To-morrow? Part 34

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 G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to the bed. The weight of nerveless, pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sive 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. d.i.c.k 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 G.o.d! that that word should follow me even here!"

d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k, it would not have been so hard."

d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sed by, and d.i.c.k consoles me still, and tells me I shall refind the zest of life by and by, later on, in the future, to-morrow.