "Yes, you don't look well."
She gave a little slighting laugh, as much as to say, "You might have arrived at that before, one would think!"
"But Lucia," I said, entreatingly, "this is all very serious; do tell me what is wrong."
"Ah, my health becomes a serious matter," she answered, leaning her soft head back on my arm that was resting on the top of her chair, and looking up at me with her brilliant, clever eyes ablaze with indulgent derision, "if it is likely to stop our marriage when YOU desire it!"
I winced before the delicate thrust in her words, and hardly knew whether the pain of them was drowned in the pleasure the confident touch of her head transfused through my arm.
"That is unnecessarily unkind," I answered, quietly. "Your health or ill-health would always be a serious matter, but since you hint it—yes, I admit—if it prevented our marriage, if it came between us now, Lucia, it would surpass even the importance it has at all other times. Tell me what is the matter," I persisted.
The little head turned restlessly on my coat sleeve, and the warmth from the cheeks and lips came into my wrist. She seemed half inclined to yawn, and the delicate left hand, with my ring flashing on it, came to her lips and closed them when they had barely parted.
"People call it hysteria," she said at last. "It is a form of hysteria now, but it did not begin with that. It was overstrain, nervous breakdown, a collapse of the system. See my hand when I hold it up, how it shakes? I can't control that, and my heart beats wildly at the slightest exertion. I am exhausted, limp, Victor, ironed out by the events of last year, very much like what your collar would be without its starch!"
She was looking up at me now and half laughing. She had raised her hand between me and the nearest lamp; it quivered violently, as she said, and looked transparent and scarlet close against the light. I caught it in mine and drew it up to my lips.
"Victor!" she said, indignantly, "release it! remember where we are!"
"I don't care where we are!" I muttered, letting go her hand, but not before I had kissed it passionately across the tiny knuckles and in the palm. It fell nerveless into her lap; her face grew so desperately pallid, even her lips, that I was startled.
"Lucia! What is the matter?"
The lids that seemed ready to sink over her eyes lifted again.
"Nothing; but—I was telling you, just this minute, I am exhausted—done for."
I looked at her in dismay, and I saw her heart must be beating violently; the red geraniums against her breast rose and sank in a series of rapid, irregular jerks.
"I am sorry," I murmured. "Forgive me;" and my heart sank suddenly with a vague, in definable sense of apprehension as I looked at her.
Where was the girl who had come to me a year ago, full of overflowing, eager, exuberant health and life, hungry for love, longing and ardent for a kiss? Not here; somewhere in the past that I had neglected and refused. And the contrast between the two images struck me like a lash across the brain. The next minute I had recovered myself. This was only a passing in disposition of Lucia's, the sooner we were married now the better.
"Well, dearest, if it is only hysteria and nervous strain, and so on," I said, taking up the main thread of our conversation, "then, for that, our marriage and a long rest, in which you would do nothing but amuse yourself, would be the best thing. Make up your mind, Lucia, to give yourself, trust yourself, to me, and I will promise to get you quite well, sooner than any doctor can. I suppose you have seen one?"
"Yes."
"Well, what does he do for you?"
"Oh, I take hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, and strychnine through the day, and digitalis and potassium bromide at night."
"Good heavens! Lucia! how can you be so foolish?" I exclaimed. "It's most unwise to take all these things."
"You are not a doctor," she answered languidly.
"No; and therefore I can talk common sense," I said, flushing. "Come, dearest, let us settle which is to be the happiest day in my life."
"Don't fuss, Victor. I can't settle any time just now."
"But at least give me an idea!"
"I can't give you what I have not got myself."
"Do you mean you have no idea when we shall be married?"
"Yes. I have just said so."
My hand closed involuntarily on the back of the chair till the basket-work creaked. She heard it, and felt perhaps, also, the sudden tension in the arm beneath her head. She raised her eyes with a gleam of the old desire in them: they were soft, and her voice was gentle, with out any mockery in it now, as she said,—
"I am excessively sorry about it, Victor, but you may trust me. I will give you some certain date the moment I can, when I am better. You can't think I would voluntarily defer it, do you?"
The whole lovely, inert form heaved a little as she spoke; the eyelids and nostrils in the up-turned face quivered, the lips parted, and, convinced, I bent over her with a hurried, desperate murmur.
"No! no! But, then, when? How long? Is it days, weeks, or the end of the season?"
"Yes; I should think about the end. I can not fix it nearer. It is bad taste to press me any farther."
She lifted her head from my arm and sat up right, though even then, after a minute, her figure drooped languidly towards the side of the chair, and she doubled one of her white, round arms on the wicker-work to form a support. I stood silent, irritated, disappointed, perplexed, biting my lips in nervous, absent-mindedness. She spoke twice to me without my hearing what her words were, and I had to apologise.
"I was only saying I should like you to see the "Death of Hyacinthus" now it is finished: see the result of last year's efforts and the cause of this year's ill-health!"
"Certainly; I want to see it very much. When may I?"
"To-morrow, if you like, but I want you to see the Academy first. I should like you to come to it prejudiced, with your eyes full of all the successful pictures of the year."
"Is it not at the Academy, Lucia?"
"Don't look so apprehensive!" she said, with a slight laugh. "It has not been rejected—simply, I could not get it finished in time for presentation. I was ill, and it just missed this season by a very little."
"And now, what are you going to do with it?"
"I must offer it next year, that's all."
"What a disappointment for you!"
"Yes, I should have thought so some time ago; but I seem to be much more apathetic now to everything. Each year that one lives one gets to expect less and less from life, and one grows more philosophic, more contented with what is thrown in one's way, and less disappointed when one's hopes and expectations are not realised. Judging by those things which we do gain and enjoy and experience the worth lessness of, I suppose we learn by degrees to infer that others so longed-for and coveted would prove as valueless if possessed."
Her voice was low and tired, and had the sound of suppressed tears in it.
"You are in a depressed frame of mind," I said.
"Yes;" then, with a cynical smile, "hysteric, as I told you. Well, will you come to-morrow about eleven, and then afterwards we can come back here to criticise 'Hyacinthus'?"
"Yes; I shall be delighted."
"I think mama is going to take our carriage, so come in yours, will you?"
"Very good," I answered, and there was a long silence. Not broken, in fact, until there was the stir of some of the guests leaving.
As the third or fourth left the room, I came round and took her hand as I stood in front of her.
"Good-night, Lucia, I hope you may be granted all the sleep you have stolen from me," I said gently; then, partly influenced by the contact of that delicious hand, and prompted by my own impulse, and partly deliberately to excite, if possible, her own instincts as allies to fight for me, I pressed it hard as I added,—
"On how many more nights is this hated formula, 'Good-night,' to be said between us? Minimise them, my darling, for my sake!"
Into the tone I allowed to enter all the strength of my feelings at the moment. She only coloured painfully up to the heavy eyes, whether from confusion or pleasure or passion I could not tell. She made no answer, and the soft, captive hand struggled faintly to be free.
We were surrounded the next instant by the press of talking, laughing guests passing down to the door, and I could do nothing but drop her hand and leave her with a composed face, and my brain feeling literally on fire. The perplexity, mystery, uncertainty, and irritation which Lucia's illness and manner had poured suddenly in upon the elation, the assured triumph, the excited expectations and eager desire with which I had come, produced a state of thought in which I hardly recognised my reasoning being.
I made my way over to Mrs. Grant with the conventional smile, and then, once without the drawing-room, hurried down to the door and the night air. In the hall I recognised, standing waiting for his carriage, a familiar figure. It was a man I had known intimately in India: he was home now on furlough, and as friends we were often invited to the same houses.
"I say, Dick," I said, as I came up to him, "it's a lovely night. Are you game for a walk? If so, send the carriage home and come with me round to my place. I want your advice and condolences."
We were at the foot of the stairs. The other men and women had collected nearer the door.
"Condolences! Why, yesterday you told me congratulations were the order of the day!" he answered in a tone of good-natured raillery.
"They are so no longer," I answered, gloomily. "My head is simply splitting too. I can't think where I get these confounded headaches," I muttered, pushing the hair up off my forehead, and wishing I could push off some of the oppressing ideas. "Are you coming with me, Dick?"
He looked at me attentively, and possibly seeing the excitement I tried to suppress, and the flush it drove to my face, he debated my sobriety. I think he came to the right conclusion, for the next moment he said,—
"Yes; I'll come. Just let me get my over coat and tell the coachman."
I had the same thing to do, and we met a second or two later at the bottom of the steps, and turned to walk towards my place. As we walked down the street he slipped his arm in mine and said,—
"You seem frightfully upset. What has happened?"
"That's just what I want to know!" I answered. "If I knew I should not so much mind, but this is what I hate about women, they never will speak out nor come to the point. It is the one great fault of the sex. I despise it utterly. It can do no good, and it is most annoying and irritating to a person who has a right to confidence."
"My dear fellow," he said, soothingly, "you can't expect your fiancee, if that's what you mean, to be so uncommonly direct in speech as you are! You have a way of very much going to the point in everything, but you won't find it in other people, even throwing women out of the question."
"What is the use of wrapping things up in mystery? But women delight in it! The more they can mystify and mislead and perplex you, and leave their real or their possible meaning doubtful and involved, the greater the pleasure they have. They will carry on a conversation for hours by hints, suggestions, ambiguous terms, allusions, phrases that may mean anything or nothing, and then leave at the end, in obscurity, the whole matter, which could have been explained and made perfectly clear and settled on a satisfactory basis in a few short sentences. It's a petty, abominable trait in their character."
Dick raised his eyebrows considerably.
"She has offended, evidently," he said.
"Offended? She simply tortured me all this evening, either intentionally or involuntarily. She said too little and too much. And her manner was worse than her words. I could not make out whether she was telling me the truth or a series of delicate excuses; she herself did not calculate on my believing. Everything she said to-night, if proved false, she might justify to-morrow by saying, 'Oh, well, of course, I never thought you would take that seriously; I thought you would understand that was a euphemism to save your feelings, and so on; you know one does not say to a person's face one is tired of him and wishes the thing off.' That is what she may say afterwards, or, of course, what she told me may be the truth. It may be an excuse that sounds like the truth, or the truth that sounds like an excuse. She contrived to leave it confoundedly indistinct, and that is what I complain of."
"You haven't given me any clue yet as to what the conversation was," Dick said quietly as we paced down the silent street.
My head seemed reeling with pain and the blood that flowed to it. The moonlight, and the black shadows it deepened, jumped together before my eyes.
"The accursed upshot of it was that she won't have anything to do with our marriage at present," I returned.
"Oh! And what reason did she assign?"
"After considerable hesitation she said her health; but, as I say, she would not speak out, and such an excuse between us is monstrous!"
"After considerable hesitation she said her health; but, as I say, she would not speak out, and such an excuse between us is monstrous! Ours is not a formal 'mariage de convenance;' it lies with ourselves. She is obviously not seriously ill; if she hesitates on her own account she must know she has nothing to fear from me; if she hesitates on mine, then it is folly and nonsense. I don't care about anything! I don't care what is the matter with her, I would marry her if she were dying, rotting of leprosy to-morrow!"
"I say, old fellow, you must not excite yourself like this! You will be seriously ill if you don't look out," Dick answered, remonstratingly. "It's no use working yourself up into a fever."
"I am not working myself up; unfortunately that has been done for me," I answered, with a short laugh. "Well, Dick, I am sick of everything, disgusted with everything! It's the same old story perpetually repeated. All that one fixes one's eyes on in the distance turns into dust as one approaches it. For the last year I have thought of this meeting this evening, and now it has come, what is it?"
"You are taking me by surprise to-night, Victor! I remember you in the regiment as so deuced calm."
"I'm never calm!" I returned. "Exteriorly, yes, of course, for one's own convenience and self-respect, to outsiders, one is always calm; but the exterior is not the reality. I am not one of those things naturally which I command myself into being: existence to me is nothing but a close-fitting, strangling, self-restraint. It drags upon me like a prisoner's gangrening fetter, and I'm getting tired of it. I think I'll slip it off altogether!"
I talked straight out of the distraction of my own thoughts, the pain in my head was acute, stunning my brain, and my vision seemed all wrong, as when one has been drinking. I was conscious of Dick looking at me anxiously, as he said—
"That's all nonsense! You are quite out of your senses this evening! You wouldn't throw up your life now, when you are just on the point of success, surely?"
"If I can't force our marriage, it's likely to come to that, I think," I muttered. "I am totally at a loss. I know nothing. I can conjecture nothing. I have not seen her nor heard from her this past year; and now she will say nothing. I pressed her as much, I think, as a fellow decently could. If she had spoken clearly and definitely it would have been different. Whatever statement a woman made to me of any painful facts; or if she came to me with any confession of folly, or change of feeling, or misfortune, or whatever it was, no matter what, I should enter into it and understand her. But Lucia to-night treated me like a stranger, fenced with me like an enemy. I have no clue as to what to think and what to believe. Simply, I see that she is no longer keen on the matter, and there is a large possibility of my not having her at all. By God! if it is so"—
I broke off into silence. After all, there is no use in talk; and the knives twisted backwards and forwards in my head helped to stop speech.
We walked on in silence. The streets were very quiet here; we had left the Grants' late, and now it was getting towards morning. We verged directly towards Knightsbridge; for some time our steps were the only sound. Then, after a pause, Dick said quietly—
"I think, Victor, you are going on a wrong tack altogether. You don't make enough allowance for the fact that she is a girl, and has not seen you for a year, remember. It is all very well for you to talk of to-the-point confessions and plain statements, but practically, if a girl were to talk as frankly as you would like, I am afraid the idea of modesty would rather come to grief."
"Oh! modesty," I said impatiently, "be—Modesty! It's all very well as a pretty, becoming, every-day fashion, but it should be laid aside in the serious matters of life. It is an artificiality; admirable, useful, excellent as a daily conventional rule, but it should yield when there is a great natural question at issue. Modesty! a fictitious, artificial, inculcated shame to intrude itself between two people considering gravely the vital matter of their love, their union, their future life! It's preposterous!"
"It very often does so," remarked Dick. "I am not saying whether it should or it shouldn't."
"No," I answered more calmly; "and I entirely see what you mean, and I think you are perfectly right there. Lucia is steeped in fashion, soaked through with the prejudice and bringing up of her own rank. And I suppose I do like it and expect it, certainly, as a general rule; only, when the thing on hand is very important, and a society woman fences with you behind a screen of elegant, delicate language, you feel sometimes you would prefer the intelligible candour of a kitchen maid."
Dick laughed.
"I doubt the charm of the latter individual, Vic! You must have a little more patience with this girl, and the confidence will come by degrees, if you don't lose your self-command with her; but I'd advise you to be careful. The way in which you have been talking to me now gives an impression of—well, almost brutality, that I didn't think was in you."
I laughed contemptuously.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid of the word; I know there is a lot of it in me. It's just that knowledge that enables me to keep it under. I know if I had not kept myself, for the sake of the work, out of it, that I should have led a brutish existence. However, you needn't think that I am going to frighten Lucia. I have had such a deuce of a lot of practice in patience and restraint, and all those fine things, that I am quite sure of myself when I am with her. But as to gaining her confidence, that is impossible before the ceremony, I believe. She has been brought up in that monstrous idea, like the rest of our fashionable girls, that the man into whose possession she is to give herself utterly with the ceremony, up to the last moment before it, is to be treated with the most absolute reserve. The contrast is too ludicrous—driven to the point of exaggeration to which they drive it. In Lucia's eyes an unusual, an unfashionable word, no matter how great the necessity for it, is a crime. I believe she would walk to the block rather than let a word pass her lips in my hearing an hour before our marriage that in twenty-four hours afterwards might be a common phrase between us. You may call it modesty and charming, if you like. All I can say is, there are limits to its charm."
The approach of morning was distinct now. A grey light hung in a faint misty veil over the Green Park and top of Piccadilly. As it fell from the cloudy, neutral-tinted sky, it showed one solitary figure, a woman with a trailing skirt and battered hat, passing Hyde Park corner.
In the waste of deserted street and roadway, glimmering in the dull, grey light, that one dishevelled black figure reminded one of the remnant of some wrecked vessel, drifting at dawn along a sullen coast. She drifted somewhat faster up to us as we came to the corner and touched Dick, who was next to the road, on the arm. He shook her hand off without speaking.
"Have you any money with you, Dick?" I asked.
"Yes; but I am not going to give any to her," he answered.
I would have given the woman some, but I had none. I had left it behind when I changed my clothes for dinner. She heard Dick's answer to me plainly, and it exasperated her. All the natural, florid, unstudied eloquence of the lower orders was at her command, and well-turned periods of perfect abuse and neat incisive remarks upon our characters, our persons and attributes generally, rippled in a smooth, unbroken stream from her lips as she followed us. Just at that moment there was not a policeman nor any other being within sight.
We walked on, and the woman's curses and imprecations upon us filled the grey silence of the street. At last a porter on his way to work passed us, and she transferred her attentions and oratory to him. Dick glanced at me and laughed.
"Well, there was an extensive vocabulary, Victor! How would some of those words sound in your fiancee's mouth?"
I laughed too.
"You always were good at a sophistical sneer, but vile language has nothing to do with what I was talking about."
"No; of course not. It does strike one as curious, doesn't it," he added after a minute, "that a creature like that and the girl we have been with this evening can belong to the same sex."
"Well, I don't know," I answered; "I know there is the sort of idea that it is funny, but somehow it does not strike me more with reference to woman than to ourselves. I mean it does not seem more incongruous than that a man like yourself and an offal sweeper belong to the same sex."
"No; perhaps not. One of those houses is yours, isn't it?" Dick said.
"Yes; number 2," I answered, as we went up to the door.
"They seem to have turned the light out."
I opened the door and Dick went in. I followed, and when the door was shut behind us the hall was in nether darkness. We found our way to the foot of the stairs, where an undefined heap barred our way. Not knowing what it was I kicked it, and Dick exclaimed,—
"Take care! I think that's your man," and a groan confirmed the statement.
"Hullo, Walters! I am very sorry. I had no idea it was you. I hope I haven't hurt you!" I said as the servant got on his feet. "Why do you turn the lights out? However, it's just as well you are here. Bring me upstairs the soda, champagne, and the new lot of cigars. I suppose there is the lamp in my room?"
"Yes, sir."
"You won't care to turn out again, Dick, to-night, will you?" I said as we went upstairs. "There's an awfully comfortable sofa in my room, quite as good as a bed. Will you accept that?"
"Oh yes; I always find I can go to sleep anywhere. Do you remember, when we were camping out at Shikarpur, those nights on the shaky-legged native benches?"
"Rather! That was when I never bothered about anything. I have never slept so well since."
We went into my room. Two lamps were burning here, and the thick blinds shut out all signs of the dreary dawning light. Walters followed us in a few seconds and set a tray of glasses and bottles on the table. I flung off my overcoat and sat down in an arm-chair, pressing the palms of my hands hard on my forehead in the vain effort to deaden the tearing pain.
"Try some of those cigars," I said, after a minute, "they are not bad, and take whatever you like to drink," and I got up and filled my glass at the same time.
"I think that brandy is the worst thing for your head," remarked Dick, looking dubiously at the glass.
"But I am so confoundedly thirsty!"
"Take the soda without the brandy, then. Really, I would advise you not to touch that spirit to-night."
"Oh, I don't much care! let it be the soda;" and I filled another tumbler with the latter and drank it. "But what is your own opinion about this business with Lucia," I asked, when Dick had stretched himself on the sofa and started his cigar. "What puzzles me so is the great change in her—a change apparently in the whole tenour of her feelings. You can't think how wide the difference is between her now and a year ago. I told you that she came over to Paris to see me, didn't I?"
Dick nodded.
"That was only twelve months back, and she was simply—well, she was evidently very much in love then. You know what I mean, and she made no effort to conceal it. She urged our marriage; and then, when we decided it was impossible, she would have liked me to go any reasonable lengths in demonstration of my love for her, and so on. I made a mistake there, perhaps, but I thought it unwise. We hardly knew where we were as it was. She seemed utterly weak, and I felt she might say things in those moments she would be fearfully cut up to remember afterwards. It seemed dishonourable in my shackled, circumscribed position to lead her any farther on. That was my idea—perhaps it was mistaken—I don't know. Anyway we shook hands merely. Then, at that time, she invited a kiss in every way short of demanding it. Now, to-night I kissed her hand, not a very extraordinary nor embarrassing action, and yet I thought she was going to faint as a result. It moved some very strong sensation, repulsion or disgust, or something, and I want to know what."
"You see, Vic," Dick said, after a minute or two of silence, laying down the cigar and driving his elbow into the sofa cushion, and leaning his head on his hand. He looked past me absently towards the fender, and spoke as a person does whose opinion has long since been formed. "We can't hold over anything in this life, opportunities, our own powers, health, youth, they are all things you can't store for the future. All we can do is to use them when they are put into our hands. Still less can we reserve and warehouse our own feelings and emotions, and least of all, those of others. You might compare passion to a gas. If you allow gas its expansion it diffuses itself and is lost. If you subject it to confinement with close pressure, it becomes a liquid and loses its original form. It is the same with passion. It is impossible to maintain it as such. Either it evaporates in gratification or it undergoes some metamorphosis in suppression."
I said nothing. There was a sort of coldness and weight in his words and tone that increased my own apprehensions.
"You can keep nothing up to the pitch of a crisis. We all know that. Even a kettle of water, when it is once boiling, you cannot keep it so. It must boil over into the flames or simmer down or dry up. And if you reject a woman at the crisis of her passion, there is an enormous probability that, in waiting, her virtue or her inclination or her health will break down. Either her feelings may transport her into some folly or they may cool. If her will is too strong to allow the folly, and her nature too ardent to permit the cooling, then her constitution must give way. This last is what, judging from all I see, I should think—since you ask my opinion, old fellow, you know—has happened in Lucia's case."
I looked at him with a faint feeling of surprise. His manner, voice, and words conveyed such an idea of certainty and perfect decision in his own mind.
"Yes," I answered; "I suppose that is it. Well, that is what she told me, virtually, herself."
"You cannot wonder at it!"
I coloured hotly as I answered,—
"I know it seems as if I had been a confounded prig in refusing her last year—people may say so; but if I had given in and kept her with me in Paris, then everybody would have been slanging me for that!"
Dick laughed.
"No, Victor; I am not slanging you for one or the other course. You acted up to your own principle—every fellow must do that; but I am not sure your principle is the best—that perpetual denial to impulse, that refusal to take what you can get in the moment, because of what you may be called upon to pay hereafter. At any rate, it may not be the luckiest nor the happiest. But still, in the case of a man who has many equally strong wishes, it is difficult to say what he should do. In your case the upshot of either resolution would have been the same—as things are, you will get your book out and be discontented; in the other case, you would have married Lucia and been discontented!"
"You may be as cynical as you please," I muttered, with my hands pressed over my eyes. "I am not responsible for the complex nature of the human brain, nor can I simplify it. I know what I am going to do now. Having secured the work, I am going to gain Lucia too, if it is in the power of any man—whether, as you put it, her virtue, or her health, or her inclination, or the whole lot together, have broken down!"
"And if you don't get her, you will get over it: we all do, Vic," he said, with a smile.
"Very possibly," I assented.
It was not worth while to discuss a contingency I had determined to prevent.
"A man's profession is his best friend," Dick went on, stretching himself out on the couch. "That he can command; and for the rest—purchasable pleasures—those he can command. These affaires-de-coeur, which you can't command, are always more bother than they are worth."
There was silence, then he added,—
"One good one, though, fairly early in life, is useful, like vaccination. You are not so likely to fall in love again after it; just as, after vaccination, you are not so likely to have smallpox. For myself, I should prefer smallpox to being in love."
I merely laughed, without replying. In my present state I was not sure that he was far wrong.
"I say," Dick remarked, after a pause; "you are looking most awfully seedy. Hadn't you better turn in and try and get some sleep? One always thinks one can't, but one generally does."
"Yes; I think I had better," I said, getting up. I turned one lamp out and the other down.
"It's odd—I wonder what the ultimate, future event will be"—
"'Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quaerere,'" answered Dick, with a laugh, as he turned and settled himself on the couch.
"There are a couple of rugs," I said, depositing them on his feet. "Draw them up if you're cold."
"All right. Thanks! Good-night!"
"Good night!"
I slipped off my clothes and got into bed, feeling almost uncertain on my feet. My head seemed literally whirling and swimming in pain. When I awoke the following morning and looked round it was past ten. Dick had gone. I looked at the couch, it was empty, and a note was stuck by his pin into the sofa pillow. I sat up in bed, and by leaning forward and extending my arm I got hold of the pillow, and thence the paper and read it.
"8 A.M.—You are still asleep and I don't like to wake you, but I want to be back at my place by nine, so I am departing like the guest of an Arab. If you have nothing better to do this evening, come and dine with me. Army and Navy. Seven."
"Very good," I thought; I put the note and the pin on the table beside me, and got up. The headache was gone, and the head felt none the worse for it. The sun was streaming in through the blinds now. The gloom, the apprehensions, the pain of the previous night, had all cleared from the field together. I dressed and shaved with a steady hand, thinking, in a sane, easy way, very different from the inflamed, convulsive working of the brain last night. The work was set afloat in Paris—I should soon find readers on the asphalt—that quarter of my sky was clear. As for the sudden darkening squall that had sprung up in the other quarter, formerly so serene, the quarter over which reigned Lucia's star—it was only a squall, it would pass. She must be capable of being roused again to those feelings she had once known. And if I had nothing else, I had, at least, in my favour the sheer force and intensity of my own passion—which is, after all, the weapon under which a woman quickest sinks. I felt that I cared more keenly for Lucia than most men of eight-and-twenty in the nineteenth century care for the women they marry. I was conscious of it instinctively; even if the memory of these last ten barren, empty years that I had lived did not convince me that a passion for any one object would be greater in myself than in men whose multiplicity of previous loves must lessen the value of each succeeding one. My work, which had been Lucia's successful rival, had protected her from lesser ones.
Nothing, except the possession of this woman, had ever been a synonym of pleasure with me, and therefore its expectation had a stronger hold over me than it could have had over a man who was accustomed to acknowledge and recognise pleasure under a hundred names. I felt the impetus of this undiffused, undissipated passion, in its undivided strength, stir and vitalise all my energies, and its power over my own frame made me involuntarily, instinctively confident of the power it would have over hers.
"We will see how long it is before you capitulate, oh my fortified and arrogant city!" I thought, as I finished dressing and went downstairs. My father was reading the paper, apparently waiting breakfast for me. We were on the very best of terms now.
He felt convinced of my capability to work, and assured of my success. With that surprising tendency of the human mind to delegate its own powers to another, he accepted completely the verdict of the Parisian publisher upon qualities he had had under his own observation for an odd twenty years. Now, forsooth, because another man had told him so, he took it for granted that I had some talent. And all the time we had lived together he had hesitated to form that opinion from first-hand knowledge. Extraordinary trait in human nature, this liking to be thought for, instead of thinking for yourself! This waiting to take up, second-hand, ready-made, the views of another man, even when the fresh materials are at your hand, and you may examine them and form your own. It is a universal tendency, of course, and displays itself everywhere; in religion, in morality, in fashions, in vices, in simple conversation—everywhere.
The glorious and free gift of Nature to every man, the capacity for perception and judgment, he shamefacedly, as if it were a disgrace, tries to shift off upon another. It always amuses me immensely when brought before me, and it did now in my father's case. He assumed, as innumerable people do, that success or failure proves or disproves merit, which is such a curious opinion, as remarkable as if a person believed the absence or presence of the hall-mark proved or disproved the identity of gold. On no point did he and I differ more widely than on this.
It has always seemed to me that the formation of a judgment and opinion is an involuntary function of the mind, not a matter of effort, as others seem to regard it. Your judgment may be wrong, so may your opinion; your perception may be misled. I understand that. But can you exist without judgment, without opinion, without perception, till another man hand you his? This is hard to realise.
My father in all these years had not said my son is a fool and will not succeed, nor had he said my son is clever and will succeed, but what he had said was this, he may be a fool or he may be clever, we will see what the publishers say. And this attitude of mind, which repeated itself in different forms in half the men one meets, is fascinatingly incomprehensible to me. If I have the opportunity of seeing a man or testing a ring, what do I care, what does it matter to me, whether he is successful or unsuccessful, whether the ring is hall-marked or not! I have my own eyes, ears, and intelligence at command. What more do I want? Give me the man or the metal: in a very short time I have decided their worth to my own satisfaction. I may be wrong in my estimate, of course, but that is another matter.
If my brain is in a healthy state, I can do more avoid its forming an exact, personal opinion of the man, and a computation of his powers, than I can avoid my eye spontaneously taking his shape and muscles into its vision. In their natural, unimpaired state, neither organ should need artificial aid. But my father was looking at me now through the mental spectacles of my success, which made to him hugely big that merit which, before, he could not see at all. Thanks to those spectacles, an easy indulgence was granted me. Little that I could do now was wrong. Another man had thought fit to pay me for my powers. That elevated me in his estimation as the powers themselves never had done. He had no longer any wish apparently to oppose me. Since my brains were now authenticated by the seal of a publisher, he was sufficiently satisfied that they might be trusted to decide my own life and conduct. However, besides all this, he was strictly a man of his word, and having promised that, with my success, all opposition to my marriage would cease, he kept his conditions, as I had kept mine.
"I am very sorry to be so late," I said, as we drew our chairs to the table. "I am afraid you have waited for me."
"My dear boy, a few minutes are of no consequence!"
"I had rather a stiff headache last night, and only got to sleep when it was nearly time to get up. I hope I didn't wake you coming home last night? That idiot Walters must needs turn out the gas and go to sleep in the hall. Of course I kicked him over. Did it disturb you?"
"I should think it was calculated to disturb Walters more than me!" he returned. "No; I didn't hear you. Were you late? Will you have sole or bacon?"
"Sole, please," I said. "Yes; Dick and I walked back from Lucia's place."
"How did you find her?" he asked, stirring his tea I had just handed him, and looking at me. "Don't you think she has deteriorated in looks very much?"
"Enormously," I replied, without hesitation.
There is nothing like conceding at once to your opponent any point that you admit yourself. It saves discussion being wasted upon that which you are really agreed about, and gives more weight to all you refuse to relinquish to him afterwards.
My father looked a little surprised, and did not answer immediately, and I continued,—
"She was always, as far as I remember, a girl who could look exceedingly pretty and positively plain, and all the intermediate gradations, within twenty-four hours, but really," I added, meeting his eyes across the breakfast table, and the full blaze of the sunlight falling into my own, "to me, in any one of them, she is equally"—
I hesitated a second, and he put in—
"Attractive?"
It was not the word I should have used, but it served, and I let it pass.
"I suppose it's really her talent that fetches you as much as anything, eh?" he said, after a few minutes.
"And her character," I answered; "her whole personality. I suppose all those things weighed at first, but, as a matter of fact, now it is quite enough that she is the woman I have determined upon."
"An admission of your own obstinacy," he answered, tartly.
"That may be the right term for it," I returned, "but I hardly think it is. Theoretically, Lucia has belonged to me the past four years. An idea, a habit of the mind, is full grown and has some strength at four years of age."
My father said nothing, but lapsed into the silence of defeat or of contempt, and we pursued our breakfast.
"Will you let me have the victoria this morning?" I said, after a long silence. "She wants me to drive her to the Academy."
"Of course; I'm glad you can find something to do here. I'm afraid of its seeming dull to you after Paris."
I looked up with elevated eyebrows.
"And wherein do you imagine the gaiety of Paris consisted?" I asked.
"Oh, I've no doubt you found plenty of amusement there," he answered, with an indulgent smile.
"I assure you there was not one single hour of the whole time that was not spent in work or thought," I said, seriously.
He laughed.
"I am delighted to hear it, I'm sure, Victor," he said, with the air of a person who accepts the general truth of a statement with a large reservation of their own opinion on the details of it. However, I did not care. I had worked for my own sake; lived correctly for my own sake—and whether another knew it or not mattered to me not at all.
"No; on the contrary, I am very pleased to be back," I said. "I always look upon the place where you are as home."
A pleased expression came over his face as I spoke. We were sincerely attached to each other in spite of the jarring dissonance of character. Later that same morning when I was sitting beside Lucia as we drove to the Academy, I studied her closely in the sharp morning light, and I was alarmed at the pallor and exhaustion of her face. I am not an admirer of ill-health in any form. The hectic flush of phthisis, even, dear to the poets, has positively no charm for me; and Lucia's illness was not phthisis, and certainly did not enhance her looks.
"Who is your medical man, Lucia?" I asked.
"Why do you wish to know?"
"That I may be satisfied that he is a good one."
"I should prefer not to tell you his name."
"Why?"
"Because I object," she said simply, in her coldest tone.
"That is not a sufficient reason."
"I am of opinion that it is," she returned frigidly, with a supercilious accent.
I leant back in the carriage without answering, and looked away from her. How I hated her in that moment! After all, I thought, why do you trouble to get this particular woman above everything? Fifty women that you meet in the course of a week are as pretty—possibly of more worth—probably more civil. Why not select a more accessible divinity? Or else content yourself with Horace's parabilem venerem facilemque?
Then I glanced involuntarily at her, and I knew it was impossible. My eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impassive; her attitude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity at others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And now, when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to myself, it failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a savage and acrimonious determination to subdue it.
As I sat silent, with my eyes turned away from her to the blaze of glaring pavement and roadway, and noted mechanically the crush of traffic on ahead, Dick's remark on my brutality recurred to me, and I forced the most good-natured smile to my lips, and the quietest tone to my voice, as I turned to her and said,—
"Of course, dearest, I will consider it sufficient if you say so."
Perhaps she expected farther opposition, and my yielding surprised her. She looked at me full for a minute in silence, then, failing to discover a trace of the savage irritation I was feeling, she laid her hand impulsively on mine, and said with a smile,—
"You are a dear, good-tempered fellow, Victor!" at which I laughed— considerably.
The Academy is a place of all others, I should think, most calculated to fatigue and oppress a person in nervous ill-health. It was just twelve when Lucia and I arrived. The sun was at its hottest, and the crowds within the rooms at their thickest. The air seemed lifeless and laden with dust, swept up by the women's dresses, and filled with a mixture of scents from White Rose to Eau de Cologne. The daylight was harshly bright, and the unbroken lines of pictures in their glaring gilt frames, annoyed and jarred upon the eye.
We moved very slowly with the rank of people passing down our side of the gallery. Lucia never removed her eyes from the walls, except to glance at me and make me refer to a name in the catalogue, and the women who passed her were able to scrutinise her dress and face without a return glance. This they did to the utmost limits of good breeding, for both were sufficiently worthy of notice.
Whether Lucia looked pretty or plain, at her best or her worst, she always looked more or less striking. Some women are like this; they can appear everything but quiet and common-place. Lucia would be noticed everywhere, sometimes favourably, sometimes the reverse; but noticed she must infallibly be. An exceptionally beautiful figure, a certain extravagance in dress, and an unusually fair skin made her conspicuous where far more regular faces and straight profiles passed unnoticed. She herself was absolutely indifferent to everything save the paintings. Twice I called her attention to men who saluted her without being seen by her as she passed close to them.
"I am very sorry," she said in answer. "It is a stupid fashion to notice one's friends here. One should not be supposed to recognise them at the Academy any more than in church!"
We drifted on slowly with the mass, and at last came to a standstill before a wedge of figures in front of a prominent canvas. A nude female figure stood upright, facing the spectator, with both arms upraised to fasten a pomegranate blossom in the tightly twisted hair: an indefinite heap of sketchy clothing lay upon the ground.
"The title?" murmured Lucia; and I pressed my way a little forward to see the number, looked it up in the catalogue, and read to her "The Toilette." "Before the toilette! I should think," said Lucia, in a satirical whisper. I nodded and laughed.
We could not move on till the circle before us moved, and we stood silent looking at the shadowy representation of human flesh and blood smiling with fixed inanity from the canvas.
"The most successful picture of the year!" remarked one man just in front of us.
"Eminently artistic!" murmured another, stifling a yawn.
"Did you ever see such a thing?" said Lucia. "No living woman ever looked like that!"
"No," I answered, unguardedly.
Lucia threw a sudden, brilliant, mocking glance over my face.
"Come, Victor! you ought to have said you didn't know!"
I coloured, and then laughed.
"Ah, yes; so I ought. Well, really, I answered you in absence of mind."
"Oh, don't apologise! Let's sit down."
I glanced at her face. It was white to the lips which laughed so readily. I looked round desperately. The lounge behind was filled completely before the most successful picture of the year.
"Let us try another room," I said, hastily drawing her arm more through mine. It leant heavily there, and she grew more pallid.
"They are all alike—I can't stand the heat—we must go, I think," she murmured.
"It doesn't seem very easy," I said.
Lucia threw a helpless glance round on the crown pressing up eagerly to catch a glimpse of the popular painting, and some one in artistic circles recognised her.
A whisper went from one to the other of the little sets within the crowd, and they fell back from us; heads were turned from the canvas towards Lucia. There was an exit made, and I walked determinedly through the staring loungers, who yielded before us.
A voice said behind us,—
"They say she'll be the greatest artist of the times!"
"How I envy her!" came a girl's answer.
Lucia's blue-white lips smiled mockingly.
"Take me home, Victor," she said, faintly.
The hot summer days dragged slowly by.
The Grants did not leave town, and I hesitated to do as my father suggested, and go myself. I waited, and saw Lucia daily, and hoped daily to hear the words I thirsted for, but she persistently refused to say anything of herself or her health or her wishes. I might see her as often as I liked, go and come to and from her house as I pleased, but speak of our marriage or allow me any of the privileges of a fiance she would not.
As the weeks passed the life became intolerable for me. I could not expect my book to be produced till the autumn. There was no fresh impetus in my brain toward writing another. All my thoughts centred now round this woman, whom I saw apparently growing more listless, languid, and indifferent to myself every day.
The nervous strain told upon me. Night followed night in which I got no sleep, and which left me with a blinding headache to commence the day. Gradually these headaches lengthened, till they stretched throughout the tedious, desultory hours; and one stifling August afternoon, lying, dizzy with pain, on the couch, I determined to win an answer from her or cut all the ties, dear and clinging though they might be, and leave her finally.
To-morrow! What was to-morrow? My brain went round when I tried to think of the simplest thing. We had some men coming in to luncheon, I remembered, but I would go and see her early in the morning. We were generally alone with each other in the morning. This evening I should have no chance of speaking as I meant to speak. When the evening came, I felt unfit even to go and see her, and it was later than I intended the next morning when I reached the house. I had made myself later, too, by stopping on the way to get her some flowers. There was little in the shop worth having but some lilies, all price, scent, and brilliance. I took these and hurried on. They were very fine specimens, certainly, I thought, as I glanced over them. I care very little for flowers; they are useful, of course, sometimes, as a present for women, and a button-hole; but there, for me, their merits cease. Howard would have sentimentalised into two or three verses over these.
I found her in the drawing-room, as usual now, for the studio was rarely ever visited, except when she went to gaze in an abstracted way on the finished work. She was doing nothing—as usual now—she who formerly worked without ceasing every hour of daylight. Nor was there anything near her that suggested or made possible the supposition of work or even occupation. Every book was ranged in different cases in remote corners of the room. Not a newspaper, nor blotting-book, nor pen, lay on the table. She was sitting in an armchair facing the window, her knees crossed idly, her elbow leaning on a table beside her, her head resting on her hand; idle, listless. Perhaps her toilette alone, as an elaborate work, might excuse her from any other for several hours. She looked round with a smile, and even that was tired, as I entered and crossed to her.
"How are you, dearest, to-day?" I said, as I took her hand. "No, pray, don't get up," I added, as she made a movement to rise, and to obviate her doing so, I dropped into a low wicker chair, which I drew up close to hers, and laid the lilies on her lap.
"I am as well as usual, thanks, Victor. These are lovely! Where did you get them?"
"At a shop in Regent Street. I wanted something extraordinary, but they had nothing."
"What could you have more beautiful than these?"
"Beautiful? Yes; but there is no worth in beauty unless there is some peculiarity about it to attract one. May I do that for you?"
She had lifted the flowers and begun to fasten them into the front of her bodice, a difficult work, covered, as it was, with an intricate maze of lace.
"Thank you! I am perfectly capable of achieving it myself."
The familiar, cold pride in the tone brought an ironical smile to my lips—suppressed, however, before she saw it.
"You are afraid of the risk of my hand touching your breast accidentally in fastening a flower!" I thought, satirically, as I watched her in silence, and remembered the mission with which I had come. I glanced at the clock and saw it was later than I thought.
"Do you know what I have come for this morning, Lucia?" I asked, leaning my elbow on the arm of her chair, and looking into the soft blue eyes that seemed to have a sort of timidity in them of me now.
"To torment me as usual, I suppose," she answered.
"That depends upon how you take it," I said, with a slight laugh.
"I have come to say Good-bye."
I watched her keenly as I spoke, and I saw she was perceptibly startled. She fixed her eyes upon me, and the colour began to recede visibly from her face. However, she only said calmly after a moment,—
"Well, if you are going away, I shall have peace at any rate."
"Yes, dear," I answered gently, "you will have peace certainly as far as I am concerned, for if I go now I shall consider our engagement terminated."
Lucia started into an upright position in her chair.
"Victor!" she exclaimed, fixing two widely-dilated eyes upon me, "what are you talking about? What have I done? What do you mean? You must not go!"
And her hand sought mine and closed over it with an appealing, seducing touch. It went through my nerves and frame like flame. It seemed to confuse and scatter speech, sweep it from me as some useless trifle, and wake one intolerable burning desire for action.
I withdrew my hand suddenly, unbent my arm, and leaning over the intervening chair side, put it round the low exquisite waist and tried to draw her towards me. But this most irritating of women resented immediately that which she had just invited.
"You must not!" she said, vehemently, trying with both hands to disengage her waist from my arm, her face changing uncertainly from white to scarlet, her eyes meeting mine with a fugitive alarm, which nearly, but not entirely, overwhelmed a furtive transitory look of pleasure at the contact.
I had not mistaken her, I thought, she was both weak and sensual. I must conquer the first quality, and seduce the second, and the battle was won. But it was hard to prevent my own self-command slipping from me, and if I did not keep that, my real object would be lost in this useless sort of coquetry, or possibly a quarrel. I wanted all my own judgment—and it was difficult to summon it and keep it—to tell me exactly how far to push matters to excite her, without driving her to get up and leave me altogether.
"Nonsense!" I said, looking down into the changing face and on to the heaving, panting bosom; "if we are engaged, you know, I have a right to do much more than put my arm round your waist."
"Right!" she repeated, scornfully, "there is no right except what I choose! Take your arm away!"
"Listen to me," I said quietly, paying no heed to her request, except to tighten my clasp just so much as I dared.
Such a waist it was, yielding, supple, and warm; it was maddening to have to restrain the muscles in my arm and regulate their pressure. The blood went to my brain, and it was with a severe effort I collected my thoughts.
"You say," I continued, "that I must not go. Lucia, there is only one single condition on which I will stay."
"What is it?" she murmured.
She had ceased to resist my arm now. The colour was hot in her face, and her eyes confused.
"That you name some definite and definitive date for our marriage."
"This question again! How you do torture me! It worries me to have to think about it!"
"I know, dearest; that is why I say, settle something, and don't think about it any more."
"How can you be so absurd!" she answered, leaning her head back against the chair, and averting her soft, flushed face as far from me as she could, so successfully that there was little view of anything except the white throat and under-part of her chin as she strained her head back from me.
"Please let things go on as they are."
The words were a positive entreaty, but they fell upon ground where passion had blocked access to any of the tenderer, impersonal feelings. I only felt a rage of impatience as I heard her.
"No, dearest," I said very gently; "that is just what they cannot do;" and I looked at the swelling neck with the faint blue veins visible in its transparency, and thought, "You must be my own, or I must cease to see you, otherwise I shall strangle you."
"I cannot stand this sort of thing any longer. Not even for you, Lucia, can I run the risk of losing the little brains I possess, which is extremely likely to happen if I let things, as you say, go on as they are."
"Why?" she said, fretfully, turning her head from side to side. "What do I do to you?"
I did not answer this, but I raised myself so that I could look into her face, and our eyes met. She flushed crimson, and did not repeat the question.
"You will kill me if you worry me like this!" she said, evasively, and she did actually look very ill at the moment.
"My sweet, why do you not trust me with the cause of all this hesitation? Are you afraid of me, or do you misunderstand me? Lucia, the woman I have once loved is the woman I must always love. Whatever had happened, whatever she had done, whatever I had heard of her or from her, I should love her still. Has anything occurred since you were with me in Paris that you are afraid to tell me of? Has anyone else come between us? If so, tell me. I shall understand everything. If there is anything to forgive, I will forgive everything. I swear there is nothing that can make any difference to my love for you."
Lucia looked me steadily in the face now. A contemptuous smile curved her lips, all the confusion died out of her eyes, and they filled with a limitless arrogance and self-reliance. I had my answer in her face. It was the face of a woman whose virtue is absolutely invulnerable, and whose honour is unshadowed, and who has suffered too acutely in the maintenance of both to hear the faintest hint of weakness without a smile. A fierce, delighted satisfaction ran through me before she spoke.
"What do you insinuate, Victor?" she said, lightly, but with pointed directness. "That I have been in love with two men at the same time? No; nothing of my own will nor my own action stands between us. Forgive, forsooth!" and she gave a delightful, mocking laugh.
"You are the person to be forgiven, if anybody, for inflicting this year upon me! Now, I ask you to wait a little and you won't!"
"Because I don't see any adequate reason," I returned. "Last year I told you mine, now I demand yours."
I kept my arm round her, and could feel the pulses in her waist throb under it, but I turned my eyes away from her and stared fixedly at the carpet, waiting for her to speak, with the best patience I could command.
"I have told you till I am tired of telling you I must get better first," she said, pettishly.
"But you are not getting better," I persisted.
"On the contrary, all these four months you have been getting steadily worse."
So long a silence followed this that I looked into her face again suddenly, the lips were quivering, and the eyes brimming with tears. She turned her head away, but not before I had seen them.
"Dearest, would you rather I released you from your promise to me?" I said, bending nearer over her. "Do you wish that?"
One single, violent sob shook the lovely breast beneath me and swelled the throat.
"No," she said, passionately; "you know I don't!"
"There is no alternative between that or our marriage," I said, quietly.
I was not trying to be inflexible, nor to harden my heart against her. It was hardened by passion, which at no time is an inspirer of tenderness, and mine had been sufficiently irritated through four months of alternate excitation and resistance to be determined now. My difficulty was not to avoid being too tender, but to check myself from being too harsh. Had I heard my own words in cool blood they might have seemed hard, and my insistence inconsiderate and blamable, but my calm was only artificial, and my judgment little else than a blind clinging to the object with which I had come.
"Why can't you go away for a time and then we can marry later, when you come back?" she answered, in a weak, evasive tone.
"It is not wholly a question of being away from you," I returned. "So long as I am engaged to you, Lucia, my whole life is totally different from that which it would be if I were not."
"I give you permission to lead any life you please," she said vehemently.
"Thank you!" I thought, sarcastically; "but your permission has nothing to do with it."
"It is useless to discuss the matter," I said aloud. "I cannot argue the point with you; I have said there is no third alternative."
"I think you are most unkind," and Lucia let two lovely arms and hands sink over the sides of the chair in gesture of weak despair.
I noticed, indifferently, that she was unnaturally pale.
"If you consent to our marriage, Lucia," I urged, pressing that alluring waist, "I will promise this, if it will simplify matters—you shall continue to live as if you were unmarried until you yourself put things on another footing."
She glanced at me quickly, as I spoke, with an unexpressed surprise.
"Then what would you gain?" she said, coldly, and the unveiled cynicism in the words went home.
I flushed.
"The certainty," I answered, briefly. "This indefinite state of things is simply intolerable."
She was silent for a second; then she said violently, the scarlet flowing over her face up to her eyes—
"No! It would be impossible to maintain such relations as those after marriage, and you know it! That is quite out of the question!"
I merely shrugged my shoulders in silence.
"I am waiting for your answer, Lucia," I said, after a few moments.
"And if I cannot give you one?"
"Then I leave town to-morrow morning."
She gave a fleeting glance into my face, and then suddenly burst into a passion of convulsive sobs and tears—sobs that seemed to tear her breast asunder, and tears that started in a blinding torrent, drenching her eyelids and eyelashes and pale cheeks.
"It is most unkind, it is horrible, it is cruel of you to press me in this way!" she sobbed, trying with both hot, trembling hands to push my arm away and to free herself from my clasp.
The sight of her tears hurt me, the pain stamped on the soft face, and the tumultuous rising and falling of her breast in those agonised sobs, reproached me, but the hurt and the reproach were dull. If she thought her tears would induce me to hesitate or to desist, she was wrong. They were to me simply a favourable sign of her weakness, and urged me to press my advantage. I felt instinctively that it would not do to fail now; having gone so far, I must go farther, and be successful. Probably I should be much sooner forgiven by Lucia herself. Nothing is less pardonable, either in love or war, than an unsuccessful attempt.
Her resistance was nothing but nervous folly and weakness, and I believed she herself would be glad to be forced to give it up. Besides, even if my reason had not told me all this, my own feelings would have been enough to make me relentless.
"You may cry," I thought, looking at her as she sobbed with her head strained away from me, "but before I go you shall speak."
"What is your decision?" I said.
"What am I to say?" she murmured, in a voice choked by tears.
"Promise me some fixed date."
"I can't—now—like this. I will tell you to-morrow."
"No; to-day. You have deferred it from week to week. You must tell me now."
Silence, broken only by the sound of tears.
I waited, determined not to lose my patience.
"Tell me," I repeated after a pause.
"Victor, you must lend me your handkerchief," she said, turning her streaming eyes towards me.
The tears rained down over her lips and chin, and fell on the silk collar round her neck. She could not take her own handkerchief from her pocket, sitting as she was with my arm round her. I drew out mine and dried the wet eyes, and then pressed the soft reluctant head against my shoulder. Once there, it remained, too weary to lift itself again.
"Tell me, dearest."
"What, Victor?"
"The date."
"What date?"
"The thirteenth of next month," I said, decidedly.
I felt a startled quiver shoot through her.
"Oh, I could not really settle it without—without—thinking."
"Yes, you can, and must."
"But I don't know how long that is."
"It is exactly three weeks from now."
"But why the thirteenth?"
"We must appoint some date, and that is when my book appears in Paris, that's all; but choose another, if you like."
"The thirteenth is unlucky."
"What do you gain by all this trifling, Lucia?"
Some slight accent of all the angry surge of feelings within me crept, perhaps, into my tone. She did not answer, but began to cry again, not passionately this time, but in a weak, enervated listlessness.
"You are most unkind, Victor!"
"Is it to be the thirteenth?"
"I never knew you to be like this before."
"May I count it as the thirteenth?"
Silence. I waited and glanced at the clock again. The whole morning had slipped away. I should infallibly be late for that luncheon, but I could not help it.
"Lucia!"
"What, Victor?"
"Is it the thirteenth?"
"I don't know."
"Then I tell you that it is."
Almost beside myself with irritation, and uncertain whether I most loved or detested her, I drew her violently round towards me, bent over her and pressed my lips on hers, wet, ice-cold, and quivering. If there is anything in magnetism, or power to subdue another's volition, it ought to have acted fully then. I myself was at that moment the incarnation of will. My whole system was bowed to the intense effort to make her, by force, say what I desired.
"Say yes," I insisted.
She struggled violently, and the lips fluttered dumbly under mine; her breast swelled against mine; her soft hand tried to push back my shoulder.
"Say it," and I pressed her lips harder.
Either the force of the stronger will, or mere passion—and I am inclined to think the latter—had its influence.
"Yes, then, yes," she said, in a faint convulsive murmur, that was only just audible, but with the whole accent of assent in it.
"You promise?"
"Yes, I promise, absolutely. Oh, let me go. I am suffocated."
I released her instantly. I had no desire to keep her now that the point was gained, and I did not believe from her character that once having spoken she would retract. She started up, rose from the chair apparently with difficulty, made a few steps as if to cross the room, staggered, and, before I could reach her, fell heavily her full length along the floor. Her head, with its soft mass of bright hair, struck the ground almost at my feet, the pale face, drenched with tears, turned upward to the light. God! what a brute I felt! What had I done? I felt as if I had struck her. The first impulse of tenderness towards her welled up over my passion and turned it to a desperate self-reproach. A second later, Mrs. Grant came into the room.
"What has happened?" she said quickly, and then, as her gaze took in Lucia's figure, she turned to me with a blaze of anger in her eyes. "What have you been saying?" she exclaimed. "I will not have these scenes, Victor! I shall forbid you to see her!"
She fell on her knees beside Lucia, and unfastened the collar of her dress, still wet and stained with tears.
"Shall I not lift her up?" I asked, and Mrs. Grant raised her face again to me, white with suppressed anger.
"No," she answered, curtly. "Will you kindly leave this room. Your presence here is not needed."
I looked towards the fallen figure on the rug. The light head and the stone-white face seemed to multiply into a thousand replicas, and eddy round me. I walked out of the room.
"It will never be," I thought over and over to myself as I went down the stairs.
I turned into the dining-room, and flung myself into an armchair and waited there. Everything but Lucia herself was forgotten. My consciousness seemed suspended almost as completely as hers. At last the door opened, and Mrs. Grant herself came in. She started on seeing me.
"You still here, Victor," she said coldly.
"How could I go?" I murmured. "Is she better?"
"Yes; she is better."
Mrs. Grant's face was white and composed, her tones like ice. I saw she was unwilling to trust herself to speak to me even.
"May I not speak to her for one minute?"
"Certainly not. Are you not satisfied with the mischief you have done already?" Her voice shook with suppressed indignation. "She tells me she has fixed the thirteenth for your marriage. So that is the subject you came to press to-day! I think your conduct is most disgraceful."
My attitude of mind was—I don't care two d—-s what you think. However, I merely said,—
"I think you do me an injustice. I did not mean to distress Lucia to-day; but what is the use of this sort of thing going on as it has been doing? I have offered to release her from the engagement if she wishes, and in that case, I should go away altogether. I don't see that to keep up our present relations is any benefit to either of us."
Mrs. Grant's eyebrows relaxed a little.
"Perhaps you are right, Victor," she said, with a sigh. "Only we must be careful, or we shall lose her altogether."
Her voice shook now with something that was not anger. I held out my hand.
"I will come in the evening," I said, gently, "to hear of her if I cannot see her. May I?"
Mrs. Grant smiled, we shook hands, and I went out. I walked absently up the pavement, and then stood looking out as absently for a hansom. Now I had pushed matters to the point, I had not delayed nor put off action in this case, and I had attained the object with which I had come, but somehow I did not feel so satisfied as I had anticipated I should when I came away victorious.
Things were so different now from what they had been a year ago, and as I stood there looking up and down for a crawler, above the noise of the London thoroughfare, her own words to me in Paris rang with terrible distinctness, that prophecy wrung from her in the agony of her woman's longing—"I shall never be your own."
I almost believed it now.
"Looks like it," I thought, as I hailed a coming crawler and got in.
I said nothing to the man, but I suppose he had noted my glance at my watch before I got into the cab, and, in the hopes of an over-fare, he began lashing his horse across the head and neck. It was this that roused me out of a gloomy reverie, and I pushed up the trap.
"If you touch that animal again I'll get out," I said, angrily, as the poor brute tossed his head from side to side.
"Beg pardin', sir! Thought you was in a 'urry, sir!" came through the roof.
"Drive decently, and don't think," I muttered, relapsing into my own thoughts, cutting as the lash on the chestnut's neck.
I had stopped the lash, but I could not stop my thoughts. After dinner that evening I went to see her again. In this I did not succeed. I was told she had already gone to bed, but she had left a message for me, and not a word was said about rescinding the promise that had been forced from her in the morning. On the whole I went away satisfied and relieved.
"She will be all right," I thought, "now she has once made up her mind. It is extraordinary; women seem to have as great an aversion to forming a decision as children have to taking medicine."
"What should I do with myself now?" I questioned, standing idly in the hot, dusty London street. It was too early for me to go to bed, and I knew the pater would have turned in before I got back. I sauntered down two streets, and then drove to the Club. In the card-room I found Dick and two other fellows, one of whom was a stranger to me. As I made the convenient fourth, we played a rubber at whist. After this it seemed generally voted that the weather was too fatiguing for the strain of whist, and an adjournment was made to an open window, chairs, and drinks. I was preoccupied with my own thoughts, and I sat listening fitfully to the other men's gossip. Sometimes a sentence came to me; at one moment I was listening without hearing, the next I was hearing without listening. At last the phrase struck me—"Yes; dying horribly, like a rat of phosphorus."
I looked across to the man sitting opposite me. He was a young fellow, and I had gathered from to-night's conversation that he was studying medicine.
"Who is that?" I asked, with a sort of idle curiosity.
"Oh, only a fellow in the hospital," he answered with a cigarette between his teeth. "A paying patient. D. T., you know. I saw him last night in the ward. Shan't see him there to-morrow night, I expect," he added with a laugh, bringing down his rocking, tiled chair on its four legs, and determining at last to light the cigarette.
"You wanted to see the death, I thought," remarked Dick.
"I did; but, hang it, the fellow's been dying so long, my curiosity's worn out. However, I may come in for the show to-morrow morning if I am down at the hospital in time."
There was rather a cold silence after this remark, which made the young fellow look up and then add, hastily.—
"He's such an awful coward, you know, one can't feel much sympathy for him. 'Oh, it's so hard to die,' he goes on, 'at twenty-three! Can nothing save me? It seems so hard at twenty-three!' Well, I suppose no one does like going out, but still if a fellow knows he's got to"—
He paused. No one spoke for the minute, and then he went on,—
"Brought it on himself, too; I never saw a fellow so thoroughly knocked out! And now he does nothing but whine over it—'Oh, I'd do so differently if I had my time over again!' I said to him last night, 'Now, look here, Johnson, why don't you try and console yourself with thinking you enjoyed life at the time?'"
"Did you say Johnson?" I asked. "What is his Christian name?"
"Howard," he answered.
The two other men started, and looked at me. The speaker glanced at them, and then added hastily to me,—
"Do you know him?"
"Slightly," I answered, coldly.
He coloured.
"I am sorry if I"—
"Not at all," I said. "All that concerns him is quite a matter of indifference to me."
There was a pause, and then, by tacit mutual consent, the topic was not renewed. The men spoke of other things, and I sat in silence.
So Howard had killed himself—was dying in this way, like a poisoned rat. It was, as I had said, a matter of indifference to me. I did not feel one pulse of sorrow or regret. It is strange how completely and entirely these emotions of love, affection, friendship, hate expire, and leave no trace of their past existence.
I hear and read much of "lingering memories," "clinging remembrance," but for me the tender track of a past affection does not exist. He had, as I had told him, cut out our friendship by the roots, and I heard now of his approaching death as that of an absolute stranger.
I wondered idly where was that softening influence, and on what sort of natures did it act, that is supposed to survive all dead attachments, all broken friendships. Certainly, according to tradition, it seemed as if I ought now to feel some sort of emotion at hearing the fate of a man who had once held so large a share of my affections.
There ought to have been some touch of sentimental sadness in my thoughts, some recollections of first days together, and so on. But there was none. By that night's work he had made himself as nothing to me henceforward.
I wondered in a desultory way whether the sudden complete annihilation of an emotion in the human heart in this way showed the hardness of the heart, or the magnitude of the offence, or the poor quality of the emotion itself; and then I was roused by Dick's voice saying Good-night to the other fellows, and he and I were left by the window alone.
He looked across at me, and said.—
"If you would like to see Howard, I believe Thompson could get you admission any time."
His voice was low and sympathetic.
I raised my eyebrows and said,—
"What should I want to see him for?"
Dick looked surprised, and then said, hesitatingly,—
"Surely you were very great friends at one time!"
I laughed.
"Yes," I answered, "but there is a great deal in that at one time!"
A few days later my father pointed out the announcement of Howard's death in The Times as we sat at breakfast.
I nodded.
"Yes; I heard at the Club he was dying."
"What was it? They don't say here."
"No," I said; "they would not."
"What was it?"
"Excess."
We neither said anything further with reference to it, but Howard's death was in both our thoughts, and as we got up from the table he said, suddenly,—
"There's a great thing in having a quiet, moderate nature, or at least self-control," and then he added afterwards, as if struck by a sudden amending thought, "Well, of course, that comes virtually to the same thing."
"Does it?" I thought. "By Jove, not to the man himself!"
"Would you think, then," I asked, with a smile, looking across the rug at him as we stood by the fire, "that the existence of a lion-tamer was quite the same as that of a maiden lady who kept cats?"
He laid down his paper suddenly and stared at me.
"I don't understand—I—you don't mean that you"—
"I mean," I said, "that it's extremely difficult to see the best course. Howard has just died, raving mad, for giving way to his impulses; I may die, raving mad, for controlling mine."
He looked at me apprehensively. "I am sorry, Victor, if—You don't think you have overworked, do you?"
I laughed as I met his eyes scanning my face anxiously for traces of the possible insanity.
"No; none of the slates are loose at present," I said. "That's all right, but I am seedy altogether; out of sorts all round—that's all."
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