To-morrow? Part 19

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 pa.s.sions I had no idea.

Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing, 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script? 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 pa.s.s."

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.