"Lucia?"
And the word was one frenzied, senseless question; and the sweet mouth seemed to smile back, in its last eternal smile, my answer,—
"Yes, I am Lucia, and you possess me now."
Like a torrent dammed up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a frenzy of vain, fruitless longing and stayed—frozen there.
When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed, but yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I went to the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my own fearful memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming with me, and, when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its edge, as he had stood beside me at the altar.
A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from post to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its arms against a background of cypresses.
I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret, the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that, once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose like a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering, deadening waves standing at her grave. I stared half blindly at the words on the stone—"Wife of V. Hilton." Wife! What a mockery!
I looked, and that slab of white marble—spotless and relentless—that barred her into the grave, seemed to my still half-unstable brain symbolical of that last year of virgin purity of life that had broken her strength to bear. That spiked iron linked round the helpless dust seemed like the chains of repression that had tortured and crushed the soft ardent nature. That arrogant cross, stretching its arms threateningly above the lonely tomb, seemed the cross upon which we had crucified—she and I—the desires of the flesh. And at its foot, I read,—"She sleeps to waken to a glad to-morrow." And then a bitter laugh burst from my lips.
"Who put that?" I asked. "Great God! that that word should follow me even here!"
Dick took my arm.