I dressed hurriedly and yet carefully, and shaved with a dangerously trembling hand. The first fiacre that was passing as I left the hotel I took, and was driven, through the bright sunshine that filled the Paris boulevards, to the Grand. I sat back in it, with my arms folded, feeling my heart like a stone within me. Lucia's coming, that, thirty-six hours back, would have infused the extreme of delight through me, was now useless, worthless.
I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner again, fettered, bound, as if I had an iron collar on my neck, and manacles on my wrists. I looked through the shining, quivering sunlight that fell on every side with blank, unseeing eyes, and the bitterest curses against Howard rose to my lips, checked only by the knowledge that I had forgiven him.
When I reached the hotel, and mentioned her name, I was shown up to a private sitting-room on the first floor, facing the gay Paris boulevard, and with the bright light streaming in through its half-closed persiennes. A figure rose at the opening of the door, and came towards me with outstretched hands.
"Lucia!"
My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within the first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I recognised that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but nevertheless distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman since I had seen her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She had awakened. It was a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to me now; a woman awake to her own powers, conscious of the sceptre, and the gifts, and the kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a woman for a few years, I felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in her advance towards me, heard it in the soft tones of her voice as she said,—
"Well, Victor, are you glad I have come?"
And it was with my heart suddenly beating hard, and my face pale, and a mist before my eyes, that I came forward to her. What had been the first slight shock to her sleeping woman's passions I had no idea.
Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she passed him in a crowd had suddenly struck through the ice of her abstraction. Perhaps some pressure of an arm meaning she did not even comprehend. Perhaps some word, overheard between two men, whose meaning she did not even comprehend. Perhaps it was only Nature unaided that had whispered to her,—"Life is passing, and its greatest pleasure is as yet untried. Get up and seek it."
Perhaps any of these, or all or none. I could not say. The change was there. Lucia was conscious, awake. Pure, delicate, as from her integral nature she would always, but still awake. As she stood, the sun fell upon her light hair and seemed to get tangled there, a hot, rose glow was in her face, and the smooth scarlet lips parted in a faint seducing smile.
"Now, tell me everything," she said, softly, "I am sure the manuscript is finished by now."