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.
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