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Percy Bysshe Shelley - "The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I"

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Horatio Alger - "The Young Explorer"

To morrow?

V >> Victoria Cross >> To morrow?




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."

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