Presently, and for the first time, the lady in the corner moved. She did not turn her head from gazing at the darkness, but she drew her hand from under her cloak (that Luc now perceived to be of purple velvet) and laid it on the seat between them.
It was a bare hand, white, and thin, and long.
Luc stared down at this hand, leant forward to bridge the space between them. On the second of the fingers was a diamond ring with sapphire points. Luc had seen a child with such a ring in her shroud buried in the convent graveyard. He drooped against the back of the seat; the hand came nearer, and it seemed to him that his sight suddenly became as perfect as it once had been, for he saw every line and curve and shadow, every tint and crease in the delicate hand creeping closer to him across the worn red velvet of the seat; saw the blue and white sparkle of the stones in the lamplight, and the minute details of their carved silver setting.
She still did not look round. Luc put out his own hand, and the long fingers rested on his. The deep cold increased till he felt that every drop of blood in his body was chilled.
The coach jolted, the lamp shook violently, and the flame sank out; darkness joined the cold. The coach vanished from about Luc; he felt himself being drawn by that icy hand through soft blackness. Cloudy pictures of all he had lost oppressed him: he heard his father’s voice, very far off; his mother’s last cruel dismissal, coming too from a great distance. He thought he was under the earth, lying in a grave with Carola Koklinska. His own hand was now so cold that he did not know whether or no another was resting in it. A faint Eastern perfume, luxurious and warm, pervaded the universal cold; a sense of comfort, of delight, stayed the long ache of regret in Luc’s heart, as if herbs had been placed on a wound.
He thought he was back in Bohemia, sleeping on the frozen ground, and that presently the dawn would break like a frosty lily, and he would look up to see a lady in a habit of Oriental gaudiness ride round a tall silver fir, in the topmost boughs of which the sun would sparkle among the snow crystals.
But it was another light that broke across the peaceful, grateful darkness that surrounded Luc. He sat up shivering, to find himself in the close, worn interior of a public coach, the door of which was being held open by the guard, who carried a lantern that cast a strong yellow glow.
The coach had stopped. Luc’s fellow-passenger was yawning and shaking himself.
“Ah, Messieurs,” the guard was saying, “a thousand pardons—the light has gone out!”
“Eh?” yawned the man in the frieze coat. “Well, I think we have both been asleep, have we not, Monsieur?”