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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of To-morrow?, by Victoria Cross
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: To-morrow?
+
+Author: Victoria Cross
+
+Posting Date: April 22, 2009 [EBook #3609]
+Release Date: January, 2002
+First Posted: June 13, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TO-MORROW? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Johannes Blume and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To-morrow?
+
+
+By
+
+Victoria Cross
+
+
+
+
+  "Cras te victurum, cras dicis Postume semper
+  Dic mihi cras istud, Postume quando venit?
+  Quam longe cras istud, ubi est? aut unde petendum?
+  Cras istud quanti dic mihi, possit emi?
+  Cras vives? hodie jam vivere, Postume, serum est
+  Ille sapit, quisquis Postume, vixit heri."
+
+  MART. v. lviii.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+"REJECTED! rejected!"
+
+I crushed the letter spasmodically in my hand as I walked mechanically
+up and down the length of the dining-room, a rage of anger filling my
+brain and the blood thundering in my ears.
+
+"Rejected! and that not for the first time. Another year and a half's
+work flung away--simply flung away, and I am no nearer recognition than
+ever. Incredible it seems that they won't accept that."
+
+I stopped under the gasalier and glanced again through the letter I had
+just received.
+
+"DEAR SIR,--With reference to your last MS., we regret to say we cannot
+undertake its publication, owing to the open way in which you express
+your unusual religious views and your contempt for existing
+institutions.
+
+"At the same time, our reader expresses his admiration for your style,
+and his regret that your unmistakably brilliant genius should be
+directed towards unsatisfactory subjects.--We are," etc., etc.
+
+The blood flowed hotly over my face, and my teeth closed hard upon my
+lip.
+
+Always the same thing! rejection from every quarter.
+
+The last clause in the letter, which might have brought some momentary
+gratification to a man less certain, less absolutely sure of his own
+powers than I was, could bring none to me.
+
+It only served to make sharper the edge of my keen disappointment.
+Brilliant genius! I read the words with the shadow of a satirical smile.
+
+What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every vein,
+that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they seemed
+buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the expectant
+mother she has a life within her own.
+
+I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of hearing
+reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.
+
+We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
+offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments, praise,
+or felicitation.
+
+These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here, at
+six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and not a
+single line of my writing had met the public eye.
+
+I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken man
+in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and desires of
+the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has been surpassed,
+death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire, but the longings of
+the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit and without period; and
+where a physical desire, ungratified, must eventually destroy itself as
+it wears away the matter that has given it birth, a mental desire does
+not wane with the flesh it wastes, but remains ravening to the last,
+and reigns supreme over the death agony, up to the final moment of
+actual dissolution.
+
+I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of those
+idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work, and who
+are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the brilliant but
+vague, unformed inspirations that visit them between the circling rings
+of smoke from their cigar.
+
+I had no thought, no expectation, no wish even to be offered that
+celebrated sweet condition of the palm without the dust of the struggle
+in the arena.
+
+But for me it had been dust, dust, and nothing but dust, and there were
+times when it seemed to blind, choke, overpower me.
+
+My capacity for work was unlimited; labour was comparatively no labour
+to me. The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a manuscript was as
+nothing to me.
+
+To write came to me as naturally as to speak.
+
+Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
+been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
+thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written something
+totally different.
+
+And there they all stood in a pile, an irritating, distracting pile, a
+monument of unrequited labour, an unrealised capital, a silent
+testimony to the exceeding narrowness of the limits of British
+indulgence to talent.
+
+My persistent ill-luck was all the more aggravating as I was not
+handicapped by poverty, as so many authors are. The question of terms
+had not been one to present a difficulty.
+
+I had no need to ask a publisher to accept my MSS. at his own financial
+risk.
+
+I was not the traditional struggling young writer of the lady novelist
+who treats poverty and genius as convertible terms, making up with the
+former quality whatever her hero lacks of the other.
+
+No; although the combination may be very romantic, I confess,
+notwithstanding that I was an unrecognised author, I was not living in
+a garret, nor writing my MSS. by the proverbially flaring candle, nor
+going without my dinner in order to pay for foolscap.
+
+But my feelings were as bitter, and the sense of disappointment as
+sharp, as any attic-dwelling genius' could have been, even if we
+suppose the lady novelist to have thrown in a conventionally
+consumptive wife.
+
+In fact they were stronger because more absolute, more concentrated in
+themselves.
+
+There were no pangs of hunger to distract my attention, no
+traditionally patient wife to look sadly at me, no responsibilities for
+others lying upon me and my rejected MSS.
+
+Simply all my own desires for myself centred in them.
+
+There was one side issue which at times seemed to include everything,
+to be everything in itself, but the moments when this forced itself in
+overwhelming prominence upon my brain were few.
+
+The wish that I had to publish my works could not be traced to distinct
+motives; it did not spring from a desire to gain money, nor yet
+celebrity.
+
+I was not particularly keen on fame while I lived, and I certainly had
+no sentimental ideas of my name surviving me.
+
+I cared little in fact whether my name ever reached the public,
+provided only my works were known and read. The wish to give them out
+was not a thing of motive, nor thought, nor will. It was the fierce,
+instinctive impulse that accompanies all creative power, the tremendous
+impetus towards production that is an integral part of all conceptive
+capacity. The same driving necessity that compels a writer in the
+middle of the night to rise and take his pen and commit to paper some
+thought or thoughts that are racing about in his brain, trying to find
+an outlet, that compels him to produce them as far as he is able, this
+same urgent impulse forces him to complete his manuscript, and when
+completed, to strain his utmost to give it actual life in the thoughts
+and brains of the public.
+
+The pressing want to produce is as wholly natural, as innate, as
+independent of the individual's volition as the conceptive impulse
+itself.
+
+And it was thus with me.
+
+I could not be said to wish to publish from this or that motive,
+because of this, that, or the other. I was simply dominated by the
+instinct to do so, which grew more and more urgent as it found no
+gratification.
+
+It had risen now rampant at this last rebuff, and it seemed to rage
+about in my brain like a Bengal tiger in a net.
+
+I walked up and down the long dining-room, backwards and forwards, from
+the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard at the
+other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now and then
+from sheer nervous irritation. "Cursed, infernal nuisance!"
+
+I had just muttered this when the door was pushed open, but the
+enterer, on hearing my exclamation, promptly drew it to again, and
+would have shut it, but that I caught the handle.
+
+It was the butler.
+
+"What do you want, Simmonds," I said.
+
+"Nothing, sir. I was told to enquire if you was in."
+
+"Well, I am."
+
+"Yes, sir. Please, Mr. Hilton said was you ready for dinner?"
+
+"Certainly; and, Simmonds, where's Nous?"
+
+"Tied up, sir, in the stable."
+
+"Tied up! Again! I gave orders he was never to be tied up!"
+
+"Yes, sir; but please, sir, he was that dirty and muddy to go
+scrimmaging over the house, and it's the ruination of the furniture--"
+
+"The dog is not to be tied up," I interrupted.
+
+"Have him let loose at once, and in future remember, if he comes in wet
+and muddy, and chooses to lie on the drawing-room couch, let him."
+
+The man disappeared, and I walked over to the hearth.
+
+A minute or two later there was a scratching and whining outside the
+door, and I went to it and let Nous in.
+
+He bounded over me, licked my face furiously, and scratched
+enthusiastically at my shirt front.
+
+He was wet, and his fur laden with mud, as the butler had said, and my
+clothes suffered from his demonstrativeness, but his feelings were of
+more import than a dress-coat, and I would not have hurt them by
+checking his greeting.
+
+"Dear old boy," I said, taking the collar off with which he had been
+chained up,--and just then my father came into the room.
+
+"Ah, got back, Victor?"
+
+"Yes," I said, looking up.
+
+"They've rejected your last, eh?" he said at once.
+
+"Yes. Why? Have they sent it? How did you know it was rejected?"
+
+"By your face, my dear boy," answered my father.
+
+"It's odd that these failures knock you up still. You must be
+accustomed to them now!"
+
+That was cutting, and it cut.
+
+"One does not easily get accustomed to anything that is against natural
+law," I said, coldly.
+
+"Oh! and you mean that it is against the natural law of things that so
+brilliant a genius as yourself should be perpetually rejected?"
+
+I nodded. "Just so," I answered.
+
+"It is a pity they will not take your estimation of your own powers!"
+
+"There is very little difference in the estimation," I said. "The
+difference is in the courage. I have the courage to write things they
+have not the courage to print. There is no question as to my powers. No
+one, except yourself, perhaps, has ever denied those."
+
+"Well, why the dickens don't you write something that they will accept?
+Why not make up something quite conventional?"
+
+I looked across the hearth at him with a half amused, half ironical
+smile, and said nothing. It is so hard to explain to an outsider the
+involuntariness of all real talent.
+
+This great leading characteristic is invariably but imperfectly grasped
+by others.
+
+They cannot realise it.
+
+I was too flat in spirits and too tired in body to feel inclined to
+enter then into an abstruse discussion with him, and I would have let
+the matter slide.
+
+His last remark to the ear of anyone who has genuine talent, whether
+artist or author or poet, or what you please, sounds like a
+sacrilegious blasphemy.
+
+"Make up something!"
+
+Great heavens! What an expression!
+
+Is a writer, then, a cook, preparing a new dish? Is he a nursery maid
+soothing a refractory child? Is he a woman's dressmaker taking her
+mistress's orders?
+
+Dinner was served just then, and we took our seats at the table in
+silence.
+
+I thought I should have no need to answer.
+
+However, when the butler had deposited the soup and shut the door after
+him, my father returned to the attack.
+
+"Yes, Victor," he said in a friendly way, as if a happy solution of my
+difficulties had just occurred to him, "why don't you make up something
+quite orthodox and keep your own opinions out of it?"
+
+I sighed and took half a glass of claret to fortify me. I saw I was in
+for propounding my views upon genius, and I did not feel up to it.
+
+I could have avoided the argument, doubtless, by seeming to assent, by
+promising to "make up something," and saved myself a number of words.
+
+But there is a strong impulse in me to revolt against allowing myself
+to seem to accept a false statement or opinion that I do not really
+hold.
+
+And I pulled myself together with an effort.
+
+"I don't think you understand in the least my view of a writer and his
+writings," I said. "It is not a voluntary thing, led up to by
+pre-determination. There can be no question of making up. I never try
+to write nor to think. I do not invoke my own ideas. They spring into
+being of themselves, quite unsought. And, in a measure, they are
+uncontrollable."
+
+My father was staring at me in silence.
+
+"Eh?" he said merely as I paused.
+
+I laughed.
+
+"What I mean is, that a man, as a man, endowed with will, control,
+wishes, and so on, ceases to exist, you may say, while he is writing.
+He becomes then the tool of that peculiar, mysterious power that is
+moving in his brain. He writes as a clerk writes from dictation. He is
+the clerk pro tem of the impulse stirring his being, which dictates to
+him what it pleases. There is no consideration in his mind--'I will
+write this or that' or 'I won't write the other.' He simply feels he
+must write a particular thing; it crowds off his pen before he can stop
+it. He does not know where, whence, how, or why the idea came to him.
+But it is there, clamouring to be written, and he writes it because he
+must. The expression, very often, of a thought is as uncontrollable as
+a physical spasm, and the man who writes it cannot always be held
+responsible for it."
+
+"My dear Victor!"
+
+"No, really," I said, laughing, "I am simply stating ordinary facts. I
+believe any writer, any acknowledged writer of talent, will bear me
+out, more or less. It is the old idea of inspiration--one cannot
+express it better--a breathing into. It is exactly that. The man of
+genius, in any form, feels at times-that is to say, when his fit is on,
+that there is a breathing into his brain. It becomes full of images he
+is unfamiliar with, crowded with thoughts that are quite foreign
+perhaps to the man himself, to his life, to his habits, and invested
+with a peculiar knowledge of things he has had no personal experience
+of. Then as suddenly as it came the fit goes; it is over, and he can
+write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his sentences become
+mere linked chains of nouns and verbs; his inspiration has gone. He
+cannot invoke it, cannot restrain it, cannot retain it, cannot recall
+it, and only very slightly control it."
+
+"Ha!" said my father reflectively, going on with his soup, "deuced
+inconvenient."
+
+"Inconvenient it may be," I said quietly. "All the same, that which is
+written under inspiration is the only stuff worth reading. The Greeks
+expressed the peculiar feeling that a man has when his inspiration
+comes upon him by the phrase, entheos eimi, and we can hardly find a
+better one, only unfortunately we don't believe in gods. Otherwise,
+entheos eimi contains everything, for the man who was only common clay
+before his inspiration, and will be common clay when it departs, feels,
+for the time, as if a god had descended, and was within him. And when,
+afterwards, he looks at what he has written he feels it is something
+not wholly his own, but that it is the work of some powerful influence
+he can hardly comprehend, and cannot certainly rule."
+
+"But really I don't see that this has much relation to what I said
+about your writing something to please the British public!"
+
+"It is the whole gist of the matter," I said. "I am proving to you that
+I am, to a certain extent, helpless in what I write; that it is
+impossible for me to think of publics, British or otherwise, of
+publishers or critics, when I am writing. I have no time to consider
+them, no space in my brain for them, no memory that such things, or
+anything outside of what I am describing, exists even. My only thought
+is to drive along my pen fast enough, in obedience to the strenuous
+impulse urging me. I do not 'make up,' as your phrase is, anything. I
+simply put down on paper, as fast as I can, the thoughts that are
+pouring into my brain, like the waves of a flood flowing over it. I am
+whirled away on the stream myself; my identity is lost, submerged. Now
+look here, I'll give you a cut and dried instance which will make clear
+how it is that I offend the prejudices, or the proprieties, or whatever
+you call it, in my books; at least I imagine it is in this way: Suppose
+I have a death scene to write. My MS. is waiting for that to complete
+it. I don't say to myself beforehand, Now there shall be a bed with
+Tomkins dying in it; there shall be Maria at the left-hand corner, and
+Jane at the right. The wife and doctor shall be grouped artistically at
+the foot. Tomkins shall make two speeches before he dies; no,
+three--three is more natural--uneven number. Now what shall Tomkins
+say? Yes. Ah--hum--what the deuce shall I make him say? It must not be
+too much like what a dying man would say, because the British public is
+dead against realism. It must not either show any strong contempt for
+religion; a little mild contempt, of course, goes down and is
+fashionable, but I must not express it forcibly. He must not either
+evince a disbelief in immortality--at least that's dangerous ground.
+Some publishers will accept it and some won't.--Better leave it out.
+Ah--hum--what shall Tomkins say? I have it! A retrospect of his past
+life! And yet--No, stay! that won't do. Something that sounds like
+something that might possibly be immoral might turn up in it, and that
+would be fatal--damn the MS. utterly. Well, look here, Tomkins has got
+to die, and I've got to finish the book, so I must get something down.
+'Darling Mabel, this parting is terrible, but still I feel we shall
+meet in another world.' Now, is that safe? Has a similar phrase been
+put in heaps of novels before? Because the British public won't have
+anything too new. It likes to head over again what it has heard at
+least fifty thousand times before, and then it knows it won't be
+shocked. Yes, that sentence will do. Now I must put in a few more and
+then, thank goodness, the scene will be done! Now," I said, springing
+up from the table, "do you call that art? do you call it genius? Is a
+collection of bald phrases and second-hand sentiments, hooked together
+like that, worth anything when it's done?"
+
+"My dear boy, don't excite yourself like that," my father answered
+deliberately. "Sit down and finish your soup."
+
+"Oh, hang the soup!" I said, resuming my seat. "Shall I sound the gong?
+I have not told you my way yet, but I'm coming to it when the man's
+gone." I sounded the gong, and the butler came in with the next course.
+
+There was no carving ever done at our table, so my father had only to
+tranquilly continue eating while I talked. He had forced me into the
+discussion, and now he should hear it to the end.
+
+"Of course, if you do write the death of Tomkins like that you can keep
+your scenes orthodox, or whatever word you have in view. But, supposing
+my MS. is lying incomplete;--I have a conviction that I am going to
+write of death, but the method of the man's death is at present unknown
+to me, unthought of.--Then, some afternoon, I happen to be sitting
+smoking, and just perhaps wondering whether I shall go round to the
+club or not, when suddenly a scene, a death scene, the scene I have
+been waiting for, comes rushing through my head. It comes upon me with
+tremendous impetus; mechanically, almost unconsciously, I take up a pen
+and write. Space opens before me and I see a hospital ward. A blaze of
+light floods it. Rows of narrow beds are there, and on one I see
+Tomkins--dying. I make my way to him: now I am by his bed. I see him
+stretched beneath my eyes. I see the pillow dark with the sweat of his
+death agony--the night-shirt torn at his throat to get air. Have I time
+to consider then whether the British public like the word night-shirt,
+and whether it would not be safer to put Tomkins into a dressing-gown?
+The man is there before me, dying, and he is in his night-shirt, and I
+must write it. Besides, my pen is tearing on. I cannot stop--he is
+dying. Will he speak before he dies? I do not know yet. His eyelids
+quiver, the black veins in his throat knot up, he gasps. I bend lower:
+'his breath comes hurriedly: his eyes open and fix upon me: they are
+red, vitreous but conscious: then I know he will speak, he is going
+to--the next moment his half-strangled voice reaches my ear. He is
+speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less, no
+different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips whiten and
+draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a convulsive spasm
+wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid silence, and then one
+deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and flesh collapse as the Life
+is set loose. The damp body sinks back, leaving its death sweat on my
+arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is dead. But the impulse is not done
+with me yet. I cannot get out of that hospital ward till I have done
+everything, passed through all the circumstances that crop up naturally
+from the death of Tomkins. There is no 'making up.' The scene is being
+enacted before me. It is. It exists. It is the truth for the time
+being, and, as the truth, I write it. There is the miserable girl,
+sobbing convulsively, with her arms out-stretched in the bed-clothes.
+Can I leave her without some words of consolation? I must write down
+that she is there, because I see her there. There are some arrangements
+to be made with the nurse, and then, when I am leaving the ward, or at
+least intend to, my brain hurries the doctor up the ward to me. I don't
+'make him up.' I had not the remotest idea of the head doctor appearing
+when I sat down to write. But now I see him approaching me between the
+beds, and before I can pass him, as I want to, he button-holes me and
+proceeds to explain that Tomkins never would have died if he had
+undergone an operation that the doctor had perceived from the very
+first moment was necessary. After a long talk with him, perhaps, my pen
+stops. I pause: and when I pause I know the inspiration has gone. As
+the ancients would say, the Muse or the God has departed and dictates
+no more. I fling aside the paper and look at my watch. Several hours
+passed in the hospital, but I'll go round to the club now. And I go. I
+know Tomkins is dead. It only occurs to me afterwards, as a secondary
+consideration, that in consequence the MS. is finished. Tomkins was not
+for the manuscript, but the manuscript for Tomkins. Now the point
+is--Can I be held responsible for that scene? It is not my fault that I
+have mentally seen a private soldier dying in hospital. The whole thing
+was involuntary."
+
+"Very extraordinary views!" muttered my father.
+
+I shrugged my shoulders in silence, and called up Nous to give him my
+untouched dinner.
+
+"The best joke of it is, too," I said, suspending a strip of sirloin
+over the collie's nose, "the publishers admit if I had less talent they
+would print my things. I could not understand why my 'Laura Dean' was
+refused, so I went down to the publishers to try and find out. I saw
+the reader himself, and an awfully nice fellow he is, too. In reply to
+my question, he said the objection to the book was that it dealt with a
+wife leaving her husband. I stared at him in amazement. 'But, great
+Scott!' I said, 'that's a good old-fashioned theme enough. It's as old
+as the hills. It's the subject of--' and I gave him a list of about a
+dozen eminent novels. 'Yes,' he admitted. 'But they are not written in
+the same way.' 'Is there anything coarse or low in the writing?' 'Oh,
+no! I should not say that!' 'Well, what is the matter with it, then?'
+'The thing is too much brought before you. Of course, in these books
+you have mentioned the wife runs away, but it does not make much
+impression. You have put it all so forcibly, and given the characters
+and episode so much life, and driven the idea of her infidelity so far
+home to one, that, well, it becomes a different thing--one realises
+it.' 'Oh, then you admit the immoral theme and the language to be
+unobjectionable, and the book would have been accepted by the British
+public provided only it had been less well written?' 'Yes, I suppose it
+comes to that.' And then I caught his eye, and we both laughed. He is a
+clever fellow himself, I should think, and the ludicrousness of the
+idea tickled him as much as it did me. I came away. His admission was
+quite the truth. It is the British way to take the second-rate in every
+art and scout the best. Write a book poorly and feebly, and it passes.
+Write the same thing powerfully and well, and the cry is--It's
+improper! It's just the same thing in painting. Paint a nude woman
+snowy white, without a shade or a shadow, and looking altogether as no
+mortal woman ever did look, and the picture will be hung at the
+Academy, and people will say, 'How charming! So artistic!' But paint a
+woman with a glow on her neck and bosom, and the warm blood running in
+her arms, dare to make her a living, breathing thing on canvas, and
+your picture will be rejected. 'Excellent, unequalled, perfect, but--it
+cannot be seen!' And what is British art as a consequence? Justly is it
+looked down upon by the other nations. We simply set our heel upon the
+best men. And look at our productions! Look at the rot and the trash
+that floods the libraries every year! Look at the average novel! It's a
+disgrace to our intellect! Look at the woodeny dolls that are its men
+and women! And behold our Academy! See our pictures!"
+
+"Don't rock your chair like that, Victor; it annoys me."
+
+"Very good," I said, bringing my chair down on its fore legs again.
+"Are you ready for the cheese?"
+
+"Yes; but won't you eat anything?"
+
+"No, thanks. I am fed upon annoyance just now."
+
+"You are getting thin on it, too," he answered, looking at me. "It's a
+pity you are so excitable!"
+
+"It's a pity I was born in this confounded Britain! I should have got
+on all right with Parisian readers. But I don't despair even here. They
+can reject my MSS., but they can't take out my brains. I daresay I
+shall stumble across some man at last with courage enough to stand by
+me in the beginning and help me force open the British public's jaws
+and cram my ideas down its throat; and that once done, it will digest
+them perfectly, for it's a tough old beast, though very blind. Why on
+earth has that fellow carried off the champagne?"
+
+"You finished the bottle yourself just this minute!" returned my
+father, in surprise.
+
+"Did I? Oh, very likely! Absence of mind!"
+
+"It seems to me if you had a little less of this talent you boast of
+you would be considerably the gainer."
+
+"Possibly," I rejoined. "But a gift is a gift. You can't say to nature,
+take this back and let me have something more paying! Besides, I can't
+admit that for any earthly reason I would change. I have no desire to
+be a second-rate writer when I know I am a first!"
+
+"By Jove! if conceit could carry the day!"
+
+"No, there is no conceit," I persisted. "Is it conceit to say my hair
+is black? It is black, and everybody can see it is. I have nothing to
+do with it. Nature made it black, and black it is, and I know it.
+Should I gain anything by contending that it was red? I don't see that
+I should. However," I added, laughing, "The point is of no consequence.
+Put me down as a fifth-rate writer, if you like, until I become the
+fashion!"
+
+"It does not seem you ever will, at this pace," he said quietly.
+
+"Very good," I answered, equally quietly.
+
+"Then you will not have the trouble of changing your opinion."
+
+There was a long silence then. We each smoked without a word. At twenty
+minutes to ten my father got up. He always went to bed horribly early.
+
+"What are you going to do, Victor?"
+
+"I am going out," I answered, getting up and stretching myself.
+
+"Will you be late?"
+
+"Probably. I got no sleep last night, nor the night before. It's no
+earthly use my going to bed when I feel like this. I can't get to sleep
+by repeating hymns, as some fellow suggested the other day."
+
+"Why don't you take morphia or something to help you?"
+
+"I don't care to begin taking drugs," I said, "I would rather wear
+myself out, and induce sleep in that way. I shall take a three hours'
+walk or so."
+
+"Well, good-night."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+When he was gone, I sat a few minutes in the easy chair, with my head
+in my hands thinking. I had meant to ask him a question at dinner, but
+that argument on talent had put it on one side. Well, it would do later.
+
+"Coming out, Nous?" I said to the collie. The dog started and pricked
+his ears.
+
+"Out?" I repeated, and he leapt to his feet and gave himself a joyful
+shake, and then stood on the hearth-rug in front of me, swaying slowly
+his great brush of a tail and poising his head at an intelligent angle.
+I got up, felt for my latch-key, and went into the hall. Nous waited
+impatiently while I put on my hat and overcoat, and then we went out
+together. The night was cold, wet, and foggy. It was late in November,
+and a light mist veiled the end of each black, deserted street.
+
+I took no heed of anything, neither the atmosphere round me nor the
+direction in which my feet carried me. I was wrapped up in a maze of
+thoughts, and there was not a decently pleasant one in the whole lot.
+
+They were warmed and brightened every now and then as a form that I
+loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain
+of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it
+threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that
+flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in a hurricane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The next morning when I came down to breakfast it was late, and my
+father had already withdrawn to his own library. I had missed again
+speaking to him, as I could not seek and disturb him there.
+
+He also was a writer, though quite of a different school from myself.
+He wrote ardently upon politics, political economy, and statistics,
+things which I took no interest in.
+
+The nation might arrange itself how it pleased for all I cared. What I
+wanted to arrange was my own life. I had no ambition to set my
+country's affairs straight, my own thoughts were too much engaged in
+tugging my own into some sort of order.
+
+There were some letters for me, and I turned them over listlessly,
+balancing them tip in succession against the toast-rack in front of me,
+without opening any. The last I came to was quite different from any of
+the others, and being the last, it stood foremost before me, and I
+looked at it while I went on with my breakfast.
+
+It is curious how representative a letter generally is of its writer.
+The mere outside is like a psychological photograph. Of course it does
+not give details, but it presents you with a wonderfully accurate
+outline of the cut of a person's identity. This envelope was square,
+and looked as hard, white and clean as if a stone-tablet had passed
+through the post. It bore a delicate, weak, feminine superscription,
+hurried and careless; the writing unformed, but graceful and
+distinguished; and on the other side of the letter, stamped in grey,
+stood a crest, and the motto subscrolled.
+
+Yes, the woman who had written it was very like the letter. Immaculate
+and perhaps somewhat hard, delicate, and in will a little weak,
+impulsive and undecided, well-bred, and strikingly typical of the class
+to which she belonged.
+
+I broke the letter open after a minute and read--
+
+"DEAREST VICTOR,--Do come and see me as soon as you possibly can. A
+scheme for the next canvas occurred to me last night, but I want you to
+help me execute it. What about the manuscripts? If you can't come, tell
+me. Bring Nous.  LUCIA."
+
+I smiled as I replaced the letter. The composition was rather
+defective, and left the meaning decidedly indistinct. If I could not
+come I was to tell her. Tell her what? About the MS., or that I
+couldn't come?
+
+And under what circumstances was I to take Nous? Apparently if I could
+not do so.
+
+I was not sneering at the little note, and it went into my breast
+pocket, but it amused me.
+
+"That is the way I ought to write for the British, I suppose?" I
+muttered, with a yawn. "Muddle all one's language up until nobody has
+the faintest idea of what the author's sentiments are, and then they
+don't know whether he means anything heterodox or not."
+
+I got up. I might as well obey the orders I had just received.
+
+There was a tired confusion of thought in my brain--a floating mass of
+half-formed embryonic ideas, wishes, plans and suggestions filled it
+that were quite useless for prompting or guiding any definite
+resolution as to what I should do in the immediate future.
+
+Everything seemed to depend on something else, and it was impossible to
+find any positive basis upon which I could found a resolve.
+
+If I could succeed as an author, my way was clear, but if I could not,
+and if ... and if... And so on through a wearying, perplexing series of
+conditions.
+
+Just then I felt unequal to regulating and giving order to this inward
+chaos, and I abandoned the attempt.
+
+Meanwhile I would go over to the house in South Kensington, whence the
+letter had come.
+
+It was about eleven when I arrived there, and I was told Miss Grant was
+"upstairs, as usual."
+
+I nodded, and went up the necessary six flights of stairs to a familiar
+landing on the third floor.
+
+A door in front of me stood ajar, and with a sign to Nous to remain on
+the stairs, I knocked at it.
+
+There was no answer and no sound from within, and thinking the room was
+empty after all, I pushed the door wide and went in.
+
+It was a huge room, used as a studio, facing the north light, and with
+three large windows.
+
+Before the middle one there was an easel, and the girl was in the room,
+standing there in front of the canvas between me and the light. She was
+seemingly entirely abstracted and absorbed. She was completely
+motionless, and for the moment she communicated her stillness to me.
+
+I paused, silent, looking at her.
+
+She was standing directly in front of me, facing the canvas, that was
+perfectly blank at present.
+
+One hand rested on her hip, the other was raised and pressed to her
+head, as when a person looks into distance, and the arm and elbow and
+wrist traced a delicate curve against the dull grey square of London
+window pane.
+
+A twist of hair about as thick as my arm fell nearly to her waist. It
+was decidedly not gold; that is, it did not suggest dye and the
+Haymarket; but it was fair and curly, and seemed to hold light
+imprisoned amongst it.
+
+The figure was tall, and erred, perhaps, on the side of slightness.
+
+Certainly it would have been too slight for those men whose scale of
+admiration runs--so much in the pound. But the architecture of the form
+was perfect. Each line was worthy of study in itself as a thing of
+beauty, and the harmony of them all in the whole figure, whether it
+moved or was at rest, gave an indefinable pleasure to the eye.
+
+What a lovely thing it was this form, seeming to hold in itself the
+light and pleasure and glow of life, as it stood, the only brilliant
+thing in that cold north room.
+
+And it might be mine, might have belonged to me long since if ... well
+if ... that was just it.
+
+I made a step forward and she turned.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad you've come," she said, laying her hand in mine. "I
+want you so much."
+
+We shook hands.
+
+Although we were cousins, and had been engaged for the last two years,
+this was our invariable method of greeting and leave-taking.
+
+I had never kissed her, nor was I sure whether I ever really desired to.
+
+There were times when the thought that precedes the impulse or the
+impulse that gives birth to the thought came to me, but always when I
+was away from her and not with her, and consequently the desire
+culminated in nothing.
+
+When I was actually beside her all my own feelings seemed suddenly held
+in suspension, just as one stops with feet chained when one discovers
+one has come abruptly upon sacred ground.
+
+There had been times when I had hurried to this girl with words eager
+to be spoken on my lips, and at the first sight of her they had died
+unuttered on my tongue, just as words die into silence in the presence
+of a somnambulist.
+
+"Why am I specially necessary?" I said, smiling, as we stood in front
+of the easel. "Will you let me paint you as Hyacinthus?" I went into a
+fit of laughter. "My dear girl! anything to oblige you, but consider,"
+I said, looking down into her eager eyes; "you ought not to have a
+model of six-and-twenty. Hyacinthus was probably sixteen."
+
+"You don't know how old he was!" she said, mockingly, her azure, sunny
+eyes lighting up with laughter, too, as she leant on the bending
+maul-stick and looked up at me.
+
+"No, I don't know," I answered; "but I can infer it. If we only went
+upon what we actually know we should not go very far."
+
+"Well, he might have been as much as nineteen, and you don't look quite
+six-and-twenty; and the remaining difference I can soften down. Have
+you any other excuse to make to get out of the bother of sitting?"
+
+"You are a horrid little wretch to put it like that," I answered, "and
+I won't say another word of advice. Paint your Greek youth as you
+please. Of course, you'll give him this mustache with waxed ends? It's
+very appropriate!"
+
+"No; of course I shan't. Now, Victor, do be sensible. You can be so
+nice at times!"
+
+"Can I really? You are kind!"
+
+"I want to hear about the manuscript. Was it accepted?" she said very
+gently, with her hand on mine.
+
+"Well, that's soon told," I answered. "It wasn't."
+
+She said nothing. Probably she knew that the mere expression "I am
+sorry" would be inadequate to say to a man who felt every failure as
+keenly as I did, and I hastened to remove her difficulty.
+
+"Don't let us talk of it," I said. "Tell me of the new conception."
+
+"It is to be called 'The Death of Hyacinthus,'" she said, glancing at
+the vast, vacant canvas, on which, doubtless, her eye saw the whole
+vision already. "The scene is to be flooded with sunlight, that pours
+in upon a green, open glade. The life-sized figure of Hyacinthus will
+be standing three-quarters towards the spectator, and a little towards
+the rush of light from the setting sun. His eyes are to be fixed upon
+the quoit which will be here, at this end of the canvas, opposite him.
+It will be tinged blood-red in the sun's rays, and seem a little above
+him."
+
+She paused, with her eyes on the canvas. She had drifted away on the
+stream of her idea. "And what about the two gods?" I asked.
+
+She started.
+
+"Oh yes, I was going to tell you. Zephyrus will only be represented by
+the effect of the wind seen on the bushes, on the trees, and every
+blade of grass or fern in the picture. These small tamarisk trees that
+fringe the glade will be bent nearly double. The spirit of the wind
+must be in the whole painting. That will be the great effect, of
+course."
+
+"And Apollo?"
+
+"I cannot put him in. You see, I do want this to be taken at the
+Academy next year, and though they have scores of nude women, they
+would not have a nude god at any price: and it would be too inartistic
+to clothe Apollo. So I have supposed him invisible; being a god, he
+would be so to all except Hyacinthus. Simply his hand, holding the
+quoit, will be faintly suggested, and the light allowed to fall through
+it."
+
+There was silence. "Do you like it?" she said suddenly to me.
+
+"Yes. I think the idea is unconventional: but on that account you will
+probably be rejected."
+
+"I must risk it. Hyacinthus is to be in white, and must look radiantly,
+gloriously happy."
+
+"I say, do you want me to look radiantly, gloriously happy-because that
+will be rather difficult just now."
+
+"As far as you can. You see, the point is that he was struck and killed
+in the moment of supreme confidence and light-hearted joy."
+
+"How very uncomfortable! Is that to be my fate?" I said laughing.
+
+"Well, will you, Victor?"
+
+"Will I what?"
+
+"Take your seat here, now, and let me sketch you?"
+
+"Certainly; but I thought you said he was to be standing?"
+
+"I don't think I can take you for the whole figure. You are too much
+occupied to be able to spare the time. And I can find another model for
+the figure. I should like to take you for the whole, but you may be
+going away or something before the painting is finished. But in any
+case I have set my heart on giving him your head and neck."
+
+"You flatter me awfully," I returned. "You shall have them--but that
+wretched Nous is outside all this time. May I let him in?"
+
+"Oh yes! I did not know you had brought him!" she exclaimed, and ran
+herself to the door and called him in.
+
+He came in meekly. And I stood where she had left me by the easel, and
+watched her bend over him and caress him, and I thought I was badly
+used.
+
+"Now, will you sit there?" she said, coming back and indicating a chair.
+
+I took it in silence. Then she paused, looking at me.
+
+"What is it?" I said, enquiringly.
+
+"Would you--" and she hesitated.
+
+"Continue: command me."
+
+"Could you take off your collar?"
+
+"I think, perhaps, I could," I said, looking up into her serious face.
+"I am not aware that it is an absolute fixture!"
+
+She laughed, but she was seldom chaffed out of a reply.
+
+"It might have been in one with the shirt!" she said.
+
+"Far-seeing intuitiveness! I admit it might; but fortunately in this
+case it's not. Then you'll excuse me if I take off my coat?"
+
+"Yes, I want you to--coat, collar, and tie; so that I can sketch your
+neck down to the base of the throat."
+
+"Ah!" I said, drawing off my coat, "I was wondering how you were going
+to fix up Hyacinthus with a lavender tie!"
+
+She deigned no answer to that, and sat down just in front of me. A
+piece of plain drawing paper was put upon the easel before the canvas.
+
+"Will you raise your head more? and throw your eyes up? higher, above
+my head!"
+
+"May I not look straight at you?"
+
+"No: up! up! to the window above me!"
+
+"Won't you come and put me in the right position?"
+
+"No. I am sure you have intellect enough to understand verbal
+directions."
+
+"Well there," I said, throwing myself into the position she wanted;
+"that is easy: but how about that jolly expression? where's that to
+come from?"
+
+"Can't you imagine for a moment that you are successful, and we are
+married?"
+
+"A pretty good stretch of the imagination that!" I muttered, "as things
+are at present!"
+
+And involuntarily I brought my eyes down from the window to the pale,
+delicate, abstracted face opposite me. I did not intend to convey any
+reproach to her, but perhaps she thought so, for she seemed to answer
+that which she took to be in my mind.
+
+"But, Victor, you know," she said, laying down the pencil she had just
+taken up, "it is in your own hands. I am willing to marry you when you
+like!"
+
+She said it very gently, but with just a touch of cold restraint that
+irritated me excessively.
+
+"Oh yes, I know it's all my own confounded fault, but that does not
+make it any pleasanter. However, let all that pass. I'll look as
+cheerful as I can."
+
+There was a long silence. She was absorbed in the drawing, and I in my
+own thoughts, as I stared through the upper pane, as directed, at the
+grey, drifting, hurrying November clouds. Had I descried a quoit there
+about to descend upon me I should have been rather pleased than not. At
+last I became conscious of an intolerable crick in my neck.
+
+"May I move?"
+
+"Oh, one minute! one minute!" she answered, and her voice struck me. It
+was faint, breathless, mechanical: the voice of a person whose whole
+being is tense with some straining effort. At least fifteen more
+minutes of silence passed.
+
+"I say! I really must turn my head now!"
+
+"No, no! not for worlds! Keep still!"
+
+I kept still, but I felt sick with the peculiar cramp in my neck.
+Suddenly she dropped the crayon and started up.
+
+"Now you may move, Victor! I've finished!"
+
+I brought my head down to its ordinary level with considerable
+thankfulness, and as my eyes fell upon her I was rather startled. Her
+figure seemed expanded as she stood, and the white serge of her bodice
+rose and fell heavily. All the blood had flowed from her face, leaving
+it blanched, colourless. In her eyes the azure iris had disappeared,
+the dilated pupils had brimmed over it, and left nothing behind the
+lashes but shining, liquid blackness. Unconsciously, seemingly, her
+left hand was pressed to her left side, beneath the heart, and I saw it
+tremble; and the whole form quivered as she leaned slightly forward
+with her gaze bent upon the canvas. There was for the time being some
+great force lent her. Some power had stirred in the brain, and now
+seemed overflowing through the physical system--doubtless at its
+expense. This was inspiration, certainly, and valuable for its creative
+power, but the merely physical life and physical frame panted and
+fainted after its painful throes to produce that which the brain
+commanded. I looked at the girl, oblivious of me, oblivious of herself
+and of the pain that forced her hand mechanically to her side--looked
+half with pleasure, half with alarm. It must always bring a delight to
+the human being to watch the triumph of intellect over matter, of the
+mental over the physical system, of the mind over the body. The
+sympathy of our own mind must go with the fellow-mind in its struggles
+for freedom. It is like one captive calling to another from behind his
+prison bars. But when we love the body too, and when our reason tells
+us that the striving captive, if set free, must die; when we remember
+that by some horrible, unnatural anomaly this spirit, that at times
+seems divinity itself, is condemned to live in this abominable prison
+and to perish there, with and in its fetters, then the wave of exultant
+pleasure, of exuberant, arrogant triumph, that swept over us, poor
+fellow-prisoners, watching those fetters shaken and almost cast off,
+thunders back upon us, turned into the bitterest humiliation. I felt it
+all--the pitiable mockery of man's nature, the inexplicable, terrible
+union of a god and a brute in one frame, and the god dependent on the
+brute, and both mortal--as I looked at the slight, lovely form of the
+woman I loved, and saw it rocked and swayed, and left pained and
+breathless with the struggles of the powers within to assert and
+express themselves. It had so happened that I had never seen her at
+work before. It was only recently that she had been allowed to give up
+set studies for her own creative fancy. For years she had been employed
+in acquiring the technique of her art; and even beside these
+considerations, I had not been with her in her moments of most tense
+application, and I should not have been with her now but that I was
+needed as a tool in the work. And as I saw her at this moment, filled
+with mental energy and dominated by the pleasure of mental labour, a
+quick sympathetic elation came over me, almost immediately after to be
+replaced by simple fear.
+
+"I am afraid you have overtaxed yourself rather," I said, in
+conventional phrase; "I'm afraid you're in pain."
+
+"Oh, that's nothing! Come and tell me what you think!" she said,
+extending her hand, but not taking her eyes from the drawing. "This is
+only the first study, of course. But tell me, have I got a
+sufficiently--well--expectant--rapt expression? I am not quite sure."
+
+I saw she was too utterly preoccupied to attend to anything I said of
+herself then, so I did not insist farther, and went up to the easel. I
+was not an artist nor a critic, nor in any way qualified to be a judge
+of painting as painting; but of genius, who is not a judge? In any art
+it is recognisable, patent, obvious to all. There is no human clod, no
+boor who is utterly insensible to its influence. It needs no education
+to perceive its presence, though the ignorant could not tell you what
+that presence was. Genius is as the sun itself: as universally
+perceptible. Even the rustic clown feels the sun hot upon his face. Ask
+him what sun is, and he cannot say, but he feels the difference between
+sun and no sun. And the power in this rough drawing beat in upon my
+perceptions as the sun beats on the labourer's face.
+
+"I think it's a triumph," I answered. "You have caught a most startling
+look of concentration."
+
+"I am so glad!" she said, lightly.
+
+The strain was over, and she was descending into ordinary mundane life
+again, but the hand she had put on my arm chilled through the shirt
+sleeve like ice.
+
+"Do you recognise yourself?"
+
+"Ye--es," I said, slowly; "except for that very glorified nose you've
+given me!"
+
+She laughed, and moved the paper off the easel.
+
+"Now I just want to give you an idea of how the tamarisk will be
+swayed," she said, holding a crayon between her tiny white teeth, and
+motioning me to a couch under the window. "Sit down there and wait a
+minute. I'll just sketch them roughly for you to get an approximation."
+
+I sat down on the couch facing her, and occupied myself by replacing my
+collar, etc. The studio was fireless and uncommonly chilly. Then I
+leaned back and studied the girl as she sat there, one little foot
+crossed over the other, and a piece of mill-board supported on her
+raised knee. The tamarisk seemed to call for little expense of the
+divine energy, for she was as tranquil, smiling, and human as usual,
+now, as she sketched the bushes. They were far more mechanical work,
+naturally, than creating an expression and throwing it on a human face.
+The light from the window behind me fell full upon her, and seemed
+positively to brighten in her proximity. I wonder how, in their canons
+of beauty, the Latins could possibly have inscribed Frons minima,
+underrating the forehead, the sublimest feature in the human face, the
+great distinction between our countenance and that of our Simian
+prototypes. In this woman I thought it was, perhaps, her chief
+attraction. Round the temples and summit her light hair lay in thick
+loose curls. It did not "stray" anywhere. On the contrary, it was very
+intelligent hair, and knew exactly what to do with itself, how to curl
+upwards here and catch the light, how to cluster together there in
+adorable circles and half-circles in the shadow. And then came her
+forehead, a smooth band of white velvet, upon which two bow-like
+eyebrows were delicately traced. Excepting these and the vivid blue
+colouring in the eyes, and the rose and white tinting of the flesh, she
+had no positive beauties. The nose was a straight little nose, but very
+English, not the least sculptural, and the lips were rather too thick.
+They looked best when she was speaking, and their crimson was divided,
+and showed the small, even teeth behind them. Sitting watching her, now
+that her face was no longer flushed and animated in conversation, I
+noticed it looked white and tired, and all round the eyes were faint,
+discoloured shades. She looked overworked: looked as I myself looked in
+the early morning when I went upstairs from a night's work in my study
+to dress for breakfast.
+
+"What were you doing last night?" I asked, abruptly. If I interrupted
+the work on the bushes, no matter; she must work less.
+
+She looked up with a sudden flush.
+
+"How did you know?" she answered, looking at me with confusion and
+perplexity in her eyes.
+
+"I know nothing. I merely ask you. You were up all night?"
+
+Her face became quite pale again, and she raised her eyebrows with a
+slight smile of indifference.
+
+"Yes, I was."
+
+I paled too, with annoyance.
+
+"Lucia! this is the one thing I asked you to do for me; to give your
+nights, at least, to rest!"
+
+"I know you did," she said, passionately, looking at me, her lips
+quivering and her face growing paler and paler. "But it is impossible
+sometimes! What gain is there in discussing these things? A perfect
+scheme came to me last night, and I sat here thinking of it--planning
+it upon this canvas. I could not have slept had I left this room.
+Besides, to close your brain to your ideas when they do come!--it is
+madness! I might never have seen the picture so vividly before me again
+if I had not stayed to think it out, to realise it, to impress it, as
+it were, clearly on myself. I cannot promise you, Victor--I never have,
+I would not before--to go to bed and try to sleep when a plan occurs to
+me suddenly for a canvas, as it did last night!"
+
+"But think of sitting in a room like this all night with no fire! This
+studio is positively freezing!"
+
+"Is it? I don't feel it."
+
+"No. That is what I complain of. You feel nothing and think of nothing
+while you are at work, and you will injure yourself unconsciously. If
+you do these things you will certainly break down."
+
+She merely shrugged her shoulders and looked past me through the
+window, an arrogant determination filling her blue eyes. The next
+minute she was speaking rapidly, and with an intonation of impatience
+in her voice.
+
+"You know I am given over to the work--entirely, utterly. It is useless
+to expect me to sacrifice it to anything. On the contrary, everything
+must be sacrificed to it. Health, life itself, must be in the second
+place. I only value my life for the sake of this talent. Of course, I
+know if I lose my life I lose it too; but, equally, I can produce
+nothing without work. If I am to succeed I must work simply--it is
+necessity."
+
+Each word was incisive, and seemed to cut slightly like falling steel
+from those soft, warm lips. A sudden desire rushed through me to teach
+her--at any rate, to exert myself to the utmost to teach her--that her
+life was valuable to her for other things than the capacity it gave to
+work. But I checked the words and the thoughts that rose, acting on the
+same principle as had guided me hitherto. To wake her to a sense of the
+pleasure and the gifts life holds, without being able to confer
+either--that could not be any gain. I merely said:
+
+"And if you give up your life for the sake of this painting, Lucia, is
+that fair to me?"
+
+"You would have your work," she answered.
+
+The tone was cold and calm, and she went on sketching.
+
+"Do you think that would console me?"
+
+"I do not think: I am convinced of it. You are a man to whom your work,
+your genius, is everything. This holds the first, the ruling place in
+your life, and will always do so. I am in the second, I believe; but it
+is the second, and the step between is wide. It is quite right it
+should be so. I am not complaining, but it is useless to deny that it
+is so. Well, when one loses but the second object in one's life--"
+
+A soft smile swept over her face, and she lifted the white lids and
+dark lashes--that had been drooped as she looked down at the drawing
+paper--with a brilliant, mocking flash in her eyes. I met them, and
+though I was not looking at it, but directly back into her eyes, the
+whole charming figure forced itself upon my vision. The round throat
+and the fine shoulders and the delicate curves of the long figure,
+sloping to the waist beneath the white serge bodice. Had she really but
+a second place? If I realised at any time I was not to possess her
+after all, what then? Should I be consolable? An angry denial leapt to
+my lips. There was no question of first or second. These two passions
+for this woman and for my own success were coordinate forces, and their
+very equality it was that kept me passive, without decisive action
+between them.
+
+There was a sort of confusion in my brain--a longing to make some
+protestations. The words crowded excitedly to my lips, but I kept them
+closed. The conversation was on dangerous, critical ground. If I began
+to speak now, in this frame of mind, I did not know what I might say.
+My own brain was not sufficiently clear and collected. I did not know
+myself quite how far that which she had said was the truth. It is
+useless to talk vaguely and at random, or on mere passing sensations of
+the moment. Before speaking to another, before entering on a
+discussion, one must know exactly what one is saying--be prepared to
+act in accordance with every statement, and accept and realise the
+responsibility of each word, and all this at that moment I was
+not,--far from it. I felt my thoughts disordered and confused. Before
+my mental eye swam a mist of manuscript; before my physical eye rose
+and fell that gently beating breast. I took out my watch.
+
+"It's a quarter past twelve, Lucia," I said, rising; "I must go."
+
+The girl started to her feet and came in front of me.
+
+"Victor, are you offended at what I said?"
+
+I looked down at her with a slight smile.
+
+"I am not so easily offended," I said, quietly.
+
+"I will talk about all these things with you another day--not now."
+
+"And do forgive me for siting up at nights. I know you do not like it.
+I know it ruins my looks, but I must work. Besides, all my excitement,
+all my amusement, is in it too. When I am not with you it is all I
+have. It is different for you, as a man, besides your work and besides
+myself, you have all sorts of distractions and--"
+
+"What sort of distractions do you think I have?" I asked, quietly, and
+looking straight into her eyes.
+
+Her words might mean and include a very great deal.
+
+"Oh, how can I say! When you feel restless and unable to work at seven
+in the evening, say from then till seven the next morning your time is
+your own--balls, the Empire; there are a thousand things--all the
+pleasure, or at any rate the passing excitement that you can take in
+these ways, I crush into the excitement that there is in work--in
+overwork."
+
+There was nothing in the actual words, but I felt the thoughts that
+underlay them, unexpressed. I resented the opinion she held of me. It
+was untrue, and I meant to remove it. I was silent an instant, thinking
+how to find words passably comprehensible and yet conventionally
+circumlocutory and euphemistic. After a moment I said simply--
+
+"If you think I am leading a fast life, it is a mistake. I am not. What
+makes you think I have distractions, as you put it?"
+
+"Oh, nothing, except that I know you are constantly not at home at--in
+the evenings. But really, Victor--" she added, a scarlet flush leaping
+across her face, and then leaving it pale and cold, with a shade of
+reserve and pride upon it. "I have no wish to approach this subject at
+all. I should never think of enquiring into or interfering with a man's
+life. These are things that must rest in his own hands."
+
+I looked at her, as the graceful figure seemed to expand with pride, at
+the dignity of each line of her form and the pose of the distinguished
+head, and an irritated flush crept into my own face.
+
+"I am out constantly, as you say," I answered, "because I cannot sleep,
+but I walk then simply in search of fatigue. Pleasure, Lucia! there can
+be none for me now until you belong to me. As for my life, it is a
+hard-working and as absolutely without relief as your own--absolutely."
+
+She was silent.
+
+"You don't believe me?"
+
+"Of course I believe you," she answered, impulsively, putting her white
+hand suddenly into mine. "If you say so, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+She hesitated and coloured. I had not the least idea of what she was
+really going to say. I thought the "but" led to some condition more or
+less contradictory to her expression of belief in me, or, perhaps, to
+some statement she had heard, or something that she had thought. And I
+pressed her.
+
+"But what?" I repeated.
+
+"I was going to say, I have no wish to make your life harder than it
+is. I do not want our engagement to impose impossible laws upon you,
+nor do I set up an imaginary standard for you. You have your honour and
+your own self-respect, and I know I shall always be satisfied with the
+standard you raise for yourself."
+
+The voice was very soft, and her touch and eyes caressing. She had not
+said in the least what I had expected, and she had touched, as she
+always did in me, the best springs in my thoughts. Her own pride, and
+her unquestioning assumption of mine, stung all that I had.
+
+"Even you, Lucia, could not have a higher!" I answered on the impulse.
+
+She smiled.
+
+"That is exactly what I say," she said, and the smile went on into a
+slight laugh. "When will you come again to sit for Hyacinthus?"
+
+"To-morrow, at the same time! Will that do?"
+
+"Yes. It's immensely good of you. How can I thank you?"
+
+I looked down at the red lips, at the delightful neck and shoulders,
+for a second in silence, then I pressed her hand, whistled to Nous, and
+went out. As soon as I had passed down the stairs and reached the
+street the bitter rush of feelings that the sight of this girl roused
+in me, and that her actual presence held in check, swept over me
+unrestrained. Why had I left her like that? I asked myself savagely.
+Why had I not drawn her into my arms and kissed her till all that soft
+delicate face was one flame of scarlet? Then a contemptuous smile came
+with the answering thought. What use were mere empty kisses if she gave
+me a thousand! This state of things could not go on. The life that I
+led seemed growing more and more unendurable week by week. It was a
+life of perpetual restraint, of refusal to every wish, of denial to
+every desire that rose in me, in which there was a bar laid upon every
+impulse, and an immovable chain upon every tendency. I was ambitious,
+and I could get no recognition. I was gifted, at least in my own
+estimation, and I could force open no field for my gifts. I was in
+love, and there was no means of attaining its object. Patience!
+patience! This was what I had been saying to myself hour by hour for
+two years, but there were times when it seemed that my brain, my whole
+system, was collapsing in the nervous irritation, in the chafing and
+the straining of this existence, which was filled with nothing but
+successless work, continuous disappointment, and unsatisfied desires.
+
+Night succeeded night in which sleep was an impossibility, when my head
+seemed light and turning as in delirium with the violence and intensity
+of longing to shape my life differently. Could I have obtained the
+fulfilment of one desire or of the other, the strength of my nature
+would have flowed naturally into the channel opened before it. Could I
+have seen my work succeeding I would have foregone everything else
+willingly and worked with satisfied ardour, closing my eyes to the
+pleasure of life. Could I have obtained Lucia I would have been content
+to work and wait patiently till success chose to come to me. But the
+latter desire depended on the former, and when I thought of Lucia, her
+image only brought back upon me the stunning, deadening sense of the
+necessity of success, and so my thoughts were dragged round in a
+perpetual, wearying, dizzying circle, like a fixed wheel revolving
+without motion forward.
+
+I had grown to hate my present daily existence. It was a state of
+enforced passive inaction that seemed corroding my nerves as the long
+worn fetter eats into the flesh. The current of life was running at its
+swiftest and fiercest in my veins. Vitality was ardent in the brain and
+blood, but there was no worthy expense of my energies, and they simply
+fell back upon themselves again and again, thwarted, baffled, unused,
+until existence seemed an intolerable curse. I saw daily other men's
+works accepted and received, and their talent and genius praised that
+could produce such a work, which, when it drifted into my hands, I
+recognised was no better than the MSS. lying in my study, unused,
+wasted. Sometimes the morning of a day would pass in looking through
+the reviews and criticisms of the favourite novel of the hour, the
+afternoon in reading the book itself and forming a judgment of it, and
+then an evening of sickly irritation would follow, in which, pacing
+backwards and forwards, in the empty study, I had to admit that the
+author, no more gifted, no more favoured with talent than myself, had
+been successful and I had not. The very praise I received for my powers
+from men who would not help me to employ them was a maddening stimulus.
+
+"Talent? Yes, decidedly, but too heterodox for us."
+
+This was the general resume of the opinion of the publishing world that
+had determined to eject me and shut its door in my face. Had it been
+hinted that the rejection was on the ground of incapacity it would have
+been easier to bear, but, without exception, every declined manuscript
+had been accompanied with a warm commendation of the art that the
+critic chose to think was so misapplied. Often, walking up and down the
+length of that study with these letters of empty compliment crowding
+the mantelpiece, I felt like a captured tiger in a cage, being goaded
+and thrust at through the bars. And, together with this excessive
+longing of the brain to employ its power raged the useless, vehement
+desire for the woman, until in those moments of silent solitude, it
+seemed as if two living vultures were upon me, slowly tearing me
+asunder. As I walked away from Lucia this morning, and when I reached
+my own steps, I was conscious of a sense of physical illness; my head
+seemed light and dizzy, as when one gets up after long fever. I was so
+long opening the door that Nous, who had pushed his whole body close up
+against it, looked at me with surprise. As we went in I had one clear
+determination, and that was to apply once more to my father for help.
+He could, if he would, enable me to marry Lucia. Success must come with
+time. It was this time that would be transformed. This time, this daily
+life of waiting work, that hung upon me now like a wolf, with its
+fangs, gnawing my brain, would then, if I possessed her, pass by like a
+dove upon wings. After luncheon, when he was standing by the hearth, I
+thought, was a good time to approach the subject, and I came up to the
+other end of the mantelpiece.
+
+"Don't you think you could," I said, striking a lucifer and lighting up
+a cigar, without the least wish to smoke at that moment, "manage to let
+Lucia and myself arrange something?"
+
+He looked at me a little ironically.
+
+"Have you heard that the firm have rescinded their decision, and are
+going to bring out the book after all?" he asked quietly.
+
+I coloured with anger and annoyance at the sneer. "No," I answered,
+simply, "I have not."
+
+"Then, my dear Victor, you know it is quite useless to re-open this old
+question. I have told you before, and I can only repeat it now, I am
+not going to make you an independent allowance, that you may marry your
+cousin and comfortably settle down into a do-nothing existence."
+
+"I never propose such an existence," I answered calmly. "Have I ever
+led it? am I leading it now?"
+
+"No, because just now you have every incentive to work, and you have
+all your energies turned in that one direction, but with a secured
+income, independence, and married to this girl, I know exactly what you
+would become, and if I can prevent it, I am not going to have my son a
+confirmed idler about town."
+
+"I can't think how you can so misjudge me," I said. "If you would make
+me an allowance--say 300 Pounds Sterling a year--half the rent of this
+house we live in!" I added bitterly. "I should marry Lucia, but on that
+account I should not neglect the work. Incentive! I should have every
+inducement to work then as now!--if inducement were necessary--Which it
+is not. I work now, not because I am driven by motives and wishes, but
+because to write is as natural to me as to sleep or breathe!"
+
+"Please remember you are talking to a sane Englishman," he answered
+coldly; "and if you want me to listen to you, you must talk sense."
+
+"Very good," I said, bringing my teeth down nervously on the cigar.
+"Put it entirely on the ground of motive if you like; I should want to
+succeed then doubly, and success is only a thing of time. It will come
+one day to me, as it has come to others who have had the same
+difficulties at first."
+
+My father smiled sceptically.
+
+"We shall see. In any case, if you are so certain of success, you can't
+object to the fulfilment of your wishes resting on so sure a
+contingency!"
+
+"That has nothing to do with it. I did not say how long success might
+not be deferred, and I am unwilling to wait in these circumstances."
+
+"Ah!--delightful frankness!" he returned derisively, and I looked away
+from him into the fire.
+
+It shot across me then, amongst my own worrying thoughts, how strange
+it is that one human being should have so little sympathy with another,
+that where one can, without the least annoyance to himself, confer all
+that another desires, there seems always some inexplicable impulse to
+withhold it. And I--if I had power to give, if I ever possessed money,
+it should be to give, give freely and without conditions to those who
+needed it.
+
+Perhaps my father guessed what I was thinking of. At any rate, he
+recommenced the conversation by saying--
+
+"You have had a great deal done for you, Victor, though you may
+consider yourself very ill-used. You had a most expensive education.
+Then you passed into the army--brilliantly, I admit, but you were aided
+in every possible way. Then you had a fancy to go to India. Well, I got
+your regiment changed, and you went. Six months after you write that
+you have determined to become an author. I assent to that, much against
+my judgment, and you send in your papers. Good. What have you done
+since then? Nothing but write things no one will print, and hang about
+your cousin!"
+
+A dull anger lit up in all my veins, and sent the blood to my head at
+his words. Still, they were practically the truth, and I knew I had no
+right to resent them.
+
+"Now," he continued, "I make you a reasonable and just proposal, and
+you know that it is so. I give you every opportunity to display your
+talent, if you have any, which I very seriously doubt. You have leisure
+and unlimited means at your disposal. I only stipulate that before I
+make you independent, and before you marry, you shall give some proof
+of your powers in literature. I don't say you must wait till you have
+acquired a fortune. Your first production that is accepted and
+acknowledged sets you free. When I see you are really on the way to a
+profession, I will take care your finances don't trouble you, and as to
+marriage, you can then, of course, do what you please. But as to
+assisting you now to hurry into an affair that I don't under any
+circumstances particularly approve of--No."
+
+"Why don't you approve of it?" I said, with a faint smile; "if I were
+in love with a housemaid or a ballet dancer I could understand your
+objection, but a girl in our own rank, educated, pretty, clever--what
+more would you have?"
+
+My father shrugged his shoulders and elevated his eyebrows, and finally
+answered--"I should have liked a little more sanity between you.
+Remember there is insanity on her side and insanity on yours, and you
+both of you seem half-cracky already, to my mind. Then you are cousins.
+The relationship is near, unpleasantly near. You are both very much
+alike, extremely excitable, and with both your heads stuffed full of
+nonsense. She is exceedingly delicate, and no wonder, sitting up all
+night sketching and sitting in all day painting! I wish you could have
+chosen some strong, sensible, matter-of-fact young woman!"
+
+I smiled as I listened. The combination of those three adjectives
+fairly set my teeth on edge, and suddenly I seemed to see Lucia's pale
+brilliant face, with its dilated eyes and genius-lit pupils, swimming
+in the shaft of sunlight that fell between us on the rug.
+
+"What the children of two such maniacs will be, I tremble to think of!"
+he said after a minute.
+
+I laughed outright, flung my cigar end into the fire, and stretched
+myself.
+
+"I don't think you need trouble about the children!" I said
+significantly.
+
+His remark sounded so ludicrous to me that my answer came
+spontaneously, but it was the worst thing I could have said. My
+father's old-fashioned ideas were the rock upon which we invariably
+split. Otherwise we should have got on very well. But he was entirely
+of the school of yesterday, and I was entirely of the school of
+to-morrow. His forehead contracted violently, and he said curtly--
+
+"Now, don't let me hear any of that ridiculous nonsense you were
+talking the other day! I won't have these sentiments expressed in my
+hearing!"
+
+I laughed, and said nothing. I never wish to express sentiments in
+anybody's hearing that they don't want.
+
+"Of course," he said, finally, after a long pause, "you can please
+yourself. If you like to try and find a situation as clerk or secretary
+or shoe-black, and marry this girl on the proceeds, do so. But if you
+do, you will get no help from me in future. Don't come to me then for
+funds to bring out your MSS. If you choose to disgrace your family and
+disappoint my expectations, consider yourself entirely cut off from me,
+that's all."
+
+There was another stretch of silence, and then--
+
+"Well, which is it to be, Victor? Lucia or Genius?"
+
+"I really hardly know," I answered, lightly. "I want them both. I'll
+think it over."
+
+And with Nous, who had sprung to his feet as I moved, closely following
+me, I crossed the dining-room and went out, upstairs to my own writing
+and sitting-room. Here I flung myself into an arm-chair and let my hand
+hang over the side and rest on the collie's neck. And as I curled
+absently the locks of fur round my fingers, the thought came--When
+would my hand play as familiarly with those short, glistening curls on
+Lucia's forehead? Of course, as far as that went, we were engaged, and
+I might have put our relations on a far more intimate and familiar
+footing than they were now. I might have kissed her, twisted and
+untwisted that great cable of hair, put my arm round her waist, and so
+on and so on. No one would have objected since we were fiances and, in
+addition, cousins. And it is difficult to define exactly the impulse
+that had prompted me to abstain from all of these things. Partly it was
+an impulse in her defence, and partly in my own. I felt that it was
+difficult enough, hard enough, to keep in perfect control my own
+passionate impulses when I was with her, even now, while there was the
+screen and shield between us of her abstracted calm; when there was a
+certain coldness and reserve around her; when there was no beginning,
+no opening, no invitation of demonstration; when her complete
+unconsciousness of herself helped me to restrain and conceal all my own
+feelings; but if this were dispelled; if she came to greet me with the
+bright conscious flush of passion; if I saw reflected in her eyes the
+fire that burnt in me; if I were permitted to take her into my arms and
+cheat myself for a single illusive instant with the thought that she
+was mine--what would it all mean? Only giving a sharper, more cutting
+edge to the bit in my mouth and rousing in her a hunger I could not
+satisfy. She was at present devoted to her art with a devotion that
+left her practically indifferent to everything else, and there was a
+thin frame of ice round her, which her abstraction and her ceaseless
+work built up; but I was convinced that the smouldering fire of a
+woman's nature lay underneath--that it was concealed never cheated me
+for an instant into the belief it was not existent. She was
+pure--perfectly, absolutely immaculate; but there was another power
+within and transfused throughout her innocence that swayed and subdued
+my will as innocence alone could never do. She reminded me of some
+exquisite, delicate porcelain flagon filled with sparkling wine, that
+sends its hot crimson glow through the snowy transparent tints of its
+circling walls. The wine within lies, at present, in glowing
+tranquillity, unshaken and unstirred, and the beauty and the purity of
+the flagon grows upon one as one looks. One would hesitate certainly to
+stretch an unclean hand to lift it, hesitate to touch it with lips that
+were not pure--but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are
+clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within
+that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because
+they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of
+porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the
+potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us
+that that within is wine. And as the purity of a cup like this is
+different from that of a clean, thick, common china cup standing empty
+on the board, so was Lucia different from the ordinary virtuous English
+girl. And for her I would do and suffer much, and feel glad in it. I
+looked upon her as this vase, and since I had known her I had kept my
+hand clean, that one day I might take it without remorse. And in my
+treatment of herself I acted as I did because I saw that, as yet, her
+passions and her nature slumbered, just as the wine, unshaken, is
+steady within the cup.
+
+Now, in my present helpless condition, to merely wake and rouse them,
+to distract and disturb her, and lift her out of her art, to draw her
+half from her own life, before I could take her wholly into my own,
+seemed a sacrilegious cruelty. And this was why, from the commencement
+of our engagement, I had said to myself--On this one condition only.
+
+This was why, on the evening when I put the circlet of the engagement
+ring over the delicate finger, I had not touched the lips thanking me.
+I knew I could not kiss her coldly. These things depend upon one's
+nature. Some men shake hands listlessly. I cannot. If I take a friend's
+hand I grasp it warmly. How then, here, with those passive lips under
+mine, could I prevent them from drawing in the enthusiasm from my own?
+And this once done, I did not know how it might stir in her, and break
+up her life and turn her aside from the tranquil path of abstraction
+and occupation she was following now. I am not saying that, as a rule,
+a woman waits for her lover's kiss to arouse her. On the contrary, I am
+well aware that most women are uncommonly wide-awake from their
+thirteenth year, and it is a very old-fashioned and quite exploded idea
+to suppose that the springs of their nature lie dormant until one
+particular individual unlocks them. I am only saying that this girl was
+as yet entirely given over to her genius, and happy in it; and I loved
+her too well to weaken an impulse towards art which she could gratify,
+and create an impulse towards love which I could not for so long
+satisfy. So with all this in my brain, and with a guard upon myself
+that had never been relaxed since, I released her hand, with my ring
+upon it, as gently as I had taken it, and the quiver of nervous,
+painful excitement, that had shot through me as she laid it on my knee
+confirmed my resolution. Why teach her also, one moment before she need
+know it, the pain of self-repression?
+
+"Is it not pretty," she had said.
+
+"Which, the hand or the ring?"
+
+"Why, the ring, of course," she had said, laughing. "You are too bad,
+Victor!"
+
+"I don't know. I think the hand is decidedly the lovelier. But the ring
+is useful as a sign that now there is but one man in the world for you,
+as, Lucia, there is for me henceforth but one woman."
+
+She had looked up suddenly, and her eyes had met mine with the passion
+kept out of them, and only reverence for her there. And even at that
+the fugitive scarlet had stained the pale skin, and the eyes had
+widened and darkened upon me, asking, Tell me, explain what this
+mysterious feeling is that seems stirring faintly in me? And I had
+looked back at her in silence, with a word unuttered, but still perhaps
+divined by her, on my lips.
+
+Later!
+
+And now things had come to a crisis. I felt as if I could not stand any
+longer, clear-headed and hard-working as I had been, against this
+repeated raising, then deferring, then breaking down of hope.
+
+Constantly I had given rein to my thoughts and wishes; many times I had
+said, "This book will certainly be accepted, and then a month or a few
+weeks and she is my own."
+
+But the book had not been taken, the weeks passed by and Lucia was as
+far from me as ever. And it could not continue. The perpetual
+excitation and reaction was slowly injuring and confusing the brain
+like a noxious drug administered to procure lunacy. And the temptation
+swept over me now to let go my hold on work, on this bitter effort to
+succeed, on this vain, useless striving for recognition, and sink into
+some humble position which would supply the necessities for a quiet
+obscure existence--shared with this woman. The weeks, months, years,
+passed now, wasted, in a dull torture, in a low fever, filled with
+long, dragging hopes, expectations, possibilities, and no realities.
+Better sweep all these away and settle into a level, solid existence,
+contented with the simple natural pleasures that life offers without
+striving for. Contented! I laughed as the word drifted across my brain.
+That was just what I felt I could not be in any life but the one I
+coveted--a life of power, recognition, distinction. Other men were.
+They married the women they loved, and dropped into quiet lives of
+daily work and regular incomes, and were content in them. Yes; but that
+was insufficient argument.
+
+They had not within them the suffocating weight of a desire
+ungratified, the stifling sense of a power unused. Nature, who has
+appointed no greater joy for us than the exercise of the capacities she
+has given us, has also no heavier, bitterer burden she can lay upon us
+than these capacities barred down in us unemployed. As I thought, my
+father's words recurred to me, "A secretary, a clerk or a shoeblack."
+It was improbable I should descend to the shoeblack. It was possible
+that I could become a secretary or a clerk. A secretary or a clerk! The
+idea amused me. I leaned my elbows on my knees, my forehead on my
+hands, as I sat and stared down at the bear-skin rug at my feet and saw
+a vision of fifth-rate existence pass before me. A suburban villa or
+squalid London lodgings; the hurried early breakfast served by a
+slavey; the tram or bus to the city; the society of seedy clerks; the
+pipe instead of the cigar; the public billiard room instead of the
+club; the omnibus instead of the hansom; the fortnight up the Thames
+instead of the spring at Cairo. A day of uncongenial work--but at the
+end of it Lucia!
+
+The thought seemed to come suddenly and stunningly through my brain
+like a bullet. The blood rushed to my face and I got up and crossed to
+the window, looking out and seeing nothing. Lucia daily, hourly, side
+by side with me in my life, and utterly my own possession! Yes, it was
+worth it! Worth all those petty considerations that had been passing
+before me, but there was another heavier than all the others massed
+together. My leisure would be taken from me. It would be impossible to
+write then as I was writing now. Now, I was absolutely my own master,
+and disposed of my time exactly as I pleased, and days passed
+constantly which were wholly spent in the preparation of a manuscript
+and when my train of thought was never interrupted. If all my days were
+given to monotonous business work, how then, and when, would the
+writing be accomplished? My evenings and nights would be my own--or
+Lucia's; and this line of reflection finished in an ironical laugh. I
+walked to and fro, one word hammering persistently on my
+brain-sacrifice. To accept a humble, working position, and in it to
+marry a woman as lovely, as vehemently desired, and as long waited for
+as Lucia, would mean the sacrifice of my talent. It would mean a
+suppression, a thrusting aside of work, and, to a certain extent, of
+thought. In such a life there would be so little place for it. Between
+the necessity of rejecting impersonal or imaginative thought to make
+room for the diurnal business routine, and the irresistible temptations
+to reject it at other times for present personal pleasure, it would be
+rarely accepted or welcomed, and its impetus would gradually weaken or
+lessen. Even as I thought of it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of all
+the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The rebellion of
+all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by the physical.
+What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental sinews to gratify
+the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental emotions to give reins
+to the physical? It would be the work of a fool. A rooting-up fruit
+trees to clear a space for weeds. And what of those twenty-six years of
+life that lay behind me? Did they count for nothing? Was all the
+repression and the hard work they contained to be flung aside now and
+wasted? Was the whole principle that had shaped them, of living in and
+for the intellect, to be utterly reversed now? And yet it was a
+wretched, poor, burdensome thing, life, as it had been lived by me. The
+past years stared me in the face mockingly. Clean, capable of being
+scrutinised in the sunlight, estimable from a moral and mental
+standpoint, but absolutely barren of pleasure, and, so far, barren of
+result. I looked at them with little satisfaction or pride. They were
+as immaculate, as bare, as denuded, as irritating, and as painful to
+contemplate as a chalk cliff. The character that is summed up in the
+line "video meliora proboque, detiora sequor" is supposed to be very
+common, and meets with universal comprehension and commiseration. Mine,
+perhaps, would find neither. I followed the good--that is, good as the
+world's opinion goes--the straight line in life, without any of the
+enthusiasm for virtue to form a consolation and support. I looked upon
+vice without that repulsion that makes resistance to it easy, pleasant,
+involuntary almost. I felt no sense of strong condemnation of those
+acts or failings or lapses in others which I studiously avoided myself.
+Therefore, I had neither the pleasure that might be derived from the
+evil itself, nor the warm satisfaction and personal pride that comes
+from conscious superiority to one's neighbours. I had lived the life of
+a Puritan, but I had neither the heart nor brain of one. None of the
+rigid bigotry, none of the exultant delight in morality, none of the
+merciless joy in trampling upon pleasure which gives him his reward. I
+looked round upon life and its many devious ways with eyes listless and
+indifferent to its vice and sympathetic to its pleasure, and back upon
+my own straight path with something of regret that my self-respect had
+been strong enough to hold me to it. And now the temptation came to
+sacrifice all that I had clung to. To abolish the thought and
+remembrance of my talent, muffle and stifle the powers of the brain,
+and remember only that I had the pulses and senses and blood of a man.
+It came over me slowly, this phase of rebellious animalism, like a
+mantle falling over me. Thought followed thought insidiously,
+imperceptibly, like fold upon fold of a cloth dropped upon me, as I sat
+in the silent room alone. To take this girl and force back her art upon
+itself, to mutilate her brain-power and drug it with her roused
+sensuality, to turn her into a simple instrument of pleasure for
+myself, and lend myself to her as such. To yield to this inflowing tide
+of desire that beat, now, heavily through all my veins, and let the
+brain go down beneath its waves.
+
+If I chose I could do it, and none but myself could gauge the depth of
+my debasement. No eye could discern the high level ground now on which
+I stood and the morass that swam before me. I should marry this girl
+and the world asks no more. This other lower life that lay in my power
+appealed to me in all its sweetness--this woman as she would be when
+mine. Those lips with the mark of mine upon them; those delicate nerves
+stung to frenzy; that form tense, and the limbs strung with passion;
+those eyes terror-stricken between anguish and ecstasy.
+
+The thought of the woman's personality clung to me like a viscous web.
+I struggled against it, but it enwrapped me; I could not shake it from
+me.
+
+Again and again my arm encircled those soft yielding shoulders; the
+warm agitated bosom was touching mine; my hands held, and felt within
+it, the smooth muscles of the white arm--a vision of the whole
+indefinably supple form swam giddily before me in a suffocating
+proximity, till I pressed my hands on my eyes, and the thought came
+involuntarily,--Is this insanity?
+
+My brain gave her into my arms now as I sat there, and the blind
+physical system clamoured in agony, Where is she? An hour passed, and
+then I got up and laughed. The destructive wave of emotion had risen in
+me, rolled through me and gone by. The struggle was over, and I lived
+again but to work. I stood on the rug rolling a cigarette, and lighted
+it leisurely, trying to recall a respectable calm, and when I had
+fairly succeeded I went out and downstairs. I came into the dining-room
+and found my father still there, looking through a budget of political
+pamphlets that had just come in by the post.
+
+He looked up, and I met his eyes with a laugh.
+
+"I have decided not to look out for a vacancy in the shoeblack line," I
+said; "but to go on--up the hill. Is there any claret or water or soda
+about--I don't much care what it is?"
+
+"There is claret and soda too--there on the cheffonier. What a pity it
+is, Victor, you are so unreasonable! You make yourself look deplorably
+ill about every trifle! You are certainly trying to find a short cut
+out of the world! Why don't you take things more easily?"
+
+"I am as I am," I muttered. "I'm going out now," I said, when I had
+finished the soda.
+
+"I'm going to look Howard up. I have got a new plan of work if he'll
+join me in it. I shall see."
+
+My father elevated his shoulders as much as to say, Some new phase of
+dementia, I suppose, and I went out.
+
+I took the underground to Baker Street, and thence two minutes' walk
+brought me to the house I wanted. Howard was a friend of mine, an
+intimate friend, though, strictly speaking, from his character he ought
+not to have been.
+
+As a general rule I steer clear of friendships with men who are very
+much opposed to me in character; it saves a lot of bother in the end.
+However, in this case, although I believed Howard to be a weak,
+worthless, untrustworthy individual, I could not help liking him. He
+was talented and of a pleasing--at least to me--personality. When I
+came into his room he was sitting reading in a long chair by the fire.
+
+"Oh! is that you, Vic? Come in," he said, turning a good-looking
+discontented face towards me, not improved just now by the effects of a
+severe attack of jaundice.
+
+"How are you?" I said, shaking his saffron-hued hand.
+
+"Pretty beastly. And you?"
+
+"Your remark might serve, I think," I said, taking a chair opposite him.
+
+"Aren't you any better?" and I scanned his face closely.
+
+He was not more than twenty, and had a singularly fine type of
+countenance.
+
+"Oh yes, thanks! Crawling on."
+
+"Any news?"
+
+"None, I think, except that I've broken with Kitty."
+
+I laughed.
+
+"I knew you'd have to!" I said. "Did I not say so from the first? I
+felt sure you could never stand her!"
+
+"I am rather sorry, for she was very pretty; but the last straw she put
+upon me was too much. I couldn't--after that--no, I couldn't, really."
+
+"What was it?" I said, laughing, as he shook his head dubiously and
+looked meditatively into the fire.
+
+"Why, I sent her a sonnet--at least, no, a verse--and we were talking
+about it afterwards, I had written--"
+
+     'And leaning sideways, looks, and lifts
+     The tresses of her heavy hair.'
+
+"See?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Well, she objected to the adjective 'heavy,' and wanted me to insert
+another. What word do you think she suggested?"
+
+"Can't say at all. Golden, perhaps!"
+
+"Worse!" he answered, with a groan. "Golden is hackneyed but still
+conceivable. No--Crimpy! my dear fellow! Think of it!"
+
+I went into a fit of laughter.
+
+"Heavens! well I must say I never should have thought of that," I said.
+"What a fearful girl. And what did you say?"
+
+"Say! I tried to explain to her the awfulness of it, the incongruity,
+but no, she couldn't see it! We jawed about it for a couple of hours
+with the result that our engagement is now off!"
+
+"Good. I am very glad to hear it; but perhaps a Breach of Promise will
+come on?"
+
+"Can't help it. Anything would be better than to go through life with a
+girl who didn't feel there are some things no fellar can do; and one of
+them, that he can't put a word like crimpy in his sonnet."
+
+"Been doing any work?"
+
+"Yes; one poem. Like to see it?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+He got up and went to a table littered all over with papers--written,
+printed, and blank. After a time he extracted the one he wanted, handed
+it to me, and then flung himself into the chair again.
+
+"Whew! This title won't do. 'The Hermaphrodite!' That's far too
+alarming for the British public."
+
+"Oh, bother! Well, go on. Read the poem."
+
+I did so in silence.
+
+"First-rate," I said, when I had finished. "Not a weak line in it. Not
+a single weak line. And there's nothing to prevent its being taken even
+in this d----d England, I think. The title's the worst part. You'll
+have to alter that."
+
+"Why? Swinburne has a poem, 'Hermaphroditus.'"
+
+"Yes--in a volume; and there it's Latinised; and then Swinburne has
+made his name, which of course is everything. If you want to make your
+debut before the English reading world you must do so with 'Ode to my
+father's tombstone,' or something of that sort!"
+
+"Well, if you think Latin would improve it, let's put 'Duplexus' as its
+title," he answered, laughing and trying to snatch back the paper.
+
+"Not on any account!" I said. "That would sound cynical, and cynical
+when you're unknown you must not be."
+
+"Oh, well, there! I leave it to you to find a title! I don't care what
+it's called."
+
+I looked through the verses trying to catch an idea for a name. Numbers
+suggested themselves to me, but none sufficiently vague and indefinite
+to suit the English ear. At last I said--
+
+"Do you think Linked Spheres would do?"
+
+"Linked Spheres?" replied Howard, with elevated brows. "What on earth
+has that to do with the subject?"
+
+"Well, I have taken it from this line where you say, 'And in his brain
+are two divided worlds of thought.'"
+
+"But I say that they are divided--divided isn't linked!"
+
+"No, I quite admit it. But though divided they must be linked to a
+certain extent by being both within his brain. It is not quite right
+though, because the walls of the skull might, by encircling the two
+worlds, be said to unite them, but they could not 'link' anything. I
+follow all that, and I don't think the title is particularly artistic.
+It's not clear enough. Your own is much better from the view of
+intrinsic fitness. But the beauty of Linked Spheres is its
+indistinctness. You must not be too clear. That has been my great
+fault--perspicuity--and I am beginning to see it now. It has fatally
+barred my getting on. I always do try to make people see exactly what I
+mean, and that is apparently a mistake. When I write about passion
+everybody feels it is passion, and is shocked in consequence. When
+another fellow writes about it you feel he is trying to say something,
+but you are not quite sure what, and so it doesn't matter."
+
+"'Muddle it! muddle it!' must be your watchword if you want to pass
+muster through the British press. Linked Spheres is a splendid
+muddle--very indefinite, quite void of connection with the subject in
+hand, and with a pleasant tinkle about the sound, just like Gladstone's
+speeches! Linked Spheres! It's impossible, for how the deuce would you
+link a sphere? Metaphor all wrong, and no one will know in the least
+what you mean, but it sounds pleasant and polished, and perfectly
+proper, and you'll find your editor will swallow the poem at a gulp."
+
+Howard laughed.
+
+"You're in an awful huff, Victor, with the British press, that's clear!"
+
+I laughed too.
+
+"Yes I am, I admit it, and all this leads up to the question I came to
+ask you this afternoon. Will you come over to Paris with me? I am
+going."
+
+I got up and leant against the mantel-piece, pushing a place clear for
+my elbow on it between a bottle of liqueur and a copy of "The Holy
+Grail."
+
+"You're great at springing mines upon one. Paris? why Paris? And how
+can you tear yourself away from Lucia?"
+
+"I wish you would not pronounce that word as if it rhymed with
+Fuchsia," I said.
+
+"Well, how do you want me to pronounce it?"
+
+"You know quite well its Lu-chee-ah, and the accent is on the middle
+syllable, not the first."
+
+"Oh, all right: Lu-CHEE-ah. Ah! what a mouthful! I would rather say
+Miss Grant!"
+
+"It might be as well if you did," I said, coldly.
+
+Howard looked at me and opened his eyes.
+
+"You are uncommonly sticky to-day," he said, kicking a very old slipper
+off his swinging foot and catching it on the toe again.
+
+"Well, what about Paris? Let's hear."
+
+"I am so sick of this rotten, wishy-washy England. They won't take my
+things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First
+Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall
+turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends
+itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as
+men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular
+vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen
+must remain always a stick dipped in ink. It must never become what
+mine is--a painter's brush, wet, dripping, overflowing with oil colour.
+It struck me you might care to come too, and do the same with your
+verse. If so--come, by all means."
+
+I looked down at his intelligent face and hoped he would come. Selfish,
+conceited, and self-sufficient as I may be, there is a strand of
+weakness made up in my composition that forces me to find the
+companionship of another intellect whenever possible.
+
+"Yes; I'll come," he answered after a minute, getting on to his feet
+and thrusting both hands into his pockets with an energetic air. "I'm
+rather dubious about the books and the translation business; but anyway
+we can have a high old time in Paris!"
+
+"But look here, Howard," I returned, "whether I succeed or not, I am
+not meditating having any high old time, or rather what you mean--a low
+old time. I'm going there to work."
+
+"Oh, we all know you're a saint!" he said derisively. "But--'A doubtful
+throne is ice on summer seas!' We shall see how long your virtue lasts
+at La Scala and in the Champs Elysees, with Lucia safely packed away in
+England!"
+
+I smiled and raised my eyebrows in silence. The point was not worth
+discussing. Howard and I looked at some things from such an enormously
+different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It
+was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a
+boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift
+away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level
+in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole
+psychological system--self-control and self-respect--were entirely
+absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of
+utility, at his every bad one from the point of secrecy. He would do
+the first if it were useful to him, and the last if it were secret.
+These, I believe, were the only two conditions that ever occurred to
+him. He was weak, even contemptible, in character, and I could not help
+clearly seeing it, but my friendship to him was won over by his
+talents, and by a certain good-tempered, easy, pleasant way he had.
+Widely different though we were, we had never had a quarrel. We got on
+together perfectly, and he might say things to me that would have
+offended me from an other man. Liking! Liking! What is it? It is as
+difficult to define, as impossible to imprison between the limits of
+motives and reasons, of "Whys" and "becauses," as Loving. I liked
+Howard, or rather I liked his society, which is not the same thing.
+Often the people who are the most disappointing in the great issues of
+life are the pleasantest to live with through the trifles of everyday
+existence and vice versa. I would not have trusted Howard in a crisis
+for any consideration, but then crises don't come every day, and he was
+delightful to discuss a chapter or a sonnet with.
+
+"When are you going, by the way? Not to-morrow, I hope, for behold this
+room!" and he glanced round helplessly.
+
+It was certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Masses
+of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books
+stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers occupied the chairs.
+
+"No, next week. Shall we say Saturday?"
+
+"All right. I'll be ready by then. Cross--evening, I suppose?"
+
+"Very likely. But I shall see you again," I said, looking at my watch.
+"By Jove! close to seven. I must go. Try and get rid of that confounded
+jaundice. Good-bye!"
+
+Howard extended his hand.
+
+"By the way, what about the tin? Can you manage?"--
+
+"Oh yes! That's all right," I said.
+
+I was Howard's bank, upon which he drew fitfully and spasmodically:
+that is to say, when any expensive little fancy seized him. He always
+insisted on giving me I.O.U.'s and acknowledgments for the sums he
+borrowed, which I as regularly tore in pieces and put in the fire. I
+was half way down the stairs when I ran back and opened his door again.
+
+"Howard!"
+
+"Hullo!"
+
+"Have you a copy of that verse? I have not half studied it this
+evening."
+
+"What?" he said, looking round his chair back. "Your precious Linked
+Spheres? Yes; take that one if you like."
+
+I took up the paper.
+
+"Thanks!" I said, and re-descended the stairs.
+
+Going down Baker Street, I stopped at the first lamp-post, and read
+some lines of it again. A glow of admiration, almost of affection,
+towards the curious lines, full of nascent genius, lit slowly in me.
+
+"Splendid! magnificent!" I muttered. "If not here, I'll see it's got
+out in Paris."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The next week saw myself and Howard installed in Paris. We had two
+large, comfortable rooms on the second floor, opening into each other,
+well furnished and upholstered in every way as sitting-rooms, as most
+of the French bedrooms are.
+
+They faced a corner where several boulevards met and diverged, and
+there was a constant stream of Paris life flowing beneath our windows
+every hour of the day. A balcony ran outside, and on this in the
+evening we used to stand and smoke and flick paper balls on to the
+heads of the grisettes and the bonnes passing far underneath. On the
+ground floor of the hotel was a cafe that extended also over the
+pavement with its chairs and tables, and was open to the general public
+as well as to those who were staying in the hotel.
+
+Howard and I got on admirably as usual. Although we were so different
+we had the common ground of a similarity in intellect. On all strictly
+intellectual subjects, in psychological discussions, on points of
+artistic merit, we seldom differed. His brain was, when he chose to
+exert it, singularly brilliant, and in a companion this compensates me
+for everything else almost that is wanting. I could not certainly have
+lived in the same intimacy with a fool who had been as high principled,
+as moral, and as sober as Howard was the reverse of all these. Our mode
+of life was very different, as naturally it would be, since I had come
+with a predetermination to do nothing but work, and he with an equally
+strong one to idle his days away in the most enjoyable manner he could
+invent. For myself, I was fairly content with the prospect before me.
+Work I was accustomed to, and it was easy. A new idea for a manuscript
+had begun to hover fitfully before my mental vision, and was gradually
+absorbing my thoughts into itself. Had I been able to write to and hear
+from Lucia I should have been satisfied, but my father had made the
+absence of all correspondence between us a sine qua non of my coming
+here. When I had heard this I had looked at him with some little
+amusement. Such a stipulation as this seemed to me to have only one
+interpretation--he hoped and thought I should forget her!
+
+"What is the meaning of this?" I asked. "What can be the benefit of it?
+How can the fact of our writing or not writing be of importance? Do you
+think I shall ever relinquish Lucia? I am resigned to wait as long as
+must be, but I am utterly determined to have her in the end."
+
+To which my father had answered grimly with a smile,--
+
+"Very well, my dear Victor, see that you get her!"
+
+Which remark had made me grind my teeth and then laugh and shrug my
+shoulders.
+
+"And you won't permit a letter a month?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh, dressed in your little brief authority!" I thought, looking at
+him. Then I said--
+
+"Very good--I agree."
+
+"I consider I have your word that you will not write, nor hear from
+her, directly or indirectly, within this year?"
+
+"Certainly you have."
+
+And so the matter was settled.
+
+When Lucia heard of it, we met each other's eyes, and she elevated her
+eyebrows, and a faint smile curved her lips.
+
+"It will make no difference," she murmured, and nothing more.
+
+After all, I don't know that I cared very greatly about the letters. It
+was Lucia herself that I wanted--nothing less. It gives me very little
+pleasure to read a letter, and I never have understood the cherishing
+locks of hair and dead roses business.
+
+The desire for the presence of the living personality is too
+sharp-edged to let me feel satisfaction in substitutory objects and
+vague associations. To have put my hand round Lucia's living throat;
+yes, that would have been a keen delight, but I was not dead set on
+possessing myself of her handkerchief that I might kiss in private. I
+had one portrait of her--that was all--and that I rarely looked at.
+
+The first thing I did in Paris was to find a translator for Howard's
+poem, which, after a time, appeared in one of the literary papers in
+its French dress, and returned to its original title. He came to me
+suddenly one evening with a contemporary paper in his hand, and the
+flush of gratified talent, and the pride that is its first cousin,
+kindling in his face.
+
+"Look here, Vic!" he said; "isn't this first-class? Here's a critique
+on my verses, and just see how they crack them up!"
+
+I took the paper and read the paragraph, Howard leaning over my
+shoulder and resting his knee on the arm of my chair. When I had
+finished I looked up at him.
+
+"Not a word more than it deserves, old man!" I said. "Now you realise,
+don't you, what you can be and do if you choose!"
+
+"Yes. Well, really, if all that's true, I ought to make some sort of a
+name some day, eh?"
+
+And for a time it seemed that a lasting impression had been made upon
+him. He seemed to feel that elation and enthusiasm stir in him which
+makes it a joy to the genius to renounce all for his work. With regard
+to my own manuscripts, I sent some of them, in English, to one of the
+French publishing firms, and there ensued a blank of three weeks. At
+the end of that time I received a peremptory note inviting me to call
+at their office. When I presented myself I was shown into a bare,
+square room, where an august little man was standing, using a silver
+toothpick. He was short, with a large-sized lower chest; bald, with a
+short, grey beard cut to a sharp point; waxed moustache ends, sticking
+out ferociously; and brown eyes, keen with intelligence. He bowed
+elaborately.
+
+I could speak French, he supposed.
+
+I assented, and the conversation then went on very fast.
+
+Monsieur's works had been read by their Anglo-French reader and highly
+approved. There was no doubt that Monsieur possessed a talent, a talent
+that he would say was--colossal. At the same time, these works were all
+too English in tone to catch the taste of the Parisian world, and
+Monsieur had seemed to put a restraint upon his pen, that rendered his
+works a touch too cold.
+
+Great heavens! how I raised my eyebrows at that; remembering that in
+England I had been always rejected on account of being too warm.
+
+Now, his proposition was this:--If Monsieur felt disposed to write a
+manuscript, in which the scene should be laid in France, and some of
+the characters, at least, be French, and also allow himself a little
+greater latitude, then he should be delighted to put the manuscript in
+the hands of their very best translator, and give it out to an audience
+that, above all things, admired vigour.
+
+I heard all this with satisfaction. The offer meant a lot more work for
+me, but I did not mind that, with success--dear success--in view. I
+closed with his proposition at once, and after some formalities and
+details had been gone into and settled, I rushed home to tell Howard.
+
+So, for a time, settled into working intellectual grooves, our life ran
+on quietly from day to day with a fair prospect on ahead of us.
+
+And then came an unlucky incident which jerked the wheels of Howard's
+existence out of the narrow, hard line of effort, and after that they
+ran along anyhow, sometimes on and sometimes off it, and kept me in
+dread of a total smash. The Champs Elysees were full of the late
+afternoon sunlight, and we sauntered slowly, criticising the occupants
+of the various carriages rolling up to the great arch of Napoleon, and
+arguing in a broken, desultory way on our usual subject of
+talk--literature.
+
+Howard was on the outside, nearest the road, walking on the actual
+kerb, and flicking up the leaves in the gutter, as he talked, with the
+point of his cane. As we strolled, with our eyes more or less directed
+on the string of vehicles moving in the centre of the sunny road, we
+noticed one small, black brougham going the same way as ourselves, that
+seemed conspicuous by being closed amongst the rest of the open
+victorias. Suddenly it detached itself from the line of other carriages
+and dashed up alongside of the pavement where we were walking. Its
+wheels ground in the gutter, and I caught Howard's arm to draw him more
+on to the pavement.
+
+"Look out!" I exclaimed. "What a way to drive!" I added, as the
+coachman whipped up his horses and drove on some fifty yards, close to
+the kerb. There he pulled up abruptly. The door of the brougham was
+pushed open and a woman got out. Such a figure it was that outlined
+itself in the sunny light, standing on the white trottoir, and with the
+vista of the Champs Elysees behind it--a form seductive in every line,
+with a fine hip, and a tiny arched foot that tapped the pavement
+impatiently.
+
+"What's up?" I said to Howard. "Whom is she waiting for, I wonder?"
+
+A few steps more brought us up to her, and then, to our astonishment,
+she turned fully towards me, and said in her own language,--
+
+"Will you come and dine with me this evening, Monsieur? The carriage
+will take us home now!"
+
+We both stopped short. There was a second of blank amaze, and the
+woman's face stamped itself on our startled vision;--the eyes, liquid
+and gleaming, behind a veil of black lashes; the smooth firm nose, with
+its raised and tremulous nostril; the oval of either cheek, with the
+damask glow in it; and the curled mouth of deepest crimson, with the
+essence of sensuous languor in its curve.
+
+For a second we stared at it in the sunlight, and that second sufficed
+to let us take in the situation; and there was something in her words
+and tone of confidence, and something of authority in the way she
+pointed to her carriage, that annoyed me.
+
+"Thank you! I only dine with my friends," I answered coldly.
+
+I suppose she was not insensible to the contempt in my tone and eyes as
+I looked down on her, for her next words came in a more humble,
+ingratiating voice.
+
+"Make me one of them, then, Monsieur!--at once;" and she smiled--a
+lovely smile on such a mouth. Howard stood in silence, staring at her.
+I was very much amused and a little annoyed.
+
+"You flatter me!" I returned, satirically; "but I have as many as I
+want already."
+
+Howard broke in.
+
+"Won't you extend your invitation to me?" he said, eagerly, and she
+threw a quick side-glance over him.
+
+"I can't invite you both--at the same time!" she said, with a laugh and
+a little Parisian shrug; and then she looked at me again with a look
+that one would say was abominable or charming, according as one's
+particular mood at the moment was.
+
+My mood was not such as to condemn it.
+
+My next words were simply said for me, as it were, by my long habit of
+self-restraint.
+
+"My presence is not in the question at all, to embarrass you," I said,
+curtly, and added to Howard--
+
+"We may as well go on."
+
+But that was not at all his view.
+
+"Ask me," he said, with his shaky French accent; "I'll come!" and he
+put his hand on her arm, with a glance that matched her own. She seemed
+pretty well indifferent which of us it should be, and she merely said
+imperiously,--
+
+"Come, then!" and with a grimace over her shoulder at me, disappeared
+into her brougham again.
+
+Howard would have followed instantly, but I seized his arm.
+
+"What are you doing?" I said in English. "Is it worth it, Howard? You
+may regret it. She is probably some married woman!"
+
+Howard wrenched himself free from me.
+
+"Don't talk to me! I'm not the fellow to refuse a jolly good lark when
+it's offered to me!"
+
+He flung himself into the brougham without another word, drew the door
+to after him, and they were gone, whirling up the Champs Elysees,
+leaving me standing on the kerb looking after the polished black back
+of the brougham receding and growing small in the distance.
+
+"Well!" I thought, "if another fellow had told me this tale, I should
+have thought it a howler!"
+
+The suddenness of the whole thing had taken my breath away, and I must
+have stood there many seconds in confused thought, in which a flexible
+form and arched foot took a prominent part.
+
+When I roused myself I saw Nous was lying down beside me with the
+patience of a philosopher, and catching the flies that buzzed along the
+sunny pavement--to kill time.
+
+I called him, and went on up toward the Arc.
+
+"I couldn't have done otherwise," I thought. I knew I did not wish to
+have done otherwise. I knew I should say again exactly the same if the
+brougham were again before me, but yet--
+
+"I want nothing now that I have my work on hand," I told myself, as the
+arched foot went on before me up the pavement.
+
+"By-and-by"--but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.
+
+I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went
+back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to work.
+
+Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was sitting
+after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe, smoking,
+under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a fiacre drew up
+at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see me for a minute,
+engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a pourboire, and then he
+was just going straight across the lighted trottoir into the hotel when
+I called to him.
+
+"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see you
+under the tree."
+
+He came back and drew up a chair, with a scraping sound, to the
+opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his hat
+back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to where we
+were sitting, from the windows and open glass doors of the cafe. He
+looked well and uncommonly jolly; a man who lives his life, such as it
+is, without thought, without reflection, and without philosophy--who
+views the passing hour without grudging, the past without regret.
+
+"You look awfully seedy," he said. "Anything up?"
+
+"No," I answered. "Well? 'How have we sped in this contest?' How went
+the dinner?"
+
+"I'll tell you," he said, turning round to secure a passing garcon.
+"Let's get hold of a drink first. Oh, she's got a jolly place!" he
+said, when the garcon, and eventually the drink, had been captured.
+"Nice house and all that. She's married, as you said, and of very good
+family. Received everywhere, you know."
+
+"Husband at the dinner?" I asked laconically.
+
+"No; husband gone to Tunis on business."
+
+"Expected back to-day, I suppose?"
+
+"No, to-morrow."
+
+"Pity."
+
+"Yes. You should have gone, Vic! She'd have satisfied you! Lovely
+figure! I never knew a lovelier!"
+
+I said nothing.
+
+"What did you think of her stopping us like that?" he went on after a
+minute.
+
+"I thought it consummate cheek," I said. "I should not have believed it
+if it hadn't actually happened before my eyes."
+
+"Yes, it was cheeky; but do you know, she is not very cheeky, really.
+An awfully nice woman, and very clever. But aren't these Parisiennes
+queer? You can't imagine any woman doing such a thing in England, can
+you?"
+
+"Hardly."
+
+"It seems she had seen us once before. It was you she wanted, not me.
+Why didn't you go, you duffer? I only came in a bad second!"
+
+I laughed.
+
+"She had read my things and likes them. Do you know, I think it is
+rather a good thing I have met her, it will urge me to do more--don't
+look at me 'in that tone of voice,' I am sure it will, really, Victor!"
+
+"Are you going to see her again, then?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, oh yes!"
+
+"When the husband next visits Tunis, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, and before that, even when he's here. She is going to patronise
+my talent--see?"
+
+"I see."
+
+"I must write my next thing to her, of course. It's a nuisance being
+hampered with this beastly French language!"
+
+And then the conversation went on. We sat there and talked and argued
+from the particular to the general, and back again, until the waiters
+came and cleared the chairs off the pavement and began to turn out the
+lights in the cafe--and it was a conversation after which I slept badly.
+
+After this incident I saw less of Howard, and our lives ran farther and
+farther apart. I grew more and more absorbed in the developing
+manuscript. He grew more and more taken up in the stream of amusement
+he had entered. He wrote very little. A couple of lines that had
+occurred to him perhaps at the theatre, and were jotted hastily on the
+edge of a programme, was all that a whole week produced. And even these
+would have been lost through his carelessness but for me.
+
+The days were generally divided between headache and sleep; the nights
+between the theatre and drink. I regretted it; and this life that was
+being wasted, poured out in uselessness, within my sight oppressed me.
+I should hardly have noticed it with another man, but I knew that this
+one had been planned for higher things.
+
+I used to try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at
+any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read
+sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by drink,
+had almost forgotten.
+
+"Are they not splendid?" I would say; "and you are the author! You are
+their parent, Howard! Think! Any man could lead the life you are
+leading! not one in a thousand could produce these lines!"
+
+Howard would look at me suspiciously with heavy eyes.
+
+"Are you sure I wrote that? I don't think I remember it!"
+
+What a crime!
+
+"I know you did," I would answer, and then urge him to give every day
+and night in the week, if he liked, to pleasure except one--"let one be
+sacred to work!"
+
+"And just think," he would answer, lazily, "if I were dying, how those
+days and nights wasted would come and stare me in the face!"
+
+"Wasted! in the building of such lines as these?"
+
+"But what's the good of them when they are built? They don't make me
+enjoy life!"
+
+And he pursued his own path and I could not stop him. I hoped and
+thought he would get tired after a time of the Paris halls and drunken
+nights and sick headaches, but I waited in vain. He had gradually got
+intimate with the back as well as the front of the scenes, and this I
+liked less than anything. The state of Howard's finances, too, threw an
+extra weight of responsibility on me, for he must have trodden a
+straighter road, and perhaps he would have worked more if he had had
+less money. And the money--his superfluous cash--came generally from
+me. His own allowance was small; just enough to keep him and no more.
+Gifts, under the name of loans, from me supplied all extras, and filled
+all deficiencies and gaps. What could I answer when he used to say,
+"Dear old boy! let me have another twenty!" And yet I knew it was
+handing him the razor to cut his throat. I hoped the sight of another
+fellow working as persistently as I did would have been an
+encouragement to him to make some sort of effort himself, but he looked
+upon me as a misguided creature, and took pains not to follow my
+example.
+
+"How do you know that you will ever marry Lucia? or make a success of
+your books or anything?" he asked me one evening as we went upstairs
+after dinner, he to dress before going to La Scarletta, I to work on
+the MS.
+
+"You are working for an uncertainty, a dream. It may never come off,
+and then where will you be. Now, at least, I know what I am going to
+have this evening. Such enjoyment as there is I get it, and there's an
+end of it, and no worry about it. As for you, you are all worry; and
+even granted that you get, in the end, something superlatively
+satisfactory, why, it will hardly make up to you for all you have gone
+through to get it!"
+
+I said nothing. We had got up to our rooms by this time, and I flung
+myself into the easy chair.
+
+Howard went into his room and brought back his dress shoes to put them
+on in mine, that he might follow up his argument.
+
+"Now, look here, Vic, which of us two fellows is the most ready to go
+out of the world? In the Bible or prayer-book or somewhere we are told
+to live so that we may be willing and prepared to die any minute. Well,
+that's just what I do. I haven't a scrap of a tie to life. I don't
+think there will be anything better in it than what I have had already.
+I'd go to-morrow. But you, you would not like it a bit, and you can't
+deny it. You have got all the ties of your unsatisfied desires. You
+want to get Lucia--you want to make your name. You would be awfully cut
+up now if you were told you were going to be bundled out of life in ten
+minutes; and I--I shouldn't care!"
+
+Howard had finished fastening his patent shoes, and now sat back in his
+chair, one leg crossed over the other, and his hands behind his head.
+
+"Being brought into life is just like being invited to a feast from
+which you may be called away at any minute. Well, if you have eaten and
+drunk to satiety you will be only too glad to get up and go away and
+sleep. But if you have sat at the table, hungering all the time and
+repressing yourself, then, when the sudden call comes, and you must
+rise and leave it for ever, think what a misery and bitterness to be
+dragged away from the brilliant table, with all its dishes and its
+wines untasted, its flowers unsmelt, and be crammed away into the
+darkness--hungry, thirsty, and unsatisfied. Take my word for it, Vic,
+you'll have a bad five minutes on your deathbed!"
+
+I listened in silence. I felt ill and dispirited and disinclined for
+talk.
+
+"That's all Horace. I don't care much about Latin as a whole, but I do
+think he is splendid. I'd have that book made the general testament.
+I'd have it taught in all the Board Schools and sworn on in the Law
+Courts. I'd have every fellow take it as a guide through life; if he
+really acts up to it, it ensures his happiness. Its philosophy beats
+all the religions hollow. 'Take the day.' 'Put no trust in to-morrow.'
+'Seek not to know the future; whatever it is, bear it.' 'Each night be
+able to say I have lived.' 'Retire from life, satisfied, as from a
+banquet.' And so on ad lib. You know it all, Victor. You were brought
+up upon it, but you haven't profited by it--not a scrap. Well, I'm
+going!"
+
+He leant forward, picked up his shoes, and went into his own room. It
+was about twelve when he came in that night and found me just finishing
+off a chapter. The fire had gone out from neglect; the window stood
+open and the lace curtains waved in the damp night wind. Howard stalked
+across the room and banged the glass doors shut, and told me it was
+beastly cold in here. I was just fully absorbed in the closing passages
+of my scene, and felt a nervous irritation at being interrupted.
+
+"There's a fire-lighter behind the scuttle, throw it into the grate and
+you'll soon have a blaze," I said, without looking up.
+
+Howard drew off his lavender gloves and flung them down on the table.
+One fell on the last sheet I had written.
+
+"Confound you! do be careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing
+the great blur it left on the page. "The sheets are wet."
+
+"It doesn't matter, they're not a new pair!" answered Howard, coolly,
+going down on his knees to light up the fire. He accomplished this in a
+few minutes, and then settled down in the long chair with a cigar. I
+wrote on feverishly, expecting to be addressed and interrupted every
+moment. It was a great bore his coming in just now, disturbing me. I
+had a difficult thing to express, and I was just pursuing the tail end
+of an idea I could not quite grasp. My pen hovered uncertainly over the
+paper. I could not exactly give words to the impression in my brain,
+and the sense that he was going to speak, about to speak each second,
+worried me. At the same time I never wished to be ungracious to Howard
+when he did return to our rooms; never wished to feel it was my
+execrably bad company that induced him to stay away from them all night
+instead of half.
+
+"I say, Vic!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Do you know that kissing song Embrasse moi?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Don't you think it awfully fetching? I like that refrain so
+much--Embrasse moi, chumph! chumph!--and then the orchestra exactly
+imitates the sound of a kiss--then Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph!
+Don't you?"
+
+"Yes; it isn't bad."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Victor!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"La Faina was there to-night!"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Do you know her?"
+
+"I've heard of her."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Vic!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Do you know what Faina means?"
+
+"Of course I do!"
+
+"Do you think it a nice name?"
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"Well, it's better than Grille d'Egout anyway, isn't it?"
+
+"About on a par, I should say." "How many frills do you think she had
+on her petticoat?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know--forty!"
+
+"No; four. I counted them. Her figure is not much up atop, but her"--
+
+"Oh, stow all that!" I interrupted; "there's a good fellow, I'm just
+doing a convent interior."
+
+"All right. The rest is silence. Ah!" with a yawn, and getting up to
+saunter round the room, "that's a jolly good song--Embrace moi! chumph!
+chumph! Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph!"
+
+He did not address me again, but somehow my ideas were scattered. The
+convent scene went wrong. Ballet dancers seemed standing in the aisle
+where nuns should have been kneeling, and, after a second or so, I
+flung my pen down and pushed away the paper.
+
+"Done?" exclaimed Howard, delightedly.
+
+"Yes," I said simply, rising.
+
+"Come and have a smoke," he said, drawing up both easy chairs to the
+fire.
+
+I took the cigar he offered and sat down. Howard threw himself into the
+other chair, crossed his legs, and proceeded to give me an account of
+his experiences. I suppose I was rather silent, for after a time he
+broke in upon himself by saying abruptly,--
+
+"Are you very savage with me for interrupting your work?"
+
+"Savage?" I repeated. "Oh, no! the work can wait, I get plenty of time
+at it!" Perhaps he misunderstood me, and my words conveyed to him more
+than I meant. Any way, the next afternoon he came home early to dine
+with me, and afterwards, when I was speaking of the evening's work, he
+came up to me where I stood at the mantelpiece and took something out
+of his pocket with a confident air.
+
+"I've brought you something," he said, and he thrust suddenly into my
+hand--under my eyes--a photograph.
+
+My glance fell full on it, and I saw distinctly what it was--a
+full-length figure of the danseuse Faina. Traditionally, perhaps, I
+ought to have flung it into the fire--any way the grate--or torn it up.
+But I am not fond of throwing other, people's things into the fire, nor
+of tearing them up, simply because they offend my own views. He had no
+right, perhaps, to thrust it upon me as he had, but that fact would
+not, in my opinion, constitute my right to destroy it. So I merely laid
+it on the mantelpiece.
+
+"Extraordinary thing! Where did you pick that up?"
+
+"Faina sent it to you with her love, and an invitation to supper
+to-night after the last 'turn,'" replied Howard, rolling a cigarette,
+sticking it with his lips, and looking at me over it.
+
+"Oh! really?" I said, drily.
+
+"Why, Victor, you've quite coloured up!" said Howard with a sort of
+derisive triumph.
+
+I felt I had. Why? I can hardly say. The word "love," the sudden view
+of the portrait, dashed, whirling headlong over each other, through my
+brain, followed by a sort of hazy cloud, out of which looked two azure
+eyes.
+
+"She is very lovely, isn't she?" Howard remarked affectionately,
+setting the card upright against the wall.
+
+"Very--in her own way," I assented.
+
+I admitted it willingly, with pleasure. Why not?--an evident fact. The
+blue slime in a blocked gutter of the road is very lovely also.
+
+"Well, I'm going there to-night, because I admire the sister, and you
+must come, too. You are killing yourself by sticking to the work in the
+way you do. Come along! Where's the harm? Lucia will never know. I
+won't split. God's in heaven and the Czar's a long way off! So you may
+as well come and knock about a little. This monotonous life will put an
+end to you!"
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Lucia won't know," he repeated.
+
+"There's no question of Lucia's knowing anything," I said.
+
+"Then why do you work as you do, and always refuse to come to a supper,
+or a dance, or anything? You can't be really a quiet fellow or you
+wouldn't write things the English won't have. You say it's not a
+question of Lucia--then what the dickens is it that makes you live the
+life you do?"
+
+I did not answer him. I leant in silence against the mantelpiece,
+staring absently at the portrait of Faina, and Howard got tired of
+waiting for my answer. He went to dress, and I sat down at the
+writing-table, absently sketching women's heads on my blotting paper.
+Should I go with him or not? I felt tired of writing, tired of work.
+Wine, laughter, sound, smiles, other voices?--Then four points rose
+before me, very distinct and clear, like sharp mountain peaks from a
+valley of mist.
+
+FIRST. Supposing--if such a thing were possible--supposing on coming
+out of this house I came face to face with Lucia, should I be entirely
+pleased.
+
+NEXT. Should I, when the present inclination were over, have a
+satisfactory memory of this supper.
+
+NEXT. Did I habitually mean to spend my evenings in this way?
+
+LAST. Was it worth while spoiling a record for the sake of a single
+deviation?
+
+I answered No to each of these as they came before me in order, with
+the upshot that I determined not to go. When Howard came in again I
+looked up. He was dressed to the Enth, and as I glanced at his
+good-looking, intelligent face, I thought how incongruous it seemed for
+him to degrade himself with drink at this supper, and return, as he
+probably would, a pitiable object to look at and listen to.
+
+"Going to work, eh?"
+
+I nodded. Howard hitched the cape of his overcoat straight, and went
+out. As he shut the door I sprang suddenly to my feet. For a moment the
+impulse towards distraction, amusement, relief from strain, physical
+movement, overcame me. All the strong, ardent life rushed up within me.
+A tremendous prompting came to shout after him, "Wait a minute, Howard!
+I'll come, too, after all!" I was half way to the door. Then I laughed
+and turned back. I went up to the mantelpiece and unlocked the doors of
+a portrait frame that stood there, and flung them open. It was the
+frame of Lucia's portrait, which, like the temple of Janus, stood
+closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Now was war, and I
+gazed at the picture within for encouragement. There was equal sinuous,
+supple beauty in this form as in that outline on the Paris card, that
+lay, perhaps, in the pocket of every flaneur on the boulevards. I
+looked at the smooth, perfect shoulders, and those soft arms that had
+never yet been drawn round a lover's neck; at the extreme pride and
+dignity that lay in every line of the form that had never been touched
+by a rough hand. It swept from me in one gust the thoughts and
+tendencies struggling to rise. It brought back all the old revolt from
+the lowest, all the old admiration for the highest, in human nature.
+"Yes, you are worth it," I muttered, looking hard at the chaste,
+exquisite pride in face and form; "you are worth being worthy of, and I
+will not for an evening, nor for an hour, make myself a brute that you
+would despise if you knew his nature. Whether you ever know or not,
+what does that matter? I must know. Shall I come back to feel your
+inferior? No! Not a day, nor a night, shall there be, the history of
+which you might not read." All my own pride was stirred as I looked at
+the portrait of this woman, who, I knew, was absolutely pure, and I
+would not now have followed Howard had my life depended on it.
+
+I gave the photograph of Faina, which still stood up against the wall,
+a flick that sent it horizontal on the marble, and then, with Lucia's
+eyes just above me, I sat down to write.
+
+Seven o'clock came, and the bright light pouring into the room over the
+table covered with loose sheets of paper found me writing still. I
+looked up, then back on the page, decided I need not add another word,
+flung down my pen, leaned back in my chair, and proceeded to light up a
+cigar. "Good!" I thought with lazy satisfaction, as my eyes wandered
+over the completely covered table and the drying sheets upon the floor.
+
+"It was a splendid inspiration that! Had I gone out last night,
+infallibly I should have missed it." Just then I heard a blundering,
+uncertain step upon the stair, and then a dig in the centre of the door
+panel.
+
+I smiled.
+
+"How long will it take him to find the lock, I wonder?" I thought.
+
+The period was protracted. Round and round the keyhole did a shaky,
+unsteady hand guide the wandering key. It scratched above, it dug at
+the door beneath, while the low indistinct murmur of one repeated word
+reached me within. At last, in sheer pity, I got up and opened the door
+from the inside. Howard came unsteadily over the threshold, and half
+blundered against me. His face was deadly pale; a bright greenish shade
+lay close about his bloodshot eyes; his grey lips shook. With
+difficulty he staggered to the chair opposite me and sat down. I shut
+the door and resumed my seat and cigar.
+
+"Enjoy yourself?" I asked.
+
+He was not very steady on his feet, but fairly clear in his brain.
+
+"Yes. But it's no good--can't stand it," he murmured, pressing his hand
+hard upon his head and across his eyes.
+
+His voice was little more than a gasp.
+
+"God!--this weakness"--
+
+We sat without speaking. In the bright light, in a glass opposite, I
+caught sight of my own face. I was as pale as he from work, as he from
+pleasure. My eyes were as bloodshot as his from sleeplessness, as his
+from drink. My hand shook as much as his from mental excitement, as his
+from physical exhaustion. He was the representative of those who
+sacrifice to-morrow for to-day. I, of those who sacrifice to-day for
+to-morrow. And I wondered, as I smoked on with his collapsed figure
+before me, which was the greater fool. "Do neither" is the cry. "Take
+the gifts of to-day without robbing to-morrow." Estimable rule, I
+agree, if you are fortunate enough to have the chance of carrying it
+out. But very few of us have. A man with Howard's constitution could
+only purchase the hours last night with the hours of this morning.
+Success would not come to me to-morrow unless I were willing to
+struggle for it to-day.
+
+"What did you drink?" I asked, after a pause.
+
+"Maraschino, cognac, and clic," he answered, and a gesture of his hand
+and first finger showed he meant in the same glass. I laughed.
+
+"What a mixture! No wonder you're mixed yourself!"
+
+"Can't stand it!" he only muttered again.
+
+"No, you must sit it out or sleep it off now," I said, getting up with
+a stretch. "Faina in good form?"
+
+"Magnificent--Vic, you should have been there!"
+
+"Thanks! yes, I think so!" I said, gathering up the precious pages from
+the floor and table and piling them on a console. I wanted to go and
+get my own breakfast, but the look of Howard's face, as it lay against
+the chair back, bloodless, and the colour of ashes, made me hesitate to
+leave him.
+
+"Can I get you anything?" I said.
+
+"No--help me into bed," he muttered, without opening his eyes, moving
+his head restlessly from side to side.
+
+"Come along, then," I answered, bending over him; "here's my arm."
+
+He half raised his lids at that, and then feebly pushed a leaden hand
+and arm through mine. There was a pause. He seemed unable to make a
+farther movement, and sat, his head sunk into his chest, his arm
+hanging through mine.
+
+"Come, Howard, make an effort," I said, after a minute, and he
+staggered uncertainly to his feet.
+
+Getting him into the next room and into bed was a lengthy and difficult
+matter, but at last, after protracted pauses, it was effected, and he
+fell back upon the pillows--face and lips one tint with the linen. I
+spoke to him, but I got no articulate answer, only groans in response.
+
+"I am going to fetch you some coffee," I said, leaning over him.
+
+His eyes opened wide, and fixed upon me with a sort of helpless terror.
+
+"No, no! don't go!--stay!" he whispered, clutching my wrist with his
+damp, shaking fingers. "Stay--a minute."
+
+"But you want something to pull you round. I shan't be two seconds," I
+answered, trying to unclasp his clinging fingers.
+
+"Never mind! Oh, Vic, for God's sake stay."
+
+There was an abject appeal in the bloodshot eyes, a desperate tenacity
+in his clutch. He looked at me as if he dared look nowhere else. Some
+horror seemed pressing upon his confused and weakened brain, and I
+thought I could soothe him best by staying.
+
+"Very well--there, I'm not going," I said, reassuringly.
+
+Still he did not relax his grip upon me, but his eyes closed again, and
+he seemed satisfied. I sat down on a chair at the bedside and waited.
+The sun poured brighter and brighter through the blinds and touched up
+the mantelpiece.
+
+The photograph of Faina's sister, surrounded by some others of her set,
+was propped up in the centre of it, on a couple of paper volumes. My
+own head was aching violently now, and after a time the woman's figure
+on the glossy, sun-flecked surface of the card began to sway and swim
+before my eyes as I looked lazily at it.
+
+The minutes passed by and Howard did not move. At last, I ventured to
+try and withdraw my stiffening arm without rousing him, but at the
+first movement his fingers tightened and his groans recommenced.
+
+After a time my hunger passed into drowsiness. I leant forward
+gradually, and at last my head sank down on the edge of his bed, and I
+drifted into oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+May had come round again. The days and weeks had glided by in a
+monotony of work, varied by feverish blanks when I could do nothing,
+and the pile of manuscript lay growing dusty in its corner. Then at
+last the day arrived when the final line was written and the whole
+despatched. That was three months back, three months of anxious
+waiting, in which Howard had chaffed me daily on my looks and health.
+
+"You're dwindling to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say.
+"Catch me bothering myself about anything I wrote in the same way."
+
+Now, however, it was over. I had just left the publisher's office. The
+book had been accepted, and I was a free man. A gush of fresh life ran
+through me and stirred in my veins in response to the fresh life of
+spring that seemed in the sunny air, in the green leaves fluttering
+round the Bourse, in the white butterflies that floated across the
+dusty asphalt.
+
+When I got back I found Howard half asleep in the armchair. He sat up
+as I came in, and regarded me with a confused stare. I saw he had been
+drinking, but his brain was still tolerably clear.
+
+"Rejected, by Jove!" he remarked as he saw the MS.
+
+"No," I answered, throwing it on to a side table and myself into the
+chair opposite him--"no, thank heaven, it's all right now! They've
+accepted it. Congratulate me!"
+
+"But what on earth have you brought it back for, then?" he said,
+blinking his heavy eyes and looking at me resentfully, as if he
+suspected I was playing some practical joke.
+
+"Oh, there are a few things they want altered, that's all," I answered.
+"I am to let them have it again the day after to-morrow."
+
+"And what about terms?" he continued, getting out a roll of cigarette
+papers and beginning to roll himself some cigarettes.
+
+He was wide awake now, and had shaken off his intoxicated stupor. His
+face was bent slightly as he made the cigarettes, so that I could
+hardly see it. I sat watching his trembling fingers rolling the papers
+in an absent silence.
+
+"Oh, terms?" I said at last. "Fairly good, I think. They pay me a small
+sum and reserve me one-third of all profits from the book. I really
+don't care much about the terms. Once the book is out my name is made,
+and the money will come in all right in time. They've taken it; that is
+the main point. If you knew the glorious relief it is to me!"
+
+Howard laughed. He flung himself back in the chair and propped his feet
+up against the support of the mantelpiece.
+
+"I think you are very lucky," he said. There was silence, then he asked
+abruptly--"How much are they going to give you for it?"
+
+"Three thousand francs."
+
+Howard paled suddenly and fixed his eyes upon me.
+
+"And what will you do with it?" he asked, after a minute.
+
+"Well," I answered, without reflection, "I thought you would like two
+thousand to send home and get rid of that half-yearly interest."
+
+The blood dyed all his face suddenly crimson, and he brought down his
+feet upon the fender with a crash.
+
+"I wish to hell you'd wait till I asked you for it!" he said savagely,
+springing up and crossing to the window.
+
+There he stood looking out with his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
+I was fairly startled, and the colour rose uncomfortably in my own face.
+
+It seemed, I almost felt, as if I had done something excessively
+ill-bred. But Howard and I were on such intimate terms, and made so
+little account of what we said to each other, that I had expressed the
+thought uppermost in my mind at the moment of his question as a matter
+of course. Then, too, he borrowed so constantly and so freely from me
+that the idea of offence over money matters or mentioning them seemed
+quite impossible.
+
+"No," I thought, glancing at him as he still stood between me and the
+light; "there must be something else in his mind," and I wondered.
+
+He was seldom out of temper, and seldom made himself disagreeable to
+me. In conversation, in all our life together, he generally yielded to
+me with an almost womanly compliance. His present tone and manner were
+absolutely new to me. I did not understand them, and I liked him well
+enough to take the trouble to get up after a second and follow him to
+the window.
+
+"Howard," I said gently, "what is the matter? I am sorry if I have
+annoyed you."
+
+He turned upon me suddenly from the window.
+
+"Did I ever say I wanted the money you might get from your cursed
+book?" he said, passionately. "Do you suppose I couldn't get as much
+for something of my own if I chose?"
+
+Now, considering Howard was always in want of money, and perpetually
+lamenting his inability, real or imagined, to get it, the last remark
+seemed rather odd, and the vehemence with which he spoke against me was
+altogether incomprehensible.
+
+"Of course," I answered quietly, looking down into his excited face. "I
+merely offered the money as a convenience, pro tem, as it happened to
+be at hand, that's all. But surely it doesn't matter. Perhaps I should
+not have done. I apologise. Doesn't that make it square?"
+
+I thought he was out of health, irritable, disappointed that he had not
+made more of his own work, and jealous of my success, and I was willing
+to say anything to soften his feelings.
+
+Howard simply turned away from me again, and I caught a mutter of
+"damned impertinence."
+
+Seeing it was useless to say anything further at the moment, I strolled
+back into the centre of the room again, called Nous to me, and sat down.
+
+"Jealous!" I thought, with contemptuous amusement; "how extraordinary!"
+
+Then my thoughts rushed away in a sudden stream to Lucia, and I saw her
+face, glowing with delight, look out upon me from the blank surface of
+the wall.
+
+"How soon now shall I possess you?" was my one thought. "How long to
+our marriage?"
+
+I began by allowing three months, but I shortened and shortened the
+time till I cut it down to a fortnight.
+
+"Could I persuade her to let it be in a fortnight?" and I thought I
+could.
+
+A quarter of an hour passed, and Howard had not moved from his position
+in the window. A very little day-dreaming is enough for me, especially
+about a woman. I yawned, stretched, and finally got up.
+
+"Howard," I said, "I'm going out for a turn with Nous, but I will came
+back in time for dinner."
+
+I lingered, but he said nothing. I put on my hat, called the dog, and
+went out. I started to walk to the Arc, and the distance there and back
+would have taken me, as I had said, till our dinner hour, but half way
+there the inclination failed. I felt tired and turned back.
+
+"How utterly done up I feel!" I thought; "not worth anything. This last
+book has thoroughly taken it out of me. Rest! Rest! That was what I
+longed for now. My whole system seemed crying out for it. Of all the
+benefits the just-accomplished work would bring, celebrity, money,
+even, yes, even Lucia, seemed not so seductive in those moments as the
+possibility of gratifying this intolerable mental and physical craving
+for repose."
+
+As I walked home a sense of tranquillity, a quiet, peaceful feeling of
+relief was transfused through me, and seemed communicated from the mind
+to the body and to every nerve of my frame, as if I were under the
+influence of some soothing drug.
+
+I reached the hotel considerably before the time I had mentioned to
+Howard, and I supposed he would be out. However, as I came near I saw
+that our window was well lighted up. In fact, there seemed an unusually
+brilliant light in the room. Nous and I went up the stairs. He seemed
+to know and feel his master's good spirits, and kept licking my hand at
+intervals as he bounded up the stairs beside me, and then outstripping
+me, he would wait on the landing above me impatiently till I got there,
+in a hurry to race up the next flight.
+
+As I opened my door a peculiar scent of smoke reached me, and the air
+was clouded and singularly warm. Howard was in the room, and I could
+not make out at first what he was doing. He was crouching on his heels
+in front of the grate and seemingly stirring or poking something
+beneath the bars. Some, I can hardly define what, instinct, guided my
+eyes to the side table where I had left my manuscript. It was gone. At
+that instant: the wind from the wide open window and door blew the lamp
+flame and stirred the curtains, and a great sheet of whole black tinder
+drifted across the carpet up to my feet.
+
+Then I knew--he was burning, or had burnt, my work. A flame was dying
+down in the grate, filled and overflowing with ragged black fragments.
+With a curse I sprang towards the fender, but Nous was quicker than I.
+Either divining my intention, or made suspicious by the queer, sinister
+look Howard's figure had, the dog flew upon him with a growl, rolled
+him over and seized the clothing at his neck.
+
+In another instant I would have called him off, but Howard was an
+inveterate coward. I saw his face turn livid with terror as the dog
+pinned his throat to the floor. His hand stretched out convulsively and
+grasped a long table knife that lay, together with the string that had
+held my manuscript, beside him on the floor. He seized it, and in an
+instant, before my eyes, he had plunged it deep into the breast of the
+dog standing over him. It was all done in a second--a flash. There was
+a gush of blood upon the floor, a broken moan from Nous, and then he
+staggered and fell over on his side--motionless.
+
+Howard struggled breathless, white as death, to his feet. For one
+second I stood transfixed, watching him with blazing eyes. Then one
+step forward and I was upon him. My two hands closed like steel round
+his throat, and by his head, thus, I dragged him from the hearth out
+into the centre of the room.
+
+"You unutterable, unspeakable cur and devil!" I muttered, and I saw his
+face blackening under my grip.
+
+A gust of wind passed through the room, blowing to the door with a
+bang, and it whirled aloft, round us, broken and quivering pieces of
+black tinder. The air was full of them. And the dead dog lay in a pool
+of blood before us. It seemed to me that my brain was rocking with the
+fury and rage I felt--my whole frame convulsed in it. The loss, the
+irreparable loss, the killed hopes I saw in those floating ashes round
+me, came home to me till my brain seemed breaking asunder with anger.
+To murder him came the impulse! How? There were a thousand ways! To
+grind my fingers still deeper into his throat--THUS! THUS! Or that long
+knife that lay there on the rug, driven into and twisted round in his
+breast; or that sharp corner of the fender to batter out his brains; or
+drag him through the long, open window and hurl him in the darkness
+from that second floor balcony. Which? Devil! devil! Then as I held him
+there the thought pierced me,--Was I a brute to feel a blind rage like
+this? Had I ever in my life lost my own self-command, that command
+which sets us where we stand as men, as sane, highly-organised beings?
+And should a miserable, worthless cur like this have the power to break
+that self-control?
+
+My whole pride and self-respect rose within me and commanded my passion
+back within its bounds. I unclosed my hands from his throat, and
+dropped him upon the ground as I would have dropped a loathsome rag. I
+watched him rise to his knees, trembling, livid, and terrified, and
+then scramble to his feet, with satisfaction that such a thing as he
+had not broken my own self-rule.
+
+"Go out of this room," I said, and he hurried to the communicating door
+and shut and locked it securely after him.
+
+I heard him do so with a contemptuous smile. Had I wanted to follow
+him, my weight flung against the flimsy door would have crushed it in.
+And I was left standing there alone in the smoke-filled room with
+nothing but the thunderings of my own pulses to break the silence.
+
+"Inconceivable," I murmured, as the wind, stirring it, made the tinder
+creak in the grate as it lay in thick masses; "simply inconceivable."
+
+I walked to the hearth and bent over the dog. He was already growing
+cold. He had not moved after his first fall. That vicious, brutal stab
+must have gone straight in to the heart. The knife was wet half way to
+the hilt. I lifted the dog and laid him on the sofa, and then
+mechanically went towards the blowing night-air and into the balcony.
+My brain seemed only just maintaining its right balance. So: all my
+labour, all my confident expectations, all the triumphant pleasure with
+which I had come back that afternoon, all the result of this past
+year's effort were now--nothing. Marked in a little floating dust. And
+not one vestige, not an outline nor portion of an outline even,
+remained. There was no rough draft, no sketch, no note or notes of the
+work existing. I always wrote every manuscript, from its first word to
+its last, on the paper that went to the publisher. My inspiration of
+the time was transferred direct to the page before me, and there it
+stood, without alteration, without correction. I never wanted to touch
+it or change it after it was once written. I was struck down, back
+again to the foot of the hill of work up which I had been struggling
+twelve months. Lucia, celebrity, pleasure, liberty, everything I
+coveted was now removed, taken far off into indefinite distance from
+me. For twelve months they had been coming nearer, steadily nearer,
+with each accomplished page, and to-day, only to-day, I had left the
+publisher's office knowing they were close to me, almost within my very
+arms. Like the prisoner serving his time in gaol, and living, as it
+were, in the last day that sets him free, I had been living these
+twelve months in the day when the last line should be written. Now all
+to be recommenced from the wearying, sickening beginning. And why? Why
+had he done it? That I could not understand. As a psychological enigma
+it leapt fitfully before my brain between the spasms of personal
+desperation. He had nothing to gain, everything to lose by my failure.
+He knew I was a man to always do the utmost for my friend, simply
+because he was my friend, and therefore from any increase of power in
+me he could derive nothing but benefit. There was absolutely no motive,
+could be no cause, for the act except undiluted jealousy and envy. I
+stepped inside the room again and went again to the hearth. Except when
+I saw the piles of black tinder I could not realise that he had done
+it. It seemed incredible, as if I must be dreaming. But there they lay,
+leaf upon leaf, some whole and perfect yet, sheets of black tinder,
+curled round at the corners where the flames had rolled them up, and
+lined still with white marks where the ink had been. Yes, it was so.
+The whole of my work was a nothing, and I a dependent pauper again.
+
+Where was that whole brilliant structure now that I had lived for and
+so passionately loved through this past year? Along each line had
+flowed the very essence of my feelings at the time the line was
+written, and each one was irreplaceable. The fervour of a past
+inspiration, like the fervour of a past desire, can never be recalled.
+I gazed down into the grate and felt, stealthily creeping upon me, as
+if it had been a beast with me in the empty room, my intense hatred of
+this other man, divided from me by a few feet of space and one slight
+partition. There was no outlet from his room except into this. A few
+steps, force my way in, and what would follow?
+
+I pressed both hands across my eyes and bowed my head till it leant
+hard upon the mantelpiece, feeling the longing and the urging towards
+physical violence against him rush upon me and tear me like wolves. The
+mental rage diffused itself through all the physical system till it
+seemed like poison pouring through my veins. Every pulse, beating
+convulsively in arms and chest and neck, seemed to clamour together in
+hungry fury. I leant there trying to stifle, to kill the thoughts that
+came and beat down the brutal rage. And as I stood there I heard Howard
+cough in the next room--that slight effeminate cough he gave when
+nervous or confused. I felt my blood leap at the sound, and it rushed
+in a scalding stream over my face. I raised my head and began
+mechanically to pace the room.
+
+Even now it hardly seemed real, and my eyes kept returning and
+returning to the console where the manuscript had always lain out of
+work hours through the past year. "Devil! devil!" I muttered at
+intervals; "what an unutterable devil." I don't know how long I walked
+up and down, but suddenly a sense of physical fatigue, of collapse,
+forced itself upon me. I threw myself in the corner of the couch and
+took the dog's dead head upon my knee. Dead! It seemed strange--the
+constant companion of ten years. I had had him from his first earliest
+days.
+
+Even before his eyes had opened I was struck by the intelligent way he
+had lain at his mother's side, and surnamed him Nous on the spot, after
+my favourite quality. I admit, like all good intelligences, because
+they have always their own particular views on everything, he had given
+a great deal of trouble. He had gnawed up my important business letters
+when cutting his teeth; he had made beds on my new light spring suits;
+he had sucked his favourite, most greasy mutton bone on the couch where
+my best manuscript lay drying; and out of doors he strongly objected to
+follow.
+
+It is extremely annoying on a hot August afternoon, when you have just
+time to catch the Richmond train, and a friend is with you, to have
+your collie suddenly start off at a gallop in the opposite direction to
+the station, and pay absolutely no attention to the most distracted
+whistling and calling. Nothing for it but to start in pursuit, to run
+yourself into a fever, and after lapse of time to return with the
+fugitive to find your train missed and your friend as savage as a bear.
+
+"If that dog were mine I'd thrash him within an inch of his life!" was
+the usual remark when I got back.
+
+"Then I am extremely glad he is not yours," I used to answer, fastening
+on the dog's collar, and making him walk at the end of a foot of chain
+as a punishment.
+
+"You'll never teach him like that, Vic. If you gave him a good kick in
+the eye now he'd remember it!"
+
+"Thanks very much for your advice," I returned, "but I should never
+forgive myself if I kicked any animal in the eye."
+
+"You are a queer, weak-hearted sort of fellow!" was the general answer,
+in a contemptuous tone, at which I used to shrug my shoulders and
+continue to manage my dog in my own way.
+
+He would remember a blow, a kick, or a thrashing. I knew that. And that
+was exactly what I meant to avoid, whatever it cost at times to keep my
+temper with him. Besides, in all physical violence towards another
+object there is a peculiar, dangerous, seductive fascination. Once
+indulged in at all, it grows rapidly and imperceptibly into a
+positively delicious pleasure and habit, just as, if never indulged in,
+there grows up an always increasing horror and loathing of it.
+
+Rage and anger, and their physical expression, become by habit a sort
+of joy, similar to the joy in intoxication, but if only the habit can
+be formed the other way there is an equal joy obtainable from
+self-restraint.
+
+Control of the strongest passions is supposed to be difficult to
+attain, but the whole difficulty lies in laying the first stones of its
+foundation. If this is done the fabric will then go on building itself.
+Day by day a brick will be added to the walls, until finally no shock
+can overthrow them.
+
+More and more as a man holds in his passions, more and more as he feels
+the pride of holding all the reins of his whole system firmly in his
+hand, will he have an abhorrence of scattering them to the idle winds
+at the bidding of the first fool who chances to vex him. But if he
+forms the habit of holding those reins so loosely that they drag along
+in the mud, and are trampled on at every instant, more and more
+difficult is it to gather them up.
+
+The man who begins striking his dog as a punishment will proceed to
+kick it when it comes accidentally in his way, and then go on to
+knocking it about, simply because he feels in a bad humour.
+
+So I never would, when I came back from these chasings, crimson,
+heated, breathless, made to look like a fool, and excessively annoyed
+altogether, cheat myself with the excuse that Nous wanted correction,
+or any other nonsense to cover my own ill-temper. As a matter of fact,
+he soon learnt it was uninteresting to be brought back to the very same
+corner from where he had started and have to walk all the rest of the
+way at the end of a scrap of chain, and his education passed happily
+over without a single rough word. It took longer perhaps than a
+treatment by blows, but I had my reward.
+
+The dog conceived a limitless, boundless affection for me which more
+than repaid me. Some men, of course, don't want affection. They only
+care for obedience, and not at all how it is attained.
+
+For myself I can see no pleasure in being merely dreaded. I should hate
+to see anything--man, woman, servant, dog, anything--start in terror at
+my footstep; hate to feel I brought gloom wherever I came, and left
+relief behind me.
+
+Nous was extremely quick-witted, and it used to amuse me enormously the
+way he behaved when, as sometimes happened, I trod upon his foot
+accidentally, or fell over him in the dark. Knowing that he had never
+had a voluntary blow from me in his life, he would leap
+enthusiastically over me and lick my hands after his first yelp, as
+much as to say--
+
+"Yes; I know it was quite an accident. I know, I am sure you didn't
+mean it."
+
+We had been inseparable, he and I, for these ten years. He had walked
+by my side, eaten from my plate, slept on my bed, and his death now in
+my service left a heavy, jagged-edged wound. As I sat there in the
+corner of the couch, with my hand absently stroking the glossy black
+coat, there came the very soft jarring of a key in the lock.
+
+I glanced towards Howard's door. The sound continued. The key was being
+very slowly and gently turned, and then the handle was grasped and
+cautiously revolved. He evidently hoped I was asleep, and wanted to
+enter without disturbing me. I sat in silence with my eyes on the door,
+which slowly opened.
+
+Howard stood on the threshold. He saw I was sitting there facing him,
+and he seemed to pause, unable to come forward or retreat. He did not
+look particularly happy as a result of his work. His face was pallid
+and haggard. Fool! to have flung away a valuable friend, and shackled
+himself with the fear of another man!
+
+"What do you want?" I said, as he did not move.
+
+"My manuscripts, Victor. I left them here."
+
+"There they are on the table. They are quite safe. Did you think I
+should act as you have? Come and take them if you want them."
+
+He had to pass close before me to do so, and I watched his nervous,
+hurried approach to the table, and the trembling of his hand as he
+gathered up the papers, with contemptuous eyes.
+
+When he had grasped them all in his hand he gave an involuntary side
+look at me and the motionless form beside me--a look that he seemed
+unable to abstain from giving, though against his will. I met his
+glance, and he hurried away back to his own door, and went through it
+as a leper will shuffle and shamble away out of one's sight.
+
+As soon as the morning came, I left the hotel without having tried the
+vain attempt of sleep, and did not return to it till the evening. At
+noon I called upon the publisher and explained that an unfortunate
+accident had occurred, and the MS. I had received back from him
+yesterday had been destroyed.
+
+At that he beamed upon me blandly, and remarked that such a thing was
+unfortunate, but that without doubt M'sieur would make all haste to
+re-copy it, and would let him have a new draft as soon as possible.
+
+I shook my head, feeling my lips and throat grow dry as I answered--
+
+"That which you had was the original, not a copy. I have no copy of it
+from which I can replace it."
+
+"But M'sieur will certainly have his notes, his private work, his first
+scheme?"
+
+"None. I do not work in that way. There is not a scrap of paper
+relative to it anywhere."
+
+Upon this the publisher rose, looked at me in a long silence, and then
+said in an icy tone,--
+
+"Then M'sieur wishes me to understand that he does not intend to allow
+our firm to publish his work at all?"
+
+I flushed at the insult his words contained. They practically intimated
+that he thought the whole thing an invention, and that I was going to
+give the MS. elsewhere. I got up too, and said--
+
+"I have told you the MS. is destroyed, and I have no means of
+reproducing it, therefore it is impossible for it to be brought out by
+your or any other firm."
+
+The man before me merely raised his shoulders over his ears, bowed,
+spread out the palms of his hands, raised his eyebrows, and muttered,--
+
+"Comme vous voulez, M'sieur."
+
+Confound him! was he a liar that he assumed me to be one. There was
+nothing to do but to bow and leave.
+
+As I walked out of his office into the fresh, sparkling, morning
+sunlight, life to me had a very bitter savour. I walked through the
+streets till I felt tired in every muscle. Then I sat thinking on a
+bench in a green corner of the Champs Elysees, watching absently the
+sun patches jump from leaf to neighbouring leaf as the wind elevated
+and depressed them, and trying to mentally seize upon and analyse this
+vile, low impulse of another man's envy.
+
+It was dark when I came back to the hotel. When I came up to my room I
+was surprised to see quite a little crowd of figures clustered round my
+door, all talking at once in their shrill French tones, all
+gesticulating at each other as if about to tear off each other's scalps.
+
+Angry exclamations reached me as I came towards them.
+
+"Mais je vous dis, je ne savais pas!"
+
+"Mais c'est impossible!"
+
+"Pas en regie!"
+
+"Que voulez vous? C'est un barbare!"
+
+Then as I came up there was a general cry of "Le voila! le voila!" and
+in an instant they were all around me, all clamouring, screaming,
+questioning me at once. The master of the hotel in the greatest
+agitation, the manager in his shirt sleeves, two or three waiters, a
+man looking like a gendarme, and another official with a paper in his
+hand. For a second they shouted so--nothing could be distinguished
+except broken phrases and the continual repetition of the words
+"Notification" and "M'sieur le Commissionaire."
+
+"A vous la responsibilite!"
+
+"Moi? je n'en savais rien!"
+
+"Il veut abimer notre sante!"
+
+"Il partera tout de suite!"
+
+I looked at them for a moment in amaze, and the fellow with the paper
+thundered out--"Silence," which produced the effect of cold thrown
+suddenly in boiling water. The little crowd pressed in upon me closely
+and listened awe-struck as the Commissionaire spoke to me, in French,
+of course.
+
+"Monsieur," he said, in an impressive tone, "I am informed you have a
+dog here!"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"A dog--dead!" and the accent on the last word was terrific.
+
+"My dog unfortunately has died," I said. "Yes"--and I wondered more and
+more the upshot of it all.
+
+"Then," thundered the official, purple with excited rage, "how is it,
+Monsieur, you have not sent a notification to the police?"
+
+I was fairly taken aback. The matter, though I barely yet comprehended
+it, was evidently, in their estimation, one of serious importance.
+Involuntarily, I glanced round at the others as the Commissionaire
+scowled threateningly at me. They noted my glance, and attributing it,
+I suppose, to guilty confusion, there were suppressed and complacent
+murmurs all round me, and shakes of the head.
+
+"Pas d'explication!"
+
+"Vous voyez ca?"
+
+"Point d'excuse!"
+
+"It is scandalous, it is shameful, it is abominable, M'sieur," shouted
+the Commissionaire, "the way you have acted! Twenty-four hours you hide
+the dead body of a dog in your bedroom! You hope to escape the eye of
+the law! You would bring disgrace on the gendarmerie, on the
+municipality of Paris! You laugh at our regulations, M'sieur, you
+laugh!" and he brandished the paper violently. "But you will find the
+authority of France is greater than you! There are cells, M'sieur,
+there are courts, there are judges for your education!!!"
+
+Matters were apparently growing serious for me. I had evidently
+offended them all desperately somehow. "You go out in the morning," he
+continued, furiously, "and you do not slink back here till it is dark!
+You are a coward, M'sieur! a coward!"
+
+No Englishman likes hearing himself abused, and my own anger now was
+considerably roused. But still, in my way about life, I have found the
+inestimable value of conciliation. It saves one such an infinity of
+trouble. I suppose I lean naturally towards it. At any rate, I always
+feel this--that if you have not the power on your side it is
+undignified to assume that which you cannot enforce, and if you have
+the power you can then afford to be civil.
+
+A pleasant manner has never once failed me in bringing about an effect
+which is highly convenient to oneself, and in the long run it spares
+one's vanity considerably. There is hardly any human being, however
+aggressive he may be at first, that does not melt into respect before
+an imperturbable civility. I felt in this case, too, that I was
+probably in the wrong from their point of view. It was the question of
+another country's ways, and I have a lenient feeling towards the
+epichortyon. So, annoyed and irritated as I was, I checked my own
+feelings and said,--
+
+"I think it is altogether a misunderstanding! I have no intention of
+breaking any regulations. I was not aware that a dog's death would be a
+matter where the law would interfere."
+
+The fury on the purple face opposite me subsided somewhat.
+
+"Is it then possible," he said, more quietly, "that you are in
+ignorance of our rule, that, when any animal dies in a private
+dwelling-house, the fact shall be notified within twelve hours to the
+police, in order that the dead body may be immediately removed?"
+
+All eyes fixed upon me with breathless uncertainty.
+
+"Certainly," I said, "I did not know of the regulation. If I had, I
+should have complied with it. There is no similar rule in England."
+
+A great change took place in the official's manner. His face cleared,
+and he waved his arm with a gesture of magnificent condescension. His
+whole attitude expressed clearly that so enlightened and cultured a
+person as himself was in the habit of making every allowance for any
+poor, benighted pagan like me.
+
+"Well, M'sieur; well, I accept your statement, and I withdraw my
+expressions of a moment back. But think, M'sieur, of the risk to which
+your conduct has exposed others. Think of the pollution of the air, the
+contamination of the atmosphere! Think, M'sieur, of the typhoid! the
+fever!! the cholera!!!"
+
+He looked round upon the others, and a sympathetic shudder of horror
+passed over them.
+
+As an Englishman, of course, I felt strongly inclined to derisive
+laughter. However, I merely said,--
+
+"Well, what is to be done next?"
+
+"The body must be removed, M'sieur!" he answered, with a touch of
+severity, "at once!!"
+
+"How?"
+
+"A scavenger will remove it."
+
+I stood silent. The idea repelled me. This thing that had been petted
+and cared for by me for ten years, had slept at my side, and often been
+held in my arms, now to be flung upon a dust heap, with the rotting
+matter of a Paris street. The mind will not change its associations so
+quickly. I looked at the man and said,--
+
+"Can I not bury the dog somewhere myself?"
+
+"I am afraid--I hardly know--" he said. "These are the rules,--that all
+dead animals are taken by the municipality."
+
+He spoke reluctantly now. His personal animosity against me was
+evidently dead. Fortunate that I had not offended him earlier in the
+interview; if I had, he would certainly now have dragged the dog from
+me with every species of indignity and insult, and I could have done
+nothing against him, armoured up as he was with the law. As things
+stood, he was clearly on my side.
+
+"Perhaps this gentleman," I said, indicating the master of the hotel,
+"would let me purchase a piece of ground for a grave in his courtyard.
+If so, would you allow me to bury the dog there?"
+
+The master of the hotel, who saw now that after all there would be no
+serious row with the police, nor discredit on his hotel, and began to
+think his fury had been somewhat misdirected, hastened to assure me
+that I need not consider the matter; that not only was a portion, but
+the whole courtyard at my disposition, and not as a purchase, but as a
+free gift, if M'sieur le Commissionaire sanctioned the proceeding.
+
+The official hesitated, and the onlookers, their sympathies engaged,
+murmured,--
+
+"Ah, pauvre chien!"
+
+"C'est l'affection vois-tu?"
+
+"Il aime le chien, c'est naturel!"
+
+"L'affection, c'est toujours touchante!"
+
+The Commissionaire, his own inclination thus backed up by the
+prevailing sentiment, turned to me, and said--
+
+"Well, M'sieur, I ought to take your dog from you, but still, as you
+say you will bury the dog yourself, and, as I am sure this gentleman
+will see that the grave is deep enough to protect the health of the
+public, I believe I may safely grant you the permission you ask. It is
+accorded, M'sieur!" and he bowed, full of satisfied amiable authority
+and friendly feeling.
+
+I held out my hand to him on the impulse.
+
+"I am extremely obliged to you!"
+
+He grasped it warmly in his, and laid his left effusively on his heart.
+
+"You have my sincere sympathy, M'sieur."
+
+Then lifting his hat and bowing, and putting out of sight the
+formidable document he had shaken in my face, he retreated down the
+corridor, followed by the other official, and leaving the hotel manager
+with me.
+
+"I will have a grave dug at once, M'sieur," he said; "and you shall be
+informed when it is ready."
+
+I thanked him and entered my own room.
+
+A good three hours later I was following the gardener downstairs, the
+dead body of Nous, wrapped completely in one of my overcoats, in my
+arms. We went into the courtyard. It was raining now, the night quite
+dark, and a gusty wind blowing. We crossed the yard to where a broad
+flower-bed was planted. Here a grave, wide and deep enough for a human
+being, had been dug. A lantern, in which the flame blew fitfully, was
+set on the huge heap of mould and sent an uncertain light over the
+grave. I got down into it, and laid Nous gently, still wrapped in the
+coat, on the damp earth, with a heavy heart.
+
+I vaulted out of the grave and stood, while the man filled it in,
+listening to the steady fall of the earth and its dull thud, thud. The
+rain came down steadily, and the man looked at me and said--
+
+"Monsieur will be drenched through, he had better go within."
+
+"No, no," I said; "continue."
+
+And I waited while he dug away the mound, and the chilly wind rattled
+the branches of a tree near, and the rain soaked with a monotonous
+splashing into the earth, and the light flickered, barely strong enough
+to show me the man's working figure. When he had finished, when the
+grave was filled and the upper soil smoothed over, I turned and,
+mentally and physically chilled, went slowly back into the hotel. As I
+entered the gas-lit corridor I saw a figure there at the door. It was
+Howard. He was still in the hotel, and though I detested his proximity
+even, I had no influence on his departure. He was evidently hanging
+about there waiting for somebody or something, and to my intense
+indignation, as he caught sight of me, he came towards me.
+
+"Oh, Victor," he said hurriedly, in an uncertain tone, "I must speak to
+you!"
+
+What intolerable insolence to dare to come to me, the man he had so
+mortally injured. My impulse was to stretch out my right arm and fell
+him to the ground with a blow that should have the force of my whole
+system in it. The colour came hot in all my face.
+
+"Pray don't let us have a scene here," I said, coldly.
+
+"Very good, then come outside. It is only for a few seconds. You always
+used to say you would never refuse to hear a person once, whatever they
+had done."
+
+It was my principle, as he said, and I controlled the loathing I had of
+him, of his voice, his look, his presence, and said--
+
+"Come out, then," and we went down to the door.
+
+There was an alley just outside the hotel, a cul de sac, black and
+empty. Down this we turned, and when we had passed the side door of the
+hotel he spoke.
+
+"Victor, I am awfully sorry about the MS.; I am really. I would give
+worlds to replace it now if I could. I have been utterly wretched
+since. Is there anything I can do now to help you?"
+
+"No," I said bitterly, "you cannot re-write my manuscript nor
+resuscitate my dog."
+
+"Oh, why did I do it? I can't think! I can't understand it! If you knew
+what I have felt since!"
+
+"Have you nothing more to say than this?" I asked; "because this sort
+of thing is useless and leads to nothing."
+
+"But what do you think of me? You hate me! But it was not premeditated,
+I swear. I had no motive, no gain in doing it, and we have been great
+friends always; but I suppose that can never be again now! But still it
+was an impulse, a sudden impulse, only because I was so jealous of you!
+It was irresistible at the moment! The thing was in flames before I
+realised it! You know yourself what impulse is! You always knew I was
+like that!"
+
+"Impulse!" I repeated. "Yes, I knew you were impulsive, but that such
+an impulse could ever come to you as that--to burn, irreparably destroy
+the year's work, and all the hopes of a man who was an intimate friend,
+and against whom you had never had the shadow of a complaint, that I
+never could have believed! Impulse! It is not one that I can conceive
+existing except in hell!"
+
+We were talking with voices moderated, rather low than otherwise; but
+the hatred I felt of him I let come into each word and edge it like a
+knife.
+
+He drew in his breath.
+
+"Then our friendship is at an end?" he said, in a weak nervous tone.
+
+"Utterly. As if it had never been. You have cut out its very roots. I
+had a great friendship for you--more, a great affection. It would have
+stood a great deal. I would have passed over many injuries that you
+might have done. Anything almost but this, that you knew was so
+completely blasting to all my own desires. This shows me what your
+feelings must have been at the time, at any rate, and remember a thick
+manuscript is not burnt in a minute. How long must it have taken you to
+destroy those sheets upon sheets of paper in which you knew another
+man's very heart, and blood, and nerve had been infused? All that time
+you must have been animated with the sheer lust of cruelly and brutally
+ill-using and injuring me, and in return I"--
+
+I shut and locked my lips upon the words that rose.
+
+To abuse or curse another is almost as degrading to oneself as to
+strike him.
+
+We had come up to the end of the alley now, and we paused by the blank
+brick wall. There was a lamp projecting from it which threw some light
+upon us both, and, as his figure came distinctly before my eyes, I felt
+one intolerable desire to leap upon him--this miserable creature who
+had destroyed my work--fling him to the ground, and grind his face and
+head to a shapeless mass in this slimy gutter that flowed at our feet.
+
+Could he have faintly realised what my feelings were, coward as he was,
+he would never have come up this empty alley with me.
+
+"Well, Victor, I am leaving Paris to-night; but I felt I could not go
+without telling you how infinitely I regret it all. If you can never be
+my friend again, you can forgive me. Let me hear you say that you do
+before I go."
+
+Forgive him! Great God! Forgive an injury so wanton, so excuseless!
+Every savage instinct in me leapt up at the word.
+
+The manuscript! I felt inclined to shout to him. The manuscript! Give
+that back to me and then come and talk about forgiveness. Had the act
+and the motive been as loathsome, but the injury, the actual injury,
+the positive loss to me been less, I could have forgiven; but the blow
+was so sharp, the damage so irremediable, I could not. Even at his
+words I seemed to see staring me in the face the months of toil
+awaiting me before I could rebuild--if I could ever--the fabric he had
+destroyed in half-an-hour.
+
+And crowding upon this came the thought of what he had robbed me of,
+the name, the freedom, the power that those vanished paper pages had
+been pregnant with for me. He was leaving Paris, he said; and so might
+I have been leaving free and successful, leaving to return to Lucia,
+but for him.
+
+And now I was to remain--remain here, a prisoner, to work on another
+twelve weary months at that most nauseating of tasks, repairing undone
+work. To recommence, to take up the old burden, to start it all over
+again, now when I had just made myself free! To be shackled again with
+the weight of uncertainty and expectancy for another year, through him,
+and by God he talked of forgiveness!--to me!--now!
+
+It was too soon. Later--later, perhaps, when I was calmer, when some of
+the injury had been repaired, when a spark of hope had been rekindled;
+then, if he asked, but now--The days before me stretched such a bitter,
+hopeless blank! And how did I know that his act could ever be
+nullified! It might so turn out that now I never should accomplish my
+end.
+
+My health had worn thin and my brain was tired out. Either might give
+way, and then--a life blasted through him! Brute and devil! that was
+what he had wished, and was perhaps wishing still, even now, when he
+professed to be so anxious for forgiveness. I glanced towards his face
+opposite me, but it was too dark to see its expression. A slight,
+steady drizzle fell between us; I only saw his slight figure before me
+in the uncertain light, and again something urged me.
+
+Take your revenge now while you can get it. This man may have spoiled
+all your life, but when you realise it, then he may be away and out of
+your power. Thrash him! Half kill him now while you have the chance!
+But I did not stir. Vengeance has always seemed to me a poor thing.
+Supposing... After? ... If I satiated my rage then, what after. I
+should have two things to regret instead of one. No. Let him go with
+his vile act upon his head.
+
+But forgive? I could not. He had taken the inside, the best of my life,
+and I hated, purely hated him. I turned a step aside, his mere outline
+before my eyes sent the hate running hotly through me.
+
+"I can't," I muttered; "no, I can't."
+
+Howard sprang forward and put his hand on my arm, and at the touch I
+seemed to abhor him more.
+
+"Victor, I wish I could say how I regret it. I wish I could express
+myself, but I can't. If you knew--I would cut off my right hand now to
+undo it! I would indeed!"
+
+"Who wants you right hand" I said, savagely, stopping and turning on
+him as I shook off his detestable touch. "Fool! You can talk now!
+Replace a single chapter of that book I slaved at--that would be more
+to the purpose!"
+
+Howard's face grew paler. I saw that, even in the darkness.
+
+"It is not open to me, Victor, now," he said; "but it is still open to
+you to forgive."
+
+His voice had a grave significance in it. No words that he could have
+chosen would have been better. The short, quiet sentence was like a
+sword to divide my hatred, and penetrate to the better part of man. The
+truth, the unerring force, the reflections of this life's chances and
+decrees in those words went home. It was not open to him now to repair;
+later, it might not be open to me to forgive. And later, when all these
+present vivid feelings were swept away in the past, should I not wish I
+had forgiven.
+
+I stood silent, and the query went through me--What is forgiveness? Is
+it to feel again as we have felt before the injury? This is impossible.
+Do what I would that affection I had had for him could never re-awaken.
+It was stamped out, obliterated, as a flower is ground into the dust
+beneath one's heel.
+
+Still the loathing and the hatred I had for him now would pass. Years
+would cancel it all, and bring with them mere indifference towards him,
+the thought of him and of his act. To say the words now, and let the
+time to come slowly fill them with truth, was better, surely, than to
+reiterate my hatred of him--hatred which years hence would seem almost
+foolish to me myself.
+
+"I can't think that my forgiveness can be of very serious import to
+you," I said quietly. "However, it is yours."
+
+"You will shake hands with me, then, won't you?" and he held out his
+hand.
+
+With an effort I stretched out mine and took his, and held it for a
+second as in old times.
+
+"Good-bye, Victor," he said, in rather a strained voice, "I shall never
+cease to regret what I have done."
+
+He hesitated, as if wondering if I should speak. I did not, and he
+turned and went down the alley, and the darkness closed up after him. I
+leant silent against the wall, hating myself for forgiving him and
+letting him go, and yet knowing I would do the same again.
+
+"One must forgive, one must forgive; otherwise one is no better than
+brute," I thought mechanically. "Later I shall be glad,"--and similar
+phrases by which Principle excuses itself to furious, disappointed
+Nature.
+
+After a time I grew calmer, and I went back to the hotel and up to my
+room. It seemed emptier, blanker still, now that even the dead body of
+the dog had gone. In the grate, and scattered over the carpet, remained
+still remnants of black tinder. I felt suddenly tired, worn out. I
+flung myself, dressed as I was, upon the bed, and lay there in a sort
+of stupor. And the slow, dark hours of that terrible night of
+depression tramped over me with leaden footsteps.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The next morning, just as I had dropped into an uneasy doze, there came
+a knocking and a hammering, and a muttering outside my door.
+
+"M'sieur! M'sieur!" Tap-tap-tap. "Que diable donc! Qu'il dort! M'sieur!
+Profondement! Est ce qu'il est mort? Ah! c'est une bete Anglaise!"
+Tap-tap-tap.
+
+All this came through the wall in a hazy sort of confusion, mingling
+with my sleep, before it roused me to go and open the door. Finally,
+however, I stumbled off the bed and unlocked the door, and threw it
+open.
+
+"What now" I thought. "Have I broken any more of your confounded Gallic
+regulations."
+
+It was not a Commissary of Police this time, but a uniformed
+commissionaire, with a note in his hand. Possibly serenely unconscious
+that I had heard his polite remarks outside, he bowed urbanely.
+
+"Bonjour, M'sieur! A thousand apologies for disturbing M'sieur! But
+Madame said I was to deliver this note personally."
+
+I looked at him with elevated eyebrows. I knew no Madame in Paris.
+
+"I think there is some mistake," I said.
+
+"But why? Monsieur Eeltone? Numero quinze, is it not?"
+
+"Hilton. Yes, that is my name."
+
+He gave me a triumphant glance, and handed me the note with a flourish.
+The envelope was that of the Grand Hotel; but the writing on it was
+Lucia's writing. Lucia here in Paris! Close to me! How? Why? The blood
+poured over my face. With a sense of delight I tore the envelope open:--
+
+"I am at the above hotel. I shall remain at home all to-day in the hope
+that you may be able to come and see me." "LUCIA."
+
+I looked up the man in the doorway bowed with a deprecating air.
+
+"Madame said I was to wait for an answer."
+
+He had a subdued smile upon his face, which seemed to say--"We know all
+about these little notes! We are accustomed to them here in Paris!"
+
+I told him to enter, and he followed me into the room and took an
+interested glance round. Probably, to his view, my pallid face and
+blood-shot eyes, my last night's clothes, my boots on my feet, and the
+bed unslept-in, conveyed the idea of a drunken fit only just over in
+time to make room for the morning's intrigue. A young, beautiful
+English madame--for the title Miss is barely recognised, never
+understood in Paris--staying at the hotel and sending notes to a young
+English M'sieur in another. Yes, this was plainly an intrigue of the
+genuine order, and the mari would doubtless arrive from England later.
+All was plain, and he stood with a patronising smile by the table,
+while I scribbled a note to Lucia.
+
+"My Dearest Life,--I am rushing, flying to you now. I will be with you
+as soon as fiacre can bring me." "VICTOR."
+
+I closed it, and made him wait while I sealed it, lest he should
+interfere with it. Then I handed it to him with a two-franc piece, and
+with bon jours and remerciments and grins he withdrew.
+
+I dressed hurriedly and yet carefully, and shaved with a dangerously
+trembling hand. The first fiacre that was passing as I left the hotel I
+took, and was driven, through the bright sunshine that filled the Paris
+boulevards, to the Grand. I sat back in it, with my arms folded,
+feeling my heart like a stone within me. Lucia's coming, that,
+thirty-six hours back, would have infused the extreme of delight
+through me, was now useless, worthless.
+
+I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner again, fettered,
+bound, as if I had an iron collar on my neck, and manacles on my
+wrists. I looked through the shining, quivering sunlight that fell on
+every side with blank, unseeing eyes, and the bitterest curses against
+Howard rose to my lips, checked only by the knowledge that I had
+forgiven him.
+
+When I reached the hotel, and mentioned her name, I was shown up to a
+private sitting-room on the first floor, facing the gay Paris
+boulevard, and with the bright light streaming in through its
+half-closed persiennes. A figure rose at the opening of the door, and
+came towards me with outstretched hands.
+
+"Lucia!"
+
+My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and
+poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within the
+first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I recognised
+that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but nevertheless
+distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman since I had seen
+her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She had awakened. It was
+a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to me now; a woman awake to
+her own powers, conscious of the sceptre, and the gifts, and the
+kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a woman for a few years, I
+felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in her advance towards me,
+heard it in the soft tones of her voice as she said,--
+
+"Well, Victor, are you glad I have come?"
+
+And it was with my heart suddenly beating hard, and my face pale, and a
+mist before my eyes, that I came forward to her. What had been the
+first slight shock to her sleeping woman's passions I had no idea.
+
+Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she passed him
+in a crowd had suddenly struck through the ice of her abstraction.
+Perhaps some pressure of an arm meaning she did not even comprehend.
+Perhaps some word, overheard between two men, whose meaning she did not
+even comprehend. Perhaps it was only Nature unaided that had whispered
+to her,--"Life is passing, and its greatest pleasure is as yet untried.
+Get up and seek it."
+
+Perhaps any of these, or all or none. I could not say. The change was
+there. Lucia was conscious, awake. Pure, delicate, as from her integral
+nature she would always, but still awake. As she stood, the sun fell
+upon her light hair and seemed to get tangled there, a hot, rose glow
+was in her face, and the smooth scarlet lips parted in a faint seducing
+smile.
+
+"Now, tell me everything," she said, softly, "I am sure the manuscript
+is finished by now."
+
+She pointed to a wicker chair for me, and drew one just opposite it in
+which she threw herself, full in the morning light, but just avoiding
+the stabbing sun-rays. I saw in a sort of mechanical manner the way in
+which she was dressed. It was as a woman only dresses once or twice,
+perhaps, in her lifetime; and that is when she is determined to win,
+through the sheer strength and force of her beauty, in the face of
+every obstacle, the man she desires.
+
+Every detail had been thought of, every beauty of her form studied and
+enhanced, from the light curls on her forehead, and the curves of her
+bosom rising and falling under its lace bodice, to the tiny shoes that
+came from beneath the folds of her delicate-coloured skirt.
+
+It was presumably of cotton, for Lucia herself had informed me that she
+never wore anything in the mornings except cotton or serge; if so, it
+was a glorified cotton of a clear rose tint. Film upon film of lace
+hung over it in transparent folds, through which the glowing colour
+deepened and blushed at her slightest movement, as the hot colour in
+the heart of a rose flushes through all its leaves.
+
+Above her supple hips, clasping her waist, shone an open-work band of
+Maltese silver, and above this rose delicate vase-like lines, swelling
+and expanding at last into the rounded curves of her bosom; here the
+colour seemed to glow deeper and warmer where her heart was beating
+tumultuously, and then towards her neck it paled again, beneath ruffle
+and ruffle of lace that lay like foam against the soft, snow-white
+throat. It was a symphony of colour. A perfect harmony of perfect tones
+in union with the brilliant fairness of her skin. The sleeves, half
+open to the elbow, revealed a white, rounded, downy arm, and the
+thousand subtle pink-and-white tints of her flesh seemed to melt and
+merge themselves into a bewildering, distracting glow within that
+rose-hued sleeve. She made one exquisite, intoxicating vision to the
+senses. In those moments I can hardly say I saw her. She rather seemed
+to sway before the dizzy sight of my excited eyes.
+
+Dimly yet keenly, vaguely yet convincingly, I felt she had come as an
+adorable antagonist to my resolutions. Traditionally speaking, such a
+knowledge should have made me instantly on my guard.
+
+I ought certainly to have summoned my control, my judgment, and so on,
+to say nothing of an icy reserve. But I did not. My whole heart seemed
+to rush out to her, my whole being to strain towards her. I longed to
+take her entirely in my arms, to kiss her on the lips and throat, and
+say,--
+
+"Ask whatever you will and it shall be granted."
+
+"The manuscript is finished, isn't it?" she repeated.
+
+Oh, bitter, bitter, and cruel fate that had dragged the fruits of my
+labour, and with them everything, out of my hand!
+
+"It was finished, Lucia, a few days ago," I said, speaking calmly with
+a great effort; "but an accident happened and it was destroyed."
+
+I felt myself growing paler and paler as I spoke, meeting her lovely,
+eager eyes fixed on mine.
+
+"Destroyed?" she echoed, growing white to the lips. "Oh, Victor! How?"
+
+"I would rather not say, Lucia, exactly how it occurred, but it had
+been accepted by a publisher here, and I was going to make one or two
+trifling alterations in it to please him, and so I had it back. Well,
+then, as I say, something happened, and the thing was destroyed."
+
+There was a dead silence.
+
+I saw her heart beating painfully beneath the laces on her bosom, and
+pain stamped on all her face. Then she said abruptly,--
+
+"Have you Howard with you still?"
+
+"No. He left Paris last night," I answered.
+
+Her eyes met mine full across the sunlight. We looked at each other in
+silence.
+
+She asked nothing farther.
+
+I believe she comprehended the whole case as it stood, because she
+would know that had I lost or injured the MSS. myself I should have no
+reason for concealing it. As a matter of honourable feeling I wanted to
+keep the fact from her, but I could not help her guessing it. Curiously
+enough her next question, after a long pause--though I did not see that
+in her mind there could have been connection between the subjects--was:
+
+"Where is Nous?"
+
+"Nous is dead."
+
+"How did he die?"
+
+"That, also, I would rather not say."
+
+At that, in addition to a sharper look of distress, a puzzled surprise
+came into her face. She raised her delicate eyebrows and looked at me
+with a perplexed, half-frightened expression.
+
+"Victor," she said, leaning forward a little in her chair, "was it he
+that tore up the manuscript? and did you kill him in a fit of rage?"
+
+I looked back at her, also with surprise, that she could suggest such a
+thing of me as possible.
+
+"Oh, no!" I said hastily; "nothing at all of the sort. No! If either
+the loss of the book or the dog's death had occurred in any way through
+my fault I would tell you. I have no secrets of my own from you, but
+both of these concern another man, and therefore I would rather let
+them pass."
+
+There was silence.
+
+Then I asked, looking at her,--
+
+"Are you alone here, Lucia?"
+
+"Except, of course, for my maid--Yes."
+
+My heart beat harder. Why? I hardly know, except that the word "alone"
+has such a charm in it connected with a woman we love.
+
+"Of course," she said, leaning back, "it is a little unconventional my
+coming here alone; but Mama was not well enough, and I--Victor," she
+said, with a sudden indrawn breath, "I felt I must come and see you. I
+told her I felt I should die there if they would not let me come!"
+
+I saw her breast heave as she spoke, her cheek flushed and paled
+alternately, the azure of her eyes deepened slowly as the pupils
+widened in them, till there seemed midnight behind the lashes.
+
+I felt a dangerous current stirring in all my blood at her words, a dry
+spasm seemed in my throat, blocking all speech.
+
+"I thought you must have finished by now, and I came to say--I came to
+say"--she murmured.
+
+The blood rushed scarlet, staining all the fair skin, across the face
+before me, and the bright lips fluttered in uncertain hesitation.
+
+I guessed the situation.
+
+She had come to say to me phrases that seemed quite easy, quite simple
+to her, murmuring them to herself in the silence of an empty studio,
+and now face to face with me, listening and expectant, they had become
+difficult, impossible. I leant forward, the blood hot in my own cheek,
+a dull flame waking in every vein.
+
+"Darling," I said, taking her soft left hand within both my own, "I
+cannot tell exactly what you wish to tell me; but listen--I had
+finished all, and had things not turned out as they have I should have
+been starting now to come to you and say, 'Lucia I am free now to be
+your slave.' All this year we have been separated I have thought only
+of you, waking and sleeping, longed for you, dreamed of you, lived in
+the hour of our re-union, desired with an intensity beyond all words
+that day that gives you to me; and, forty hours back, that day, Lucia,
+seemed so near, but now--dearest"--
+
+I stopped, choked, suffocated with the weight of hopeless, despairing
+passion that fell back upon itself within me.
+
+Lucia leant forward, the beating, palpitating bosom was close to me,
+her white, nerveless hand lay close in mine.
+
+"And now, Victor?"
+
+"Now all is vanished. I am exactly in the position where I was when I
+left you in England a year ago."
+
+"And what do you mean--what are we--what?"--
+
+"My sweet, what can we do? I must recommence. I must work on another
+year."
+
+I felt the burning, tremulous fingers grow cold in mine. Her face paled
+till it was like white stone. Then suddenly she withdrew her hand from
+my clasp, and started to her feet.
+
+"Victor, I cannot! no, I cannot! I cannot wait another year! It will
+kill me!" she said, passionately, looking away from me, and pacing a
+short length of the floor backwards and forwards before me, as I rose,
+too, and stood watching dizzily the incomparable figure pass and
+repass, hardly master of myself.
+
+"Dearest," she continued; "this is what I came to say--let us marry
+now. I thought you would have successfully finished your work, and we
+might do so; but now, now, even as it is, let it be as it is, let it be
+unfinished, and still, still let us marry. There is no real bar as
+there might be. There is no question of wrong to any one. We are to be
+married--it cannot matter to any one when we are. Continue to work
+afterwards. I am willing to be second always, in every thing, to your
+work. But don't drive me from you altogether. Let me stay with you now
+I have come. Let us marry now--here. Let us go before some
+official--the Maire, or some one, or English consul, no matter
+whom--this afternoon! Victor, if not now, that day you desire will
+never come. I shall never be your own. Think how it has receded and
+receded into time! We have been engaged now more than three years!"
+
+She paused in front of me, and lifted her face--brilliant, glowing,
+appealing--with an intensity of passionate, eager longing in it that
+defied her words to express. Her whole form quivered with excitement,
+till I saw the laces of her dress tremble. On the bodice beneath my
+eyes, the lace fell from the shoulders, and its folds on each side
+divided slightly in the centre, leaving a depression there in which the
+rose-colour glowed crimson. It riveted my eyes this line--this channel
+of colour burnt fiercely beneath my lids.
+
+I could see nothing but it; it seemed everywhere, to fill the room, to
+scorch into my brain, this palpitating, throbbing, crimson line. That
+terrible impulse of blind excitement was rapidly drawing me into
+itself--the impulse that counts nothing, knows nothing, reckons nothing
+but itself; that will buy the present hour at any sacrifice--that
+accepts everything, ignores everything but that one moment it feels
+approaching. This impulse urged me, pressed me, strained violently upon
+me.
+
+It left me barely conscious of anything except the absorbing longing to
+take her, draw her close, hard into my arms, and say, "Yes, let all go;
+from this day henceforward you are mine." But almost unconsciously to
+myself my reason rebelled against being thus thrust down and trampled
+upon by this sudden, brute instinct rushing furiously through my frame,
+and my reason clutched me and clung to me and maintained its hold, and,
+feeling myself wrenched asunder by these two opposite forces, I stood
+immovable and silent.
+
+"Victor," she said, after a minute, and the warm, white uncertain hand
+sought mine again and held it, "I have been working hard since you
+left, and the canvas is nearly finished, but I am willing to relinquish
+it for the present, to let it go. In all this time you have been away
+from me I have been slowly learning that one's own life and one's own
+life's happiness is of more worth than these abstract ideas, than one's
+work or talent or anything else. I have been feeling that you and I are
+letting day after day go by and are working for a to-morrow that for us
+may never come. Is this your philosophy?"
+
+I looked down on her as she clasped my hand and drew it up to her
+breast, her eyes were on mine, and all my mental perceptions were
+blinded and forced down under the pressure of the physical senses.
+
+"Take me into your life, Victor. I swear I won't interfere with your
+work. Let me sit somewhere beside you all day long while you write, and
+let me lie all night long watching you while you write, if you like!
+Oh, do let me! do speak to me?"
+
+She pressed my hand in, convulsively, upon her breast, until it seemed
+to be in the midst of tremulous warmth, close upon the throbbing heart
+itself. I could not think. Thought seemed slipping from me. I felt
+sinking deeper each minute into the quicksand of desire. Nothing seemed
+clear any longer. All within my brain was merged into one hot, clinging
+haze, in which still loomed the idea that I must not yield. It would be
+dishonourable to my father, disappointing to myself, destructive to my
+work. I could not realise it then, could not see it, but I knew and
+remembered in a dim way that it was so, that it had been so decided,
+and I must adhere to it.
+
+"It is impossible, Lucia."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I promised my father we should not marry until I had got out
+some book."
+
+"But rescind the promise! Say that you cannot carry it out! Give up all
+help from him, and let us live our lives apart!"
+
+"I have no means to do it with."
+
+"You can make them! Surely with all your knowledge you can get some
+ordinary work to do till you can get your works out!"
+
+"Even if I had the means I could not, after the understanding between
+us, after all he has done for me, throw him over at a moment's notice."
+
+"He has no right to ask such a sacrifice!"
+
+"It has all been thought out," I said dully, "and settled before. I
+can't re-argue it all now. I decided it finally before I left England,
+and I am in the same position now as I was then."
+
+A scarlet colour stole into the rose glow on Lucia's face.
+
+"You don't care for me, Victor!" she said passionately. "You can't! No
+man could and speak so!" and she threw my hand from her and herself
+into the long chair in a sudden, wild storm of excited tears.
+
+I hardly knew what I was doing. I felt as if I had been struck sharply
+on the eyes as I heard her words. I fell on my knees beside her chair,
+and put both my arms up and clasped them round the soft waist, and let
+them lean hard on the hips, in a spasm of angry passion.
+
+"What are you thinking of? You know there is nothing I covet like
+yourself," I said savagely, the blood flowing over my face as hotly as
+it burnt in her own. "But we can't do this. We should both despise
+ourselves afterwards. You should be the last person to urge it on me.
+What do I ask you? To wait another nine months! That's all. You should
+help me."
+
+"Help you?" she said, her eyes blazing upon me with anger, shame and
+passion. "Help you in making a fatal mistake? No, I will not! You can
+refuse me if you like, but all the responsibility is with you. I warn
+you against it. I have come to warn you. When it is too late you will
+wish this day back again. You are not tied now after a whole year's
+work, and after a misfortune you could not help. If you always wait in
+life until you have settled and arranged everything just to your
+satisfaction you will find that you lose your desires. They will slip
+like sand through your hands while you are arranging your
+circumstances. Life is never, never quite as we would have it. We must
+take our pleasures one by one as they are offered to us; it is hopeless
+to think we can gain them all together. Oh, Victor dearest!" she added,
+stretching out two rounded, glowing arms in a sort of half-timid
+desperation and clasping them round my neck, while mine still held her
+heaving waist, "love now, and win your name by-and-by."
+
+There was delirium in my brain. The whole woman's form swam before my
+sight. My arms locked themselves violently round the yielding,
+pulsating waist.
+
+"I would if I could," I muttered, and that was as much as I could say.
+
+"You can," she urged in a soft, desperate voice. "Why not? I can't
+believe you love me if you let me go back now."
+
+"I can't believe you love me if you urge me to do what I think is
+dishonourable."
+
+Her arms dropped from my neck.
+
+"Oh, it is a mistake," she said.
+
+"Perhaps so."
+
+We had both risen. The floor seemed to bend beneath my feet. I felt her
+pulses still beating against my arms. I looked at her. Our eyes met,
+and the gaze seemed locked, fixed, and we neither of us could transfer
+it. My throat seemed rigid, dry as a desert; her voice was choked,
+suffocated in tears. But "Kiss me, at least; oh, kiss me!" was written
+on the whole imploring face, on the wildly quivering lips, in the
+burning, distracted eyes. But what use? Rather such a kiss, here, now,
+might bring an irremediable loss. In any case, the pain of parting
+after would be ten times intensified for us both. Could I then go?
+Would any force then be left in me? Would my will stand beyond a
+certain point? I did not know. It seemed the only safety for us both,
+the one rock still left in the wild ocean of our passion--an absolute
+denial to the rushing feelings to find expression in the least of acts
+or words.
+
+I did not believe nor think she could misunderstand me. I felt sure the
+struggle and the suffering and the desire must be printed in my face. I
+knew she must see in it that I was not cold before the despairing,
+passionate longing I saw stirring all her pained, excited frame. To me
+it seemed as if she must see me ageing and my face lining before her
+eyes. I held her hand in mine hard for a moment. Then I dropped it
+gently, and she looked at me--stunned. And so, unkissed, untouched by
+my lips that ached so desperately for hers, I left her and went out
+through the passages and down the steps and out of the hotel into the
+brilliant streets with my nerves strung tense to sheer agony.
+
+I had acted, of course, in a correct and orthodox manner. No one could
+reproach me for the interview just past, but in my heart there was a
+self-condemning voice. Pleasure seldom unveils her face and offers
+herself to us twice, and Venus is a dangerous goddess to offend. I
+said, "Wait, wait," and "to-morrow," but those ominous lines beat dully
+through my brain--
+
+  "to daurion tis oiden;
+   os oun et eudi estin."
+
+When I reached my hotel, thought, intelligent thought, seemed
+collapsing, and my brain spinning round and round within my skull.
+
+"The end of me," I muttered, "at this rate will certainly be a cell in
+a lunatic asylum."
+
+For the first time, I released my rule against drugs. I sent the hotel
+porter for a draught of chloral. When it came I drank it, and, in the
+middle of the brilliant afternoon sunshine, threw myself on the bed,
+conscious of nothing but a longing for oblivion. Unaccustomed to it,
+the drug seized well upon me. For long, merciful, quiet hours I knew
+nothing.
+
+After this there came a blank of many days: idle, barren days, in which
+I did nothing, knew nothing except that I suffered. My brain seemed
+blank, empty, like a quarry of black slate. The power that seemed to
+dwell there at times was gone now; crushed all that impersonal emotion
+of the writer's mind by the blighting personal emotion of the man.
+
+A fortnight passed, and at the end of it I had done nothing; another
+week, and then another, and I had still not written a line.
+
+At last one night, sitting idle in the cafe after dinner, I felt the
+old impulse stir in me, a rush of eager inclination to write went
+through me. A sudden sense of power filled me. The brain, empty and
+idle a few minutes before, became charged with energy and desire to
+expend it. A corresponding current of activity poured along each vein.
+The old familiar impetus swayed me.
+
+I welcomed it gladly and went upstairs, got out paper and a pen, and
+the remembrance of my own life slipped away from me. All that night I
+wrote, and the next day, and the fresh manuscript was fairly started.
+For a whole fortnight I wrote almost incessantly. I snatched a little
+food in the cafe, hardly knowing what I ate.
+
+The nights passed feverishly without sleep, while the brain revolved,
+excitedly, scenes written or to be written. Towards the end of the
+fortnight the impulses to work steadily declined. I forced myself to
+write at intervals; but, as usual, the forced work was worthless, and I
+destroyed it when it was done. No, it was no use. I could merely shrug
+my shoulders and smoke and wait.
+
+The hot, blank days of August drifted by, and as I saw the boulevards
+empty themselves day by day, and Paris grow hotter and duller each
+afternoon, I felt the solitary existence weigh heavier and heavier upon
+me. The loss of the dog seemed to have made a larger gap in my
+existence than I should have believed; his unused collars still lay
+upon my mantelpiece, his plate and saucer still stood in the corner by
+the hearth, and sometimes when I was climbing the dark stairs at night
+to my empty room I felt as if I would have given years of my life to
+have had the dog leap up into my arms in welcome.
+
+One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a
+letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I supposed
+it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too occupied, or
+indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other correspondents.
+
+In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to my
+father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without explaining
+farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and begging him to
+release me from the arrangement made before I left England, I had
+received a derisive note from him, full of ironical sympathy with my
+misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to another year's work,
+with a good grace and a contented spirit.
+
+My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.
+
+I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony, and since
+then my letters to him had been short notes, out of which I studiously
+kept my own feelings. There was no one now to whom I could either speak
+or write a word of personal matters.
+
+An anchorite in a cave of the desert could not have been more shut off
+from that dear communication with his fellows that a man hardly values
+till he loses it.
+
+When I had lighted the lamp I sat staring at the loose sheets of the
+manuscript lying on the side table, noting painfully how far it was
+from completion, and it was only when I lifted it to the middle table
+for work that I glanced at the letter again.
+
+As my eyes fell on the superscription the blood leapt into my face--it
+was Howard's. There was a strong disinclination in me to take up the
+letter, to read it, to let my thoughts flow in his direction at all.
+Resolutely I had tried to banish the memory of him from my mind, to
+utterly throw out his image from my recollection. The thought of him
+was disagreeable, and therefore never welcomed.
+
+The idea of one person cherishing, as the phrase is, hatred, envy, or
+anger against another, always seems to me incomprehensible. All these
+are unpleasant sensations, and I sweep them out of my mind as quickly
+as I possibly can, not from any exalted motives, but simply as useless,
+cumbering lumber, for which I decline to use my brain at a storehouse.
+Howard had injured me enough.
+
+Was I to waste my time and my energies in hating him? And yet the time
+had not come when I could think of him with calm indifference.
+Therefore, to scout the idea of him whenever it presented itself, to
+refuse to dwell upon him and what he had inflicted on me, was the only
+way to escape additional pain and discomfort for myself. And now, at
+sight of his handwriting, the beast, the monster of declining hate rose
+in me again, and I remembered him.
+
+It came back upon me that evening, his image, and I knew that I hated
+him still. I took up the letter with a feeling of revolt and disgust,
+as if it had been a filthy object, broke it open, and read:--
+
+"DEAR VICTOR,--I expect you will say to yourself it is the greatest
+cheek my writing to you, and I know it is, but I am reduced to that
+state of desperation when a man ceases to feel degradation."
+
+"I am writing to ask you for help--you will wonder how I can. So do I.
+I wonder at myself. But I know you are the best of fellows, and I feel
+you will help me now in spite of all that has happened. Victor send me
+what you can, as near 15 Pounds Sterling as possible, to save me from
+irrevocable disgrace. I have no one but yourself to apply to. If you
+refuse I am done for. You will know what a desperate position I am in,
+I must be in, to ask you at all.--Yours in despair and everlasting
+regret, HOWARD."
+
+I read it through, and then dropped the letter and its envelope into
+the fire, glad to get rid of the sight of the familiar hand. And I
+watched it burn, and I thought of the manuscript which must have curled
+and writhed in the same way, leaf by leaf, as he lighted it, and I
+asked myself again--What is forgiveness?
+
+I knew that I hated him. I had now the opportunity of consigning him to
+"irrevocable disgrace," as he put it. But I knew that I should send him
+the help he asked for on the same principle as I had refrained from
+injuring him, forgiven him, shaken hands with him. And why? I wondered.
+What was my motive? Simply, I think, a mere instinct to preserve my own
+self-respect.
+
+I enclosed a cheque for 20 Pounds Sterling in a blank sheet of paper,
+put it in an envelope, and went out that same night and posted it. When
+I had his letter of thanks I glanced through it hastily and then burnt
+it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain.
+Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some
+of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity,
+but slowly a manuscript grew and grew again into being.
+
+The slow winter wore away, and the ice froze or the fog pressed on the
+long French windows of my room. My father invited me to run over and
+spend Christmas with him, but I dreaded the interruption and the delay
+in the work. I stayed and pressed forward with it, and in the last days
+of March the whole book stood complete.
+
+It was one of the first nights of May. The first warm, spring-like
+night of the season, and the seats at the Concert des Ambassadeurs were
+crowded by the Parisians consuming their brandied cherries under the
+canopy of fluttering light green leaves of the opening limes. I sat,
+one of the audience, and heard the band clashing, and watched the
+dancers flit on and off the glittering diminutive stage, with
+indifferent eyes and ears.
+
+I was thinking of my success. The band might thunder its hardest, but
+it could not drown the publisher's voice in my ears, which repeated
+over and over the words I had heard that morning. "Yes, M'sieur, your
+book has been accepted. We shall hope to bring it out in September."
+
+I sat there at peace with all the world. Howard was entirely forgiven
+now; my father's treatment forgotten. Let the past go. What did
+anything matter? And I tapped my stick on the flooring at the end of
+the songs I had barely heard, out of sheer good humour, and swallowed
+the second-rate brandy and smoked an infamous cigar with imperturbable
+complacence; and as I got up with the mass at the finale I heard my
+nearest neighbour's remark to his companion, which might be freely
+translated thus:
+
+"How jolly these pigs of English always look!"
+
+As I was leaving, a woman ran down the gravel walk after me, and
+slipped her arm through mine. I turned and paused. She was very small,
+pretty, and Parisian from her black eyebrows, cocked like one of her
+own circumflex accents, to her patent shoes under her silk skirt.
+
+"What do you want" I said, in her own tongue, of course. "Money?"
+
+"We don't put it like that!" she said, thrusting out her red lips.
+
+"Well, it comes to that in the end generally," I said, whirling my cane
+round in my hand and smiling." It will save you trouble if you take it
+now," and I offered her two five-franc pieces and withdrew my arm. "Go
+to the bar and drink my health with it!" She took the money, but still
+looked at me.
+
+"Give me a kiss!" she said in a low tone, so low that I did not catch
+the last word.
+
+"Give you what" I asked.
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+"Un baiser!" she said, with a little French scream. "Embrasse moi!
+Stupide!"
+
+I laughed slightly as I looked down upon her. It seemed so ludicrous,
+the proposition, just then to me. I had hardly lived the life I had in
+Paris for the last thirty months, to now, in the moment of success and
+freedom, mar its remembrance by even so much as a chance kiss to a cafe
+chantant girl.
+
+For a second we looked at each other. I noted the tint and the curl of
+the offered lips, damp with cosmetic, and suggestive of past kisses,
+and the untouched lips of Lucia seemed almost against my own as I
+looked. Then I loosened her hand, which clung to my sleeve, and turned
+from her, and went on down the path. She shrieked some vile French
+words after me, and sent the five-franc piece rolling after me down the
+gravel slope.
+
+I laughed and shrugged my shoulders without looking back, and went on
+out of the gardens down into the now silent streets. What a flood of
+good spirits poured through my frame as I passed on! I hardly seemed to
+walk. The buoyant, almost intolerable, unbearable sense of elation
+within me seemed pressing me forward without volition.
+
+The incident just passed, the woman's hand on mine, the woman's words,
+though from her they were nothing to me, had yet touched and unlocked
+those impulses which, until now, had been so sternly repressed, barred
+down, sepulchred and sealed. They rose upwards, and with an exultant
+triumph I remembered I was free now to live and to love. My work was
+done, honourably and faithfully accomplished.
+
+Thirty months lay behind me, an unblemished scroll in time, recording
+one unbroken stretch of labour, suffering, and repression. And now it
+was over, and I was at liberty. An unspeakable animation swelled in me;
+and through all the excited, burning frame seemed to run living fire
+that formed one thought in my brain, one loved word on my lips--Lucia!
+Like two planets, at the end of each dark street I turned, I seemed to
+see her eyes. To her, to her my feet seemed carrying me. I was only
+returning to my empty room, but no matter! A few days more and then
+England and Lucia!
+
+I was glad now of everything I had suffered, every emotion repressed,
+every weakness vanquished. Strange, wonderful power that lies in that
+slight, grey tissue which we call brain! It seemed hardly credible that
+this buoyant sense of exultation, this overflowing, stupendous joy of
+gratified pride and ambition, this triumphant pleasure in my own powers
+and their recognition at last, these brilliant vistas that opened in my
+thoughts, could come from the movements of a little matter with a
+little blood flowing through it. And yet, so soon, a few years and I,
+who seemed now like some eternal being carried through worlds of space
+and endless cycles of years, should be--nothing. Well, no matter; I
+lived now and Lucia lived!
+
+The street was quite empty, and, half unconsciously, I began to sing
+the song Bella Napoli, always a favourite of mine, for the sake of the
+refrain, Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia! The notes echoed down the silent
+street as the words flowed from my tongue in the intoxication of
+pleasure--pure, simple, single, undiluted pleasure of the relief after
+those weary months of strain. The ground beneath my feet seemed buoyant
+air, each pulse within me beat with keen life, and the name of the
+woman I loved formed itself again and again on my lips, fluttered and
+lingered there, almost like the touch of a pure and invisible kiss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+One unbroken flood of golden sunlight lay like a fallen silken veil
+over the points and peaks of the downs, over the swelling sides and the
+soft rolling dip of the valley, and the still September blue stretched
+cloudless overhead. It was the late afternoon of the thirteenth, a day
+that had been hot, oppressive, stifling in town, but here was simply
+warm, still, and tranquil.
+
+All through the early hours of the day a parallel--if one may use the
+idea--oppression to the heat in the stirless air had weighed upon me.
+We had been married that morning, and before the ceremony my one
+sensation had been that of strain, during it tense anxiety, and
+afterwards reproach, and none of these are pleasant emotions. When I
+looked back to the morning, now, it seemed to be in the far distance; I
+don't know why, but ages seemed to have elapsed in the hours of this
+day.
+
+Lucia had come up to the altar, her face whiter, more absolutely
+colourless than the veil over it, and my heart sank with apprehension
+as I first caught sight of her. Never, except in death, and already
+with the coffin enclosing it, have I seen a face so pallid. She walked
+steadily--she was a woman who always walked well, as a swan swims well,
+by nature--and the graceful figure passed on calmly towards us.
+
+She kept the lids drooped over her eyes, and her white lips were closed
+firmly in repose. It seemed like a statue moving, and for a second I
+felt as if the church, the people, she, I, the whole scene were unreal,
+and my own blood changing into stone. The next second she was beside
+me, and then she suddenly lifted her eyes.
+
+They glowed upon me as if there were actual fire stirring in the
+lustrous black pupils, and they gave back the joyous beat to my pulses,
+and sent my blood flowing onward again. The glance made us both human
+directly. But how anxious I felt all the time. Would she faint? I asked
+myself, desperately, over and over again. The colour of her face was
+terrifying, and the hand she gave me for the ring was cold as the touch
+of snow, and trembled convulsively. How long it all seemed! and how I
+loathed the prayers and the hymns, and sickened at the address! What
+earthly good is it to match words against a man's passion? As it is, it
+is, and no admonitions will alter it. However, all was over at last,
+and we were in the vestry. Lucia could not write her name; she tried,
+for no woman had less affectation and more self-command than she had,
+but the tremulousness of the fingers would not be controlled, and the
+mere effort agitated her so that she fell back in the chair, quivering,
+till each point of lace in her dress shook, and every eye could see the
+violent heart-beats under her bodice.
+
+"Don't sign it, dearest!" I exclaimed, feeling like a murderer as I
+looked into the blanched, nervous face, and widely-dilated eyes.
+
+There was a blank pause for a moment of sympathy and apprehension, as
+her shaking hand dropped the pen, and then the clergyman picked it up
+and finished the half-written name. I felt a sharp self-reproach, and
+Dick did not mend matters as he turned from her to me and said, in an
+indignant mutter,--
+
+"She is not in a fit state to be married at all, Victor!"
+
+He looked at me as if I were committing a crime, and I coloured and
+felt like a brute. Then there was the long breakfast, and the
+reception, and, as I say, it seemed as if centuries were rolling over
+my head in each five minutes, but now it was all done with; the burden
+of other's society had slipped from us, and the weight of my own
+oppression I seemed to have left, together with the sullen heat of town
+air. In all the journey down Lucia had been recovering. The scarlet had
+been coming back to her lips, and as the first breath of air came to
+us, straight from the heart of the smiling, sun-lit valley, they parted
+in a laugh, the light leapt up in the soft azure eyes, the rose-colour
+under the skin, and she bent forward to me and said, impulsively,--
+
+"Victor, if you want to know, I feel perfectly happy!"
+
+"And I, too, you darling!" I said, smiling back into the brilliant face.
+
+"It seems quite a new thing to feel. I don't ever remember feeling
+happy until now, and I am five-and-twenty. Think, a whole third of an
+ordinary lifetime passed before I have known it!"
+
+I laughed.
+
+"Well, you are going to begin now, at any-rate," I said.
+
+"Yes; I think so," she answered, both the carmine lips still curved in
+smiles. "But still it is late to begin. It is not wise; one should
+begin at fifteen--ten years back."
+
+"Begin what?" I said, laughing.
+
+"To be happy."
+
+"By all means," I answered. "Begin as soon as you get the chance; but I
+think most people do. Only it is the chance that is generally wanting!"
+
+"I don't know," Lucia said, looking away from me through the window,
+where the flying sunny slopes of the valley sped by. "People muddle
+away their chances of happiness in life. Ten years ago, when I was
+fifteen and you were twenty--well, we might have married then, and felt
+all that we feel now a whole ten years ago, which I have passed without
+a single happy day."
+
+A shade of sadness came into the eyes, and darkened them as she spoke.
+
+"But why do you think of that now?" I asked. "It is no use. The ten
+years have gone beyond recall, and, if you have not been happy, you
+have something to show for the time. You have been working."
+
+"Yes," Lucia repeated; "I have been working."
+
+There was silence. I hoped I had recalled to her thoughts the great
+canvas that stood complete in her studio. For myself, I knew that the
+keenest touch of pleasure that stirred my frame now was held in the
+ever-present thought that this day saw the birth of my work in Paris.
+Not for worlds would I have hinted this to Lucia. To have breathed a
+word that assigned even a part of my pleasure at the moment to anything
+but the possession of herself was the last thing that I would have done.
+
+Every pleasure is kin to every other, and they each tend to enhance and
+strengthen another, so that in reality this inner pleasure of my
+thoughts that reverted constantly to the Paris publishers was no enemy,
+not even a rival, but rather a coadjutor of the passionate, personal
+pleasure in the woman beside me. The brain already intoxicated with one
+pleasant emotion lends itself more, not less, readily to another, just
+as a brutal lover inflames his love with wine. In precisely the same
+way, my passion for Lucia was inflamed by the wine of gratified
+ambition. All the same, I said nothing touching on the book for fear
+lest she should misunderstand me, nor hinted--that which I felt
+myself--that this scene put back ten years, when I was full of vague
+ambitions and unaccomplished plans, would not have possessed the zest
+it had for me now.
+
+Man, unfortunately, is not the desirer of one thing at a time, but of
+many things, and the gratification of a single desire is not enough to
+content him. If a person is both hungry and thirsty, you cannot satisfy
+him, however kindly you may supply him with bread. Another line of
+thought that ran side by side with this in my brain, as I watched the
+shadow pass over the girl's face as she thought of her ten lost years,
+was, that had we had these sensations at fifteen and twenty they would
+certainly not have out-lasted us till now! But this also I would not
+say. The passing of our passions, however we may recognise it as
+philosophers, is not pleasant to us as lovers.
+
+"Oh! there is our house, I believe!" said Lucia, suddenly, as we neared
+the station.
+
+"Yes; you can just see it from the line, I know," I answered, looking
+through the window. "What a glorious evening!"
+
+All before our eyes lay in the still, liquid golden light, and through
+the burnished haze that seemed to slope obliquely between us and it we
+saw the square white house, lying a little blow the level of the line,
+and all but hidden behind a delicate, intricate profusion of light
+green foliage. Behind it rose a rolling slope, clothed half-way up with
+a copse of young larch trees, whose slender stems sent long shadows
+down the whole length of its side, falling across the sun-baked,
+waving, brown-and-yellow grasses, and the red cows, lying lower down
+the slope, drowsy, as all else seemed in the mellow sunlight.
+
+At the side of the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage
+drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of
+tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there
+single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these
+on the lawn should be indigenous, and almost every country out of
+Europe was represented by one lovely forest denizen.
+
+The crytomera, the cedar of Japan, raised its delicate rosy crest here
+under the blue of an English sky; a young Turkish cypress shot like a
+dart from the ground and threw its narrow shadow straight as a spear
+across the emerald turf; and farther on a small squat tree, from China,
+unfurled smooth, glossy, polished leaves of lightest green, and
+thick-lipped succulent scarlet flowers, indolently to the kiss of the
+British sun. We caught a passing glimpse of it, and Lucia drew in her
+breath softly, with pleasure.
+
+"How lovely! What a pretty house, Victor!" she said.
+
+"Yes; I know it is supposed to be a very charming place."
+
+"And don't you think so, too?" she asked, turning to me, and the side
+light from the window caught the curly hair under the velvet hat brim
+and turned it into gold.
+
+"I haven't got a very keen artistic eye, Lucia, I think. Certainly not
+for houses," I answered, laughing, and looking straight into those eyes
+of lapis lazuli and then away. "But I adore this one, as it is going to
+give me the happiest hours in my life!"
+
+And I met her eyes. A slow flush mounted into Lucia's face, and then
+she seemed to tear her gaze from mine with difficulty and turned to the
+window, so that I could not see her face; her ear, however, betrayed
+her all the same, for the painful blush reached even there, and flooded
+its white, pink-tinted porcelain with scarlet.
+
+A second after, the train was at a standstill, drawn up at the platform
+of the station. It was very quiet, and even the train coming in hardly
+seemed to disturb the sleepy stillness that hung over the strips of
+asphalt, the beds of hollyhocks and lilac bushes against the
+whitewashed walls, where the rural fancy of the stationmaster had gone
+so far as to range a row of straw bee-hives.
+
+There were few passengers by the train, and little luggage except our
+own. The single porter, the stationmaster, some workmen, and a few
+market women, with white aprons and baskets of eggs on their arms,
+stared wonderingly at Lucia as she stood with the golden sunlight
+pouring down upon her light hair and brilliant face, and the glory of
+Parisian fashion embodied in her dress.
+
+My friend's carriage had come to meet the train, and I left her for a
+moment to speak to the footman about our luggage. As I walked back up
+the platform she was standing three-quarter ways towards me, the
+attitude which displays best that most alluring line in a woman's
+figure, the line from under the arms to the waist.
+
+In Lucia it was specially striking, not straight, but like the back of
+a Z, a sharp, smooth slope to the low waist, and formed a perfect
+harmony with the two curves of the hips, and the long fall of the skirt
+beneath. All my frame--every limb and muscle--quickened with keen
+pleasure as my eye met the familiar lines, as yet familiar to one sense
+only, and then followed the inevitable, involuntary rush of exultant
+remembrance of my absolute possession now.
+
+I let it come and flood my brain with a half-drunken satisfaction, and
+the phrase formed itself on my lips, "Well, hang it, my to-morrow has
+come at last!" As I came up to her I saw her eyes were fixed upon me
+with a searching gaze. I thanked heaven Lucia was not one of the
+horrible, modern women, if indeed they exist outside a lady's novel,
+who are always analysing you and your emotions, and testing the depth
+of your inferiority to themselves. I believed she was only studying and
+weighing my outer appearance, of which I was far more confident than of
+the inner personality. So I met the blue, soft-shaded eyes in the flare
+of the sunlight without embarrassment, and smiled back into them as I
+joined her.
+
+"Well, darling, now come," I said; "I think I have made that idiot
+understand your hand-bag is not to be shaken!"
+
+Lucia pushed a little pale gloved hand through my arm, impetuously, and
+said, as we turned to follow the decline of the platform towards the
+carriage,--
+
+"Victor! you are so good-looking!"
+
+I laughed. I was right, then. She had only been thinking of the
+exterior. What a comfort! A few steps had brought us to the carriage
+door, and the servant was holding it open. I waited to answer her till
+we had started, but when she had got in, and I had followed, she threw
+herself back on the cushions and put one hand on my shoulder, and
+before I could speak she went on in a low voice,--
+
+"Yes! It is very charming now, of course; but all the same you have
+nearly killed me!"
+
+The words were spoken with such a bitter, tremulous vehemence, that I
+turned and looked at her in startled silence. Her eyes still passed
+keenly backwards and forwards over my face.
+
+"Oh, yes! if you knew one-tenth of what I have suffered this last year!
+how I have coveted--longed. It doesn't matter what I say to you now,
+does it! Oh, I am so glad that all this terrible repression and
+restraint is done away with, and that we are free to do and say what we
+like! I am so glad I am your wife at last!"
+
+The trembling, excited accents, springing straight from her thoughts,
+and poured into my ear from her warm, parting lips, stirred my own
+tolerably well-governed feelings to a painful intensity, and I felt
+only too sharply that I, at any rate, had not done with self-restraint.
+I said nothing. I was rendered dumb by the riot within me, but I pushed
+my arm round her waist and drew her against me.
+
+The violence and want of tenderness in the action pleased her, perhaps,
+being a woman. The waist yielded gladly, and the whole form sank
+against me with relaxed and satisfied pleasure.
+
+We neither of us spoke again until the carriage drew up between the
+bright green of the larches, stabbed through with long shafts of light,
+and before the shallow steps and open windows of the house. On each
+side of the steps stood, not classic urns to remind one irresistibly of
+graveyards, but honest, bright, terracotta, human-looking flower-pots,
+from which rose or trailed the loveliest plants a skilful gardener
+could wrest from September. A white peacock paced majestically across
+the red gravel towards the larches, and underneath these, swinging
+exuberantly on suspended perches, with the strips and bars of sunlight
+flashing on their glittering feathers, chattered together nearly a
+dozen Oriental parrots.
+
+Lucia looked at the scene with an artist's quick eye, and I heard an
+instinctive murmur about its making a pretty sketch.
+
+I told her she would be otherwise occupied now than in making sketches,
+and we both laughed as we passed up the steps together.
+
+In the hall hovered, like two evil shadows, her maid and my valet,
+lying in wait for us to remind us of clothes and the serious duties of
+life. I saw Lucia carried off from me with despairing eyes, knowing it
+would be ages before I saw her again.
+
+It did not take me long to get into another suit, and then I returned
+to the dining-room, and roamed about from end to end, too restless to
+sit down to glance at the papers that lay on the different tables, or
+even to light up a cigar. I walked about aimlessly, longing for the
+woman's presence beside me again.
+
+It was a very large room--two, properly, knocked into one--with a
+window looking to the front and the carriage-drive, and another at the
+side, opening, with French glass doors, on to the low stone terrace
+which overlooked the lawn.
+
+Through these I wandered at last on to the terrace, and rested my arms
+on the low balustrade, looking with unseeing eyes across the lawn, with
+its tropical trees standing motionless in the golden haze. Everything
+around me was very still, and a peculiar strained calm seemed to be
+upon me also--the calm of an intense desire, hushed and expectant, in
+all the blood.
+
+A swift, hurried step came on to the terrace, and I turned instantly.
+
+The light fell all over her, the living incarnation of my long drawn
+out hopes and dreams. She had changed her dress to a light dinner-silk.
+The bodice was modest--I mean by that, it was unobtrusive--very. Excess
+of nervous excitement, the wealth of evening sunlight, and her fashion
+of dressing made her dazzling to look upon, and I stood for a second in
+silence.
+
+She misunderstood my pause and glance, and a rush of hot colour came
+into her face, and the tears suddenly started to her eyes.
+
+"You don't like my dress," she exclaimed. "I told Celine she was
+cutting it too low!"
+
+A step forward and I had her in my arms. Ah! what were dreams to the
+keen, sharp delight of feeling her there--alive, and in the
+flesh--throbbing and pulsating against me? I declared the dress was
+perfect, that I would not have the bodice half an inch higher for
+anything, that she looked adorable, and so on, until she was comforted.
+The tears passed into laughter, and the flush died away; but she
+trembled against me distressingly, and her lips quivered nervously.
+
+I held her to me, but she seemed to flutter uncertainly in my clasp,
+just as a bird flutters wildly without aim at the limit of its
+tethering cord, and when I released her she sank into the wire chair at
+our side with a look of exhaustion stamped on the soft, delicate face.
+I saw that it would require all my tact and care to make this evening a
+success, and I determined that it should be one for her. Standing there
+beside her, looking down on her light head, I made a rough, mental
+examination of my thoughts. I seized those that had anything of self in
+them, rolled them hastily together, and thrust them into an obscure
+corner of my brain out of hearing, to leave the better part of my love
+for her free to guide me.
+
+I drew a chair close to her and sat down, letting my arm rest along the
+top rail of hers, behind the soft head, which, after a minute, sank
+gently back upon it with a movement of tired relief. We neither spoke,
+and the perfect, sunny calm of the evening air, the silence, and the
+physical rest seemed to soothe her. When the servant came on to the
+terrace to announce the dinner, she had recovered, and her arm on mine
+was warm and firm.
+
+As soon as we had finished dinner, she rose restlessly from the table
+and looked at me with a hesitating air. I smiled back at her, but it
+hurt me inwardly this want of confidence, this lack of familiarity she
+seemed to have. This sort of hesitation before she made the simplest
+request, the start and flush when I spoke suddenly to her, this
+timidity of me now, hurt and puzzled me. I, who had taught my dog
+implicit trust, seemed to have missed the way with the woman.
+
+I remembered Paris: my own harshness to her there came back upon me
+like a blow. The indelible impression of my hardness had been given
+then, and she dreaded it now. She had been conquered then; her will and
+desire had been broken down to mine; she had been forced to yield and
+to suffer; she had appealed to me and found me inflexible, relentless;
+and now I had the fruits of my victory. The woman I loved, though she
+might love me, feared me instinctively, as the once well-beaten dog
+ever afterwards fears its master.
+
+To me, who hated victory, who loathed subduing others, and the price
+they bring of fear and shrinking, the realisation of her feeling
+towards me was like a sudden physical pain. I got up from the table
+feeling my face grow white with sharp distress. I hardly knew at the
+moment how to express my thoughts; besides, I knew words would be of no
+avail. An impression given is a scar upon the mind like a scar upon the
+flesh. She fixed her eyes on my face with a sort of apprehension in
+them, that was extremely bitter to me.
+
+"What were you going to say, dearest?" I said, merely, with a faint
+smile; "go on."
+
+"Oh, nothing much!" she said, hastily, flushing and paling almost in
+the same moment; "only I feel so restless. Come and show me all the
+rest of the house, will you?"
+
+I assented, and we passed out of the dining-room into the hall and up
+the shallow flight of stairs. I put my right hand on the banister and
+my left arm round her waist, and the whole sweet figure beside me, and
+the white neck and ear so near me, drove out the thoughts of a minute
+back, and I only laughed as I felt her waist contract convulsively as I
+touched it.
+
+"Would you like to take my arm better?" I said, mockingly, and drew her
+round to me so that the soft face was just beneath my own. In the
+subdued light of the staircase she lifted her lids, and I saw her eyes,
+gleaming and sparkling, brimming over with gaiety and pleasure, and the
+arm next me she raised and twisted close round my neck.
+
+"No, Victor; here is the place for my arm now! You won't push it away
+as you did in Paris, will you?"
+
+The words hurt cruelly. Could I never obliterate that wretched memory?
+It was vivid with her; it clung to me. It seemed a shadow dogging my
+present pleasure. I stopped suddenly on the staircase and took her
+wholly into my arms. All the supple form yielded at my touch, till it
+leaned hard against my own; the face, pallid with excitement, was
+raised to mine; the glitter of her eyes swam before my vision as I
+caught it from beneath the half-drooped lids; the lips, parted in a
+faint breath, then closed as mine joined them. As they touched, no
+consciousness was left except that both our lives seemed mingling,
+panting, fainting on our lips.
+
+The pain that is pleasure, and the pleasure that is pain, thrilled and
+pierced every nerve as I held her and felt those lips under mine, her
+heart beat under my heart, her weak arms twisted round my throat. When
+at last my lips set hers free, on fire with the passion of my own, they
+moved in a half-delirious murmur,--
+
+"Victor, you don't know how I love you!"
+
+I have no distinct recollection of passing up the remaining stairs, but
+we did reach the landing, and a second or two later were standing in
+the drawing-room. I think she said it was pretty, and so on, but I
+hardly heard, my head was reeling, and all my senses dull, her figure
+leant a little against me, and the pressure of her arm was upon mine.
+After the drawing-room, the reading-room, and a breakfast-room, all
+opening from the same corridor, had been passed through, there were
+still two rooms unexplored on that floor. I turned the handle of the
+nearer door, and then pushed it open.
+
+Lucia stepped on to the threshold, and then I felt her arm start
+violently in mine, and she drew back with a sharp, instinctive movement.
+
+I looked down upon her and murmured,--
+
+"Our room, dearest."
+
+The colour blazed all over the fair skin, till it seemed scorching it,
+and tears startled into the dismayed eyes, which she turned from me
+confusedly, as she shrank back into the passage.
+
+I was startled, and a chill seemed to fall upon me, and penetrate
+deeper as a grey pallor succeeded to the burning flush, and she had to
+lay one trembling hand on my arm again for actual support.
+
+"Victor, it is nothing!" she said, hurriedly, forcing a smile to her
+lips.
+
+"It--it--startled me."
+
+She made a nervous step forward, as if she would have forced herself to
+enter the room with me, but I collected myself with a great effort, and
+gently drew the door shut.
+
+"There is another sitting-room a little farther on; come and look at
+it," I said, quietly, in a light, indifferent tone, as if we were
+meeting in society for the first time.
+
+I drew her on past the door, feeling her hand fluttering on my arm, and
+her feet uncertain beside my own. Inwardly I was alarmed--dismayed. Her
+extreme nervousness, and the physical effect upon her, frightened me.
+With crushing force and clearness came back to me the remembrance of
+the fearless, eager, unrestrained abandonment of body and mind, the gay
+exuberance of careless passion, with all the vigour of youth and health
+in it, that had leapt up to meet my caress a year ago,--and been
+refused. We passed on to a door on the other side of the corridor,
+which opened to another sitting-room. A lovely evening had given way to
+a lovelier night. Beyond the long window panes, set open to the still
+air, we caught sight of the sinking golden crescent of the moon towards
+the south; above and all round, to the low horizon, the sky was
+crowded, sparkling, and brilliant with stars. I moved two chairs close
+up to the open window, but she stood by the sill and leaned forward to
+the night air.
+
+"You think me very silly?" she said, with her head turned away from me.
+
+"I think you are not well, dearest," I said, gently.
+
+There was silence. Words seemed frozen on my lips. A sort of terror
+filled me of exciting or embarrassing her. I stood beside the window
+frame watching her. After a minute or two she dropped back into a chair
+and looked up at me with a laugh.
+
+"I think I am all right, only you startled me! By the way, Victor, if
+anything ever does happen to me, you will remember you have your work
+and your talent to turn to, won't you? I mean you would not do anything
+desperate. I want you to promise me that."
+
+She lay back in the easy chair, burying her light head and polished
+white shoulder in the velvet cushion, and swinging one little foot idly
+as she looked up smiling for her answer. The bright light in the room
+fell full upon her, and I looked down upon this brilliant piece of
+life, full of glowing tints and warm pulses and subtle powers, and my
+brain flamed with the pleasure of the senses. I hardly noted her words.
+
+"Dear little girl!" I said, smiling back into her eyes. "I refuse to
+think of such things at all!"
+
+"Oh, well, it doesn't matter! I don't expect you would," she said,
+laughing, the colour leaping up in her cheeks, and the vivid blue
+deepening behind her lashes. "Come and make much of me now while you
+have got me."
+
+Her whole face and form were instinct with a delicious invitation, and
+I bent down to and over her, filled with the delight of the moment. We
+made one chair do for both of us, and looked through the window at
+intervals to escape each other's eyes, and laughed at nothing, and
+talked a very extraordinary astronomy. At last, with her soft fingers
+in my hair and on my throat, and her white arm above the elbow clasped
+in my hand, speech, even laughter, grew choked in dense feelings for
+all the command I kept upon myself; and we sat in silence, hearing each
+other's breath, feeling each pulse that beat in the other's throat and
+breast.
+
+There had been a long silence when the last star of Orion slid over the
+horizon, followed by my impatient eyes. I looked at my watch. I hardly
+know why I did it then. It was an involuntary action rather than a
+conscious one. I did not say anything as I replaced it, but she glanced
+sharply at me, and I saw her lips whitened.
+
+I knew the intense excitement that was moving her, it spoke to me in
+every line of her form--in her eyes, torn wide open by it, in the faint
+gleam of sweat that showed on the white forehead. I was not blind to
+it, but the tumult within me, made all the greater by the sight of it,
+left me insensible to its danger for her.
+
+She got up from where we were sitting, and began to walk restlessly
+round the table. I wheeled my chair slightly round so that I could
+watch her. Nothing struck me particularly as I did so except the
+extreme grace and attraction in the moving form. The heavy silk skirt
+dragged backwards and forwards over the carpet almost soundless, the
+moonlight and gaslight alternately gleaming on its folds. Each time
+that she came between me and the table my eyes followed with dizzy
+delight the soft side curve of her breast, the lines of the exquisite
+waist, the white idle hand that sometimes touched the edge of my chair
+arm, sometimes not, as she passed. One of these times I caught it and
+detained her, and looked up at her face, but the light was behind her,
+and only fell on the bright hair.
+
+"Why do you walk about so?" I asked.
+
+"I don't know. Victor, I feel very strange. I hope nothing is going to
+happen. I never felt quite like this before;" and she broke her hand
+loose from me and passed on.
+
+I sprang up and followed her, and put my arm round her.
+
+"Going to happen, dearest! What do you mean? Do you feel ill?"
+
+I looked at her. She was very white, and her lips were parted and pale.
+There was a distressed and strangely absent look upon her face which
+startled me, though I had no clue to its significance.
+
+"Yes, very ill," she answered, her eyes wandering away from my anxious
+ones looking down at her, as we stood for a moment together.
+
+Then she gently pushed away my arm and continued her walk.
+
+"You know my heart always does beat and hurt if I am very happy, or
+very excited, or any thing, but it's never been quite so bad as this
+before." And then, catching the distress upon my face, she added, "I
+daresay this is nothing. It will go off. I think it is only hysterical.
+Don't look so unhappy!" And a faint smile swept over her pallid face.
+
+She made her way to the sideboard and drank some water standing there.
+Then she continued to move slowly round the room, both hands pressed
+beneath her left breast, and her delicate eyebrows contracted into one
+dark line across her colourless face.
+
+"I overworked myself so tremendously just lately," she said, after a
+minute, "after--well, after I came to you in Paris. I shall take a long
+rest now. I hope I shall get strong again. When one is as delicate as
+this, life is not worth having."
+
+And then, before I could answer, she stopped suddenly, and looked
+across the room at me with dilated eyes.
+
+"Is there any brandy I could have?" she asked, abruptly.
+
+My handbag stood in the corner of the room. There was a flask of brandy
+there. In two seconds I had got it out and was beside her with the
+traveling-glass half filled.
+
+She took it with a fluttering, uncertain hand, and drank a little, but
+not even then did the colour come back to her lips--they were apart and
+grey. She set the glass down on the table with a wandering, undecided
+movement, and then turned towards me and linked two ice-cold hands
+round my neck,--
+
+"Hold me up! I am sinking!" and her head fell heavily against my
+shoulder.
+
+I clasped my arm firmly round her waist. I was startled, distressed,
+alarmed, but still, even then, I did not think there was any serious
+danger. I thought she was hysterical, as she had said; over-strained,
+and over-excited. I thought at most this was a fainting attack. I
+thought--God knows what I thought. I must have been blind.
+
+She put her hand to her throat, and I saw she wanted air. Supporting
+her, I crossed to the window, and stood where the cool night breeze
+came blowing in upon her face. My hand followed hers to her bodice, and
+I loosened all the delicate lace ruffles round it that it had never
+been my privilege to touch till now, and that were no whiter than the
+lovely breast from which I unloosed them.
+
+So we stood for a few seconds, her lids were drooped over her eyes. At
+intervals, it seemed to me, her heart gave great single, convulsive
+throbs that thudded through both our beings.
+
+Then suddenly she tore her eyes wide open, and fixed them in an
+unreasoning agony upon me. A straining, fearful effort seemed in them.
+I pressed her to me.
+
+"What is it, dearest?" I said quietly, trying to recall her to herself.
+"Why do you look at me so?"
+
+"Because I cannot see you! I have lost my sight! Oh, Victor, I am
+DYING!"
+
+The words were a strained cry of terrified anguish, and they cleft
+through my brain like the stroke of an axe. With blinding suddenness I
+knew then what was coming. My heart seemed turned into stone. Only
+Reason rejected the truth. The gong stood on the table close beside us.
+I stretched out my arm and struck it furiously, my eyes fixed in terror
+on her face. The Great Change was there; the shadow already of
+dissolution. The door was thrust open and a servant hurried in.
+
+"A doctor!" I said to him, "quick for your life."
+
+But I saw, before any doctor could reach us, she would have gone from
+me. I strained my arms round her.
+
+"Speak to me, my darling, speak," I said wildly, raising the dying head
+higher on my breast.
+
+Both her hands were clasped hard upon her heart. A frightful agony was
+reflected in the bloodless face, but for the moment death retreated.
+
+"Victor! To think I am dying! I shall never paint again! Oh, don't let
+me go! Keep me! oh, keep me with you!"
+
+My brain seemed bursting as I heard her. The only prayer of my life
+broke then in a frenzy from my lips, "Great God! spare her!"
+
+"Hold me up! oh, keep me, Victor! I am dying."
+
+"Dearest, you are fainting!"
+
+There was no answer. Heavier and heavier the pressure grew on my
+breast, the arm slid heavily from my shoulders, the head fell slowly
+backwards on my arm. I looked into her eyes. They were black as I had
+seen them long ago in the studio. Fearfully, terribly dilated they
+were, and in their depths was that look as if the soul were listening
+to a far-off summons, calling, calling to it, to depart.
+
+"My life! Speak to me once more! One word!"
+
+Probably my voice did not reach her. For her already the silence held
+but that one imperious command. My brief rule of this spirit was over.
+It no longer heeded me. She no longer answered me. Her eyes were still
+fixed upon me in helpless horror, terror, and despair; but they knew me
+no longer. The unwilling soul had already started on its journey, and
+its earthly love was no more to it than its earthly form. I held her
+motionless, my eyes on hers, then I saw a glaze, a slow glaze fit upon
+them, they set in it, and it told me she was dead.
+
+Without a struggle, without a spasm, without a deeper breath to mark
+the severance, her soul had drifted away from me, out of her body that
+I held in my arms. Without a farewell, without a word, without any
+knowledge of the second when the life had fled, without a sound beyond
+that despairing, terrified appeal to me to keep her. I stood rigid,
+petrified, my arms locked round her like iron bands. I heard the door
+open and steps. Then I saw the doctor before me. He gave one glance at
+the drooping head.
+
+"Lay her down flat," he said.
+
+I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into the
+corridor to the opposite room--our room, and laid her on the bed. He
+followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back and stood
+beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying before my eyes in
+darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night? There was the room, full
+of warm, shaded light; there was the bed, and on it a passive woman's
+figure, and another man bent over it and tore aside the bodice and
+unclasped the white stays.
+
+I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them, and
+beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then beneath it.
+The shade grew colder on his face. There was an intense silence in the
+room, then the words came across it, "Quite extinct." My ears seemed to
+fill with sounds, the ground to rise upward, the bed to heave, and I
+went forward blindly and tore his hand from her breast and pushed him
+from the bed.
+
+"Then go and leave us," I said, and I heard my own voice as from a
+great distance.
+
+He looked at me, and his face and everything around was dark before my
+eyes.
+
+"Will you kindly go out of this room?" I repeated, and he walked to the
+door.
+
+I opened it, he passed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to
+the bed. The weight of nerveless, passive beauty on it had crushed a
+depression in its whiteness, the head had sunk down sideways to the
+pillow as in tired sleep. Across the throat and breast, over and
+amongst the disturbed laces of her dress, and on the parted gleaming
+satin of her stays fell a flood of rose-coloured light. One shoulder
+rose from it and caught a shadow; another shade lay lower in the
+dimples of the elbow; the inside of the arm looked warm. The throat,
+the round soft throat, seemed glowing; the fallen head, the passive
+arms, the whole outstretched form seemed relaxed in the abandonment of
+sleep. Had I often seen her in my dreams like this? This was but the
+realisation of my dreams. I bent over her, then threw myself wildly
+upon the bed beside her, and drew her into my arms.
+
+"Lucia! my Lucia!" The sweet face almost seemed to smile as I drew the
+head to me, and a soft curl of hair fell upon my arm as I pushed it
+round her neck and pressed her breast to mine. It came softly and
+unresistingly, just so much as my arm pressed it, with terrible
+compliance. The throat chilled through my arm to the bone, numbed it.
+
+I laid my other hand upon her neck, pushed it lower till it rested
+above her heart, and enclosed one breast, nerveless, pulseless, and
+cold, colder than any snow. Slowly it chilled through my fingers. I
+smoothed one passive arm--how cold. Then my hand sought her waist, and
+my arm leant upon her hip--as once in Paris--and here the coldness held
+and froze me.
+
+Through her silk skirt it penetrated; the damp, eternal coldness
+pierced through my quivering, living arm; it seemed dividing my veins
+like steel.
+
+It was a dead woman that I clasped: a corpse. I strained my eyes down
+upon her face, that seemed but asleep.
+
+"Lucia?"
+
+And the word was one frenzied, senseless question; and the sweet mouth
+seemed to smile back, in its last eternal smile, my answer,--
+
+"Yes, I am Lucia, and you possess me now."
+
+Like a torrent dammed up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent
+desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my
+burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling
+lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a
+frenzy of vain, fruitless longing and stayed--frozen there.
+
+When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed, but
+yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I went to
+the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my own fearful
+memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming with me, and,
+when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its edge, as he had
+stood beside me at the altar.
+
+A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single
+grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron
+chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from post
+to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its arms
+against a background of cypresses.
+
+I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret,
+the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been
+shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that,
+once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose like
+a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering,
+deadening waves standing at her grave. I stared half blindly at the
+words on the stone--"Wife of V. Hilton." Wife! What a mockery!
+
+I looked, and that slab of white marble--spotless and relentless--that
+barred her into the grave, seemed to my still half-unstable brain
+symbolical of that last year of virgin purity of life that had broken
+her strength to bear. That spiked iron linked round the helpless dust
+seemed like the chains of repression that had tortured and crushed the
+soft ardent nature. That arrogant cross, stretching its arms
+threateningly above the lonely tomb, seemed the cross upon which we had
+crucified--she and I--the desires of the flesh. And at its foot, I
+read,--"She sleeps to waken to a glad to-morrow." And then a bitter
+laugh burst from my lips.
+
+"Who put that?" I asked. "Great God! that that word should follow me
+even here!"
+
+Dick took my arm.
+
+"We know nothing. There may be a to-morrow;" at which I merely laughed
+again.
+
+"Wife of V. Hilton!" I repeated, reading from the stone. "If she had
+been, Dick, it would not have been so hard."
+
+Dick said nothing. After a time he urged me to come away from the grave.
+
+"Where? To what?" I asked him; and we both stood silent, gazing upon
+her cross.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Months have passed by, and Dick consoles me still, and tells me I shall
+refind the zest of life by and by, later on, in the future, to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of To-morrow?, by Victoria Cross
+
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