"Yes," Lucia repeated; "I have been working."
There was silence. I hoped I had recalled to her thoughts the great canvas that stood complete in her studio. For myself, I knew that the keenest touch of pleasure that stirred my frame now was held in the ever-present thought that this day saw the birth of my work in Paris. Not for worlds would I have hinted this to Lucia. To have breathed a word that assigned even a part of my pleasure at the moment to anything but the possession of herself was the last thing that I would have done.
Every pleasure is kin to every other, and they each tend to enhance and strengthen another, so that in reality this inner pleasure of my thoughts that reverted constantly to the Paris publishers was no enemy, not even a rival, but rather a coadjutor of the passionate, personal pleasure in the woman beside me. The brain already intoxicated with one pleasant emotion lends itself more, not less, readily to another, just as a brutal lover inflames his love with wine. In precisely the same way, my passion for Lucia was inflamed by the wine of gratified ambition. All the same, I said nothing touching on the book for fear lest she should misunderstand me, nor hinted—that which I felt myself—that this scene put back ten years, when I was full of vague ambitions and unaccomplished plans, would not have possessed the zest it had for me now.
Man, unfortunately, is not the desirer of one thing at a time, but of many things, and the gratification of a single desire is not enough to content him. If a person is both hungry and thirsty, you cannot satisfy him, however kindly you may supply him with bread. Another line of thought that ran side by side with this in my brain, as I watched the shadow pass over the girl's face as she thought of her ten lost years, was, that had we had these sensations at fifteen and twenty they would certainly not have out-lasted us till now! But this also I would not say. The passing of our passions, however we may recognise it as philosophers, is not pleasant to us as lovers.
"Oh! there is our house, I believe!" said Lucia, suddenly, as we neared the station.
"Yes; you can just see it from the line, I know," I answered, looking through the window. "What a glorious evening!"
All before our eyes lay in the still, liquid golden light, and through the burnished haze that seemed to slope obliquely between us and it we saw the square white house, lying a little blow the level of the line, and all but hidden behind a delicate, intricate profusion of light green foliage. Behind it rose a rolling slope, clothed half-way up with a copse of young larch trees, whose slender stems sent long shadows down the whole length of its side, falling across the sun-baked, waving, brown-and-yellow grasses, and the red cows, lying lower down the slope, drowsy, as all else seemed in the mellow sunlight.
At the side of the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these on the lawn should be indigenous, and almost every country out of Europe was represented by one lovely forest denizen.
The crytomera, the cedar of Japan, raised its delicate rosy crest here under the blue of an English sky; a young Turkish cypress shot like a dart from the ground and threw its narrow shadow straight as a spear across the emerald turf; and farther on a small squat tree, from China, unfurled smooth, glossy, polished leaves of lightest green, and thick-lipped succulent scarlet flowers, indolently to the kiss of the British sun. We caught a passing glimpse of it, and Lucia drew in her breath softly, with pleasure.
"How lovely! What a pretty house, Victor!" she said.