To-morrow? Part 26

I hesitated a second, and he put in--

"Attractive?"

It was not the word I should have used, but it served, and I let it pa.s.s.

"I suppose it's really her talent that fetches you as much as anything, eh?" he said, after a few minutes.

"And her character," I answered; "her whole personality. I suppose all those things weighed at first, but, as a matter of fact, now it is quite enough that she is the woman I have determined upon."

"An admission of your own obstinacy," he answered, tartly.

"That may be the right term for it," I returned, "but I hardly think it is. Theoretically, Lucia has belonged to me the past four years. An idea, a habit of the mind, is full grown and has some strength at four years of age."

My father said nothing, but lapsed into the silence of defeat or of contempt, and we pursued our breakfast.

"Will you let me have the victoria this morning?" I said, after a long silence. "She wants me to drive her to the Academy."

"Of course; I'm glad you can find something to do here. I'm afraid of its seeming dull to you after Paris."

I looked up with elevated eyebrows.

"And wherein do you imagine the gaiety of Paris consisted?" I asked.

"Oh, I've no doubt you found plenty of amus.e.m.e.nt there," he answered, with an indulgent smile.

"I a.s.sure you there was not one single hour of the whole time that was not spent in work or thought," I said, seriously.

He laughed.

"I am delighted to hear it, I'm sure, Victor," he said, with the air of a person who accepts the general truth of a statement with a large reservation of their own opinion on the details of it. However, I did not care. I had worked for my own sake; lived correctly for my own sake--and whether another knew it or not mattered to me not at all.

"No; on the contrary, I am very pleased to be back," I said. "I always look upon the place where you are as home."

A pleased expression came over his face as I spoke. We were sincerely attached to each other in spite of the jarring dissonance of character.

Later that same morning when I was sitting beside Lucia as we drove to the Academy, I studied her closely in the sharp morning light, and I was alarmed at the pallor and exhaustion of her face. I am not an admirer of ill-health in any form. The hectic flush of phthisis, even, dear to the poets, has positively no charm for me; and Lucia's illness was not phthisis, and certainly did not enhance her looks.

"Who is your medical man, Lucia?" I asked.

"Why do you wish to know?"

"That I may be satisfied that he is a good one."

"I should prefer not to tell you his name."

"Why?"

"Because I object," she said simply, in her coldest tone.

"That is not a sufficient reason."

"I am of opinion that it is," she returned frigidly, with a supercilious accent.

I leant back in the carriage without answering, and looked away from her. How I hated her in that moment! After all, I thought, why do you trouble to get this particular woman above everything? Fifty women that you meet in the course of a week are as pretty--possibly of more worth--probably more civil. Why not select a more accessible divinity?

Or else content yourself with Horace's parabilem venerem facilemque?

Then I glanced involuntarily at her, and I knew it was impossible. My eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impa.s.sive; her att.i.tude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity at others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And now, when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to myself, it failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a savage and acrimonious determination to subdue it.

As I sat silent, with my eyes turned away from her to the blaze of glaring pavement and roadway, and noted mechanically the crush of traffic on ahead, d.i.c.k's remark on my brutality recurred to me, and I forced the most good-natured smile to my lips, and the quietest tone to my voice, as I turned to her and said,--

"Of course, dearest, I will consider it sufficient if you say so."

Perhaps she expected farther opposition, and my yielding surprised her.

She looked at me full for a minute in silence, then, failing to discover a trace of the savage irritation I was feeling, she laid her hand impulsively on mine, and said with a smile,--

"You are a dear, good-tempered fellow, Victor!" at which I laughed-- considerably.

The Academy is a place of all others, I should think, most calculated to fatigue and oppress a person in nervous ill-health. It was just twelve when Lucia and I arrived. The sun was at its hottest, and the crowds within the rooms at their thickest. The air seemed lifeless and laden with dust, swept up by the women's dresses, and filled with a mixture of scents from White Rose to Eau de Cologne. The daylight was harshly bright, and the unbroken lines of pictures in their glaring gilt frames, annoyed and jarred upon the eye.

We moved very slowly with the rank of people pa.s.sing down our side of the gallery. Lucia never removed her eyes from the walls, except to glance at me and make me refer to a name in the catalogue, and the women who pa.s.sed her were able to scrutinise her dress and face without a return glance. This they did to the utmost limits of good breeding, for both were sufficiently worthy of notice.

Whether Lucia looked pretty or plain, at her best or her worst, she always looked more or less striking. Some women are like this; they can appear everything but quiet and common-place. Lucia would be noticed everywhere, sometimes favourably, sometimes the reverse; but noticed she must infallibly be. An exceptionally beautiful figure, a certain extravagance in dress, and an unusually fair skin made her conspicuous where far more regular faces and straight profiles pa.s.sed unnoticed.

She herself was absolutely indifferent to everything save the paintings. Twice I called her attention to men who saluted her without being seen by her as she pa.s.sed close to them.

"I am very sorry," she said in answer. "It is a stupid fashion to notice one's friends here. One should not be supposed to recognise them at the Academy any more than in church!"

We drifted on slowly with the ma.s.s, and at last came to a standstill before a wedge of figures in front of a prominent canvas. A nude female figure stood upright, facing the spectator, with both arms upraised to fasten a pomegranate blossom in the tightly twisted hair: an indefinite heap of sketchy clothing lay upon the ground.

"The t.i.tle?" murmured Lucia; and I pressed my way a little forward to see the number, looked it up in the catalogue, and read to her "The Toilette." "Before the toilette! I should think," said Lucia, in a satirical whisper. I nodded and laughed.

We could not move on till the circle before us moved, and we stood silent looking at the shadowy representation of human flesh and blood smiling with fixed inanity from the canvas.

"The most successful picture of the year!" remarked one man just in front of us.

"Eminently artistic!" murmured another, stifling a yawn.

"Did you ever see such a thing?" said Lucia. "No living woman ever looked like that!"

"No," I answered, unguardedly.

Lucia threw a sudden, brilliant, mocking glance over my face.

"Come, Victor! you ought to have said you didn't know!"

I coloured, and then laughed.

"Ah, yes; so I ought. Well, really, I answered you in absence of mind."

"Oh, don't apologise! Let's sit down."