Henry David Thoreau - "Wild Apples"

Maturin Murray - "The Heart's Secret"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Leviticus"

To morrow?

V >> Victoria Cross >> To morrow?




"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.

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