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."