Lucia pushed a little pale gloved hand through my arm, impetuously, and said, as we turned to follow the decline of the platform towards the carriage,—
"Victor! you are so good-looking!"
I laughed. I was right, then. She had only been thinking of the exterior. What a comfort! A few steps had brought us to the carriage door, and the servant was holding it open. I waited to answer her till we had started, but when she had got in, and I had followed, she threw herself back on the cushions and put one hand on my shoulder, and before I could speak she went on in a low voice,—
"Yes! It is very charming now, of course; but all the same you have nearly killed me!"
The words were spoken with such a bitter, tremulous vehemence, that I turned and looked at her in startled silence. Her eyes still passed keenly backwards and forwards over my face.
"Oh, yes! if you knew one-tenth of what I have suffered this last year! how I have coveted—longed. It doesn't matter what I say to you now, does it! Oh, I am so glad that all this terrible repression and restraint is done away with, and that we are free to do and say what we like! I am so glad I am your wife at last!"
The trembling, excited accents, springing straight from her thoughts, and poured into my ear from her warm, parting lips, stirred my own tolerably well-governed feelings to a painful intensity, and I felt only too sharply that I, at any rate, had not done with self-restraint. I said nothing. I was rendered dumb by the riot within me, but I pushed my arm round her waist and drew her against me.
The violence and want of tenderness in the action pleased her, perhaps, being a woman. The waist yielded gladly, and the whole form sank against me with relaxed and satisfied pleasure.
We neither of us spoke again until the carriage drew up between the bright green of the larches, stabbed through with long shafts of light, and before the shallow steps and open windows of the house. On each side of the steps stood, not classic urns to remind one irresistibly of graveyards, but honest, bright, terracotta, human-looking flower-pots, from which rose or trailed the loveliest plants a skilful gardener could wrest from September. A white peacock paced majestically across the red gravel towards the larches, and underneath these, swinging exuberantly on suspended perches, with the strips and bars of sunlight flashing on their glittering feathers, chattered together nearly a dozen Oriental parrots.
Lucia looked at the scene with an artist's quick eye, and I heard an instinctive murmur about its making a pretty sketch.