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Book 1Twenty
Lucy often spent the long hot evenings in Sebastian`s music room, lying on the sofa, with the big windows open and the lights turned out. And how strange it was that she should be there, after all! Only last Christmas, when she went home, she had never been inside this room, and had thought herself fortunate to catch a glimpse of Sebastian coming out of the doorway downstairs.
This summer there would be no slowing-down to the village pace. No walking about the town for hours and hours in the moonlight: down to the post-office and home again; out to the little Lutheran church at the north end. At this hour she used often to be sitting on the church steps, looking up at that far-away moon; everything so still about her, everything so wide awake within her. When she couldn`t sit still any longer, there was nothing to do but to hurry along the sidewalks again; diving into black tents of shadow under the motionless, thick-foliaged maple trees, then out into the white moonshine. And always one had to elude people. Harry and the town boys had their place, but on nights like this she liked to be alone. She wondered she hadn`t worn a trail in the sidewalks about the Lutheran church and the old high school. She wondered that her heart hadn`t burst in those long vacations, when there was no human image she could hold up against the summer night; when she was alone out there, looking up at the moon from the bottom of a well. She loved her own little town, but it was a heartbreaking love, like loving the dead who cannot answer back.
Now the world seemed wide and free, like the Lake out yonder. She was not always struggling against something, she was going with something much stronger than herself. It was not that this new life was without pain. But there was nothing empty or meaningless in it, nothing that was not sweet to remember; not even that last night when they had walked under the dripping trees and breathed in the bitter darkness together.
From the very beginning there had been the shadow of some sorrow over her love for this man, even before she knew him at all. When she used to get only a glimpse of him now and then, on the street, on the steps of the Art Museum, coming out of the Cathedral, it was the look of loneliness and disappointment in his face that had drawn her heart after him. Now, when he was far away, she sometimes went into the church where the service for Madame de Vignon was held and where she had seen Sebastian pray so long and fervently. It was a place sacred to sorrows she herself had never known; but she knelt in the spot where he had knelt, and prayed for him.
She heard from Sebastian occasionally, short notes, not love- letters; a few words about his engagements or about her own studies. There was always something meant for her alone; an anecdote, a memory, a sentence about a place which had stirred him- -a human word. He kept her informed as to his itinerary, so that she always knew where he was. He had finished his summer`s work in Munich, and was going to the Italian lakes for his holiday.
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