BOOK III

THE DIVINE FIRE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of _Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson_, _Two Sides of a Question_,

etc. etc.

1904

Mr. OWEN SEAMAN in _Punch_ says:--

"Miss Sinclair is always quietly sure of herself. That is why she

will not be hurried, but moves through her gradual scheme with so

leisured a serenity; why her style, fluent and facile, never

forces its natural eloquence; why her humour plays with a

diffused light over all her work and seldom needs the

advertisement of scintillating epigrams. Judged by almost every

standard to which a comedy like this should be referred, I find

her book, 'The Divine Fire' the most remarkable that I have read

for many years."

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

_TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION_

CONTENTS

BOOK I

DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE

BOOK II

LUCIA'S WAY

BOOK III

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

BOOK IV

THE MAN HIMSELF

BOOK I

DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE

CHAPTER I

Horace Jewdwine had made the most remarkable of his many remarkable

discoveries. At least he thought he had. He could not be quite sure,

which was his excuse for referring it to his cousin Lucia, whose

instinct (he would not call it judgement) in these matters was

infallible--strangely infallible for so young a girl. What, he

wondered, would she say to Savage Keith Rickman?

On Saturday, when he first came down into Devonshire, he would have

been glad to know. But to-day, which was a Tuesday, he was not

interested in Rickman. To eat strawberries all morning; to lie out in

the hammock all afternoon, under the beach-tree on the lawn of Court

House; to let the peace of the old green garden sink into him; to look

at Lucia and forget, utterly forget, about his work (the making of

discoveries), that was what he wanted. But Lucia wanted to talk, and

to talk about Rickman earnestly as if he were a burning question, when

even lying in the hammock Jewdwine was so hot that it bothered him to

talk at all.

He was beginning to be sorry that he had introduced him--the exciting

topic, that is to say, not the man; for Rickman you could scarcely

introduce, not at any rate to Lucia Harden.

"Well, Lucia?" He pronounced her name in the Italian manner,

"Loo-chee-a," with a languid stress on the vowels, and his tone

conveyed a certain weary but polite forbearance.

Lucia herself, he noticed, had an ardent look, as if a particularly

interesting idea had just occurred to her. He wished it hadn't. An

idea of Lucia's would commit him to an opinion of his own; and at the

moment Jewdwine was not prepared to abandon himself to anything so

definite and irretrievable. He had not yet made up his mind about

Rickman, and did not want to make it up now. Certainty was impossible

owing to his somewhat embarrassing acquaintance with the man. That,

again, was where Lucia had come in. Her vision of him would be free

and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence.

Meanwhile, Rickman's poem, or rather the first two Acts of his

neo-classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, lay on Lucia's lap. Jewdwine had

obtained it under protest and with much secrecy. He had promised

Rickman, solemnly, not to show it to a soul; but he had shown it to

Lucia. It was all right, he said, so long as he refrained from

disclosing the name of the person who had written it. Not that she

would have been any the wiser if he had.

"And it was you who discovered him?" Her voice lingered with a

peculiarly tender and agreeable vibration on the "you." He closed his

eyes and let that, too, sink into him.

"Yes," he murmured, "nobody else has had a hand in it--as yet."

"And what are you going to do with him now you have discovered him?"

He opened his eyes, startled by the uncomfortable suggestion. It had

not yet occurred to him that the discovery of Rickman could entail any

responsibility whatever.

"I don't know that I'm going to do anything with him. Unless some day

I use him for an article."

"Oh, Horace, is that the way you treat your friends?"

He smiled. "Yes Lucy, sometimes, when they deserve it."

"You haven't told me your friend's name?"

"No. I betrayed his innocent confidence sufficiently in showing you

his play. I can't tell you his name."

"After all, his name doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't matter. Very likely you'll hear enough of it some

day. You haven't told me what you think of him."

"I don't know what I think--But then, I don't know him."

"No," he said, roused to interest by her hesitation, "you don't know

him. That's the beauty of it."

She gave the manuscript back into his hands. "Take him away. He makes

me feel uncomfortable."

"To tell the truth, Lucy, he makes me feel uncomfortable, too."

"Why?"

"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up

and stake your reputation on him--and all the time you can't be sure

whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It

happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire."

His eyes were fixed on the title page as if fascinated by the words,

_Helen in Leuce_.

"But this is not bad--it's _not_ bad for two and twenty."

"Only two and twenty?"

"That's all. It looks as if he were made for immortality."

She turned to him that ardent gaze which made the hot day hotter.

"Dear Horace, you're going to do great things for him."

The worst of having a cousin who adores you is that magnificence is

expected of you, regularly and as a matter of course. He was not even

sure that Lucia did not credit him with power to work miracles. The

idea was flattering but also somewhat inconvenient.

"I don't know about great things. I should like to do something. The

question is what. He's a little unfortunate in--in his surroundings,

and he's been ill, poor fellow. If one could give him a change. If one

were only rich and could afford to send him abroad for a year. I _had_

thought of asking him down to Oxford."

"And why didn't you?"

"Well, you know, one gets rather crowded up with things in term time."

Lucia looked thoughtfully at the refined, luxurious figure in the

hammock. Horace was entitled to the hammock, for he had been ill. He

was entitled also to the ministrations of his cousin Lucia. Lucia

spent her time in planning and doing kind things, and, from the sudden

luminous sweetness of her face, he gathered that something of the sort

was in preparation now.

It was. "Horace," she said, "would you like to ask him here?"

"No, Lucy, I wouldn't. I don't think it would do."

"But why not--if he's your friend?"

"If he's my friend."

"You _said_ he was your friend. You did, you know." (Another awkward

consequence of a cousin's adoration; she is apt to remember and attach

importance to your most trivial utterances.)

"Pardon me, I said he was my find."

"Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the City--in a shop."

She smiled at the rhythmic utterance. The tragedy of the revelation

was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.

"The shop doesn't matter."

"No, but he does. You couldn't stand him, Lucia. You see, for one

thing, he sometimes drops his aitches."

"Well, if he does,--he'll be out all day, and there's the open country

to drop them in. I really don't mind, if you'd like to ask him. Do you

think he'd like to be asked?"

"There's no possible doubt about that."

"Then ask him. Ask him now. You can't do it when father's not at

home."

Jewdwine repressed a smile. Even now, from the windows of the east

wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly

fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique.

It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil. If

all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was

going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was,

if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.

And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself

would not be staying at Court House. Really, he reflected. Lucia ought

to get some lady to live with her. It was the correct thing, and

therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it. An

expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.

"Father won't mind," she said.

"No, but I should." He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the

question.

She sat still, turning over the pages of the manuscript which she had

again taken on her lap.

"I suppose he is very dreadful. Still, I think we ought to do

something for him."

"And what would you propose to do?"

There was an irritating smile on her cousin's face. He was thinking,

"So she wants to patronize him, does she?"

He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for

she always knew. He only said, "I don't exactly see you playing

Beatrice to his Dante."

Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right. The Hardens

had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most

superbly patronizing women he knew. And Rickman might or might not be

a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great lady in

her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he smiled

again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more irritating

than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.

"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing

him down here."

He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous

vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought

you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think

about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and

his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never

had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if _he_

were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which

distinguishes his _Helen_. Really, for two and twenty, he is

marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to

her vagueness, "his _Helen_ is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me

some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,

polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what

she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations,

made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the

troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous

soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an

aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but

she had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford

critic had not been able to see.

The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over

the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the

enfolding hills.

Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great

chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to

Rickman.

But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.

"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool

of the evening."

"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."

Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful

pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands

and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these

things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only

beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which

appealed to him was the languor of fatigue.

"You might play to me, now," he said.

She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in

which, if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no

reproach, only a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered

what she was thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace

selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and

would not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction.

"No, he is not selfish, he is only ill."

And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into

the house.

His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her

figure.

Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His

entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia

satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was

really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her

absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came

to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her

charm. He could not say positively wherein her beauty consisted,

therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding

out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some

women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious

prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous

regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the

flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was

merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment

for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her

features, (though it was impossible to think of them, or anything

about her as incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their

subtlety. Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did

not commit him to any irretrievable opinion.

But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in

which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct

how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She

had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the

look out to go one better, and to catch you tripping. Her lucidity was

remarkable; but it served to show up other people's strong points

rather than her own. Lucia did not impress you as being clever, and

Jewdwine, who had a clever man's natural distaste for clever women,

admired his cousin's intellect, as well he might, for it was he who

had taught her how to use it. Her sense of humour, too (for Lucia was

dangerously gifted), that sense which more than any of her senses can

wreck a woman--he would have liked her just as well if she had had

none; but some, no doubt, she needed, if only to save her from the

situations to which her kindness and her innocence exposed her; and

she had just the right amount and no more. Heavens! Supposing, without

it, she had met Keith Rickman and had yielded to the temptation to be

kind to him! Even in the heat Jewdwine shivered at the thought.

He put it from him, he put Rickman altogether from his mind. It was

not to think about Rickman that he came down to Court House. On a day

as hot as this, he wanted nothing but to keep cool. The gentle

oscillation of the hammock in the green shadows of the beech-tree

symbolized this attitude towards Rickman and all other ardent

questions.

Still, it was not disagreeable to know that if he could only make up

his mind to something very definite and irretrievable indeed, Court

House would one day be his. It was the only house in England that came

up to his idea of what a country house should be. A square Tudor

building with two short, gable-ended wings, thrown out at right angles

to its front; three friendly grey walls enclosing a little courtyard

made golden all day long with sunshine from the south. Court House was

older than anything near it except Harmouth Bridge and the Parish

Church. Standing apart in its own green lands, it looked older than

the young red earth beneath it, a mass upheaved from the grey

foundations of the hills. Its face, turned seawards, was rough and

pitted with the salt air; thousands upon thousands of lichens gave it

a greenish bloom, with here and there a rusty patch on groin and

gable. It contained the Harden Library, _the_ Harden Library, one of

the finest private collections in the country. It contained also his

cousin Lucia.

He had always loved Court House, but not always his cousin Lucia. The

scholarly descendant of a long line of scholars, Jewdwine knew that he

had been a favourite with his grandfather, Sir Joseph Harden, the

Master of Lazarus, he was convinced (erroneously) that he was a Harden

by blood and by temperament, and of course if he had only been a

Harden by name, and not a Jewdwine, Court House and the great Harden

Library would have been his instead of his cousin Lucia's. He knew

that his grandfather had wished them to be his. Lucia's mother was

dead long ago; and when his uncle Sir Frederick definitely renounced

the domestic life, Lucia and Lucia alone stood between him and the

inheritance that should have been his. This hardly constituted a

reason for being fond of Lucia.

His grandfather had wished him to be fond of her. But not until

Jewdwine was five and twenty and began to feel the primordial manhood

stirring in his scholarly blood did he perceive that his cousin Lucia

was not a hindrance but a way. The way was so obvious that it was no

wonder that he did not see it all at once. He did not really see it

till Sir Joseph sent for him on his death-bed.

"There's been some mistake, Horace," Sir Joseph had then said. "Your

mother should have been the boy and your uncle Frederick the girl.

Then Lucia would have been a Jewdwine, and you a Harden."

And Horace had said, "I'm afraid I can't be a Harden, sir; but is

there any reason why Lucia--?"

"I was coming to that," said Sir Joseph. But he never came to it.

Horace, however, was in some way aware that the same idea had occurred

to both of them. Whatever it was, the old man had died happy in it.

There was no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and

vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she

had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable

and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing could have

been more soothing than the golden concord of that understanding.

Needless to say if Lucia had been anybody but Lucia, such a solution

would have been impossible. He was fastidious. He would not have

married a woman simply because his grandfather wished it; and he could

not have married a woman simply because she inherited property that

ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman who

would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a

woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred,

nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact

that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed

that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined

harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for

Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking

of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be

added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir

Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable

possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about

played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of

the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a

hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its

utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through

Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused,

and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine

to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the

passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose

and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of

wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."

"So am I."

"Yes, but _you_ don't look it. What are you thinking of?"

She turned, and they walked together towards the house.

"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about

that friend of yours."

"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"

"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want

to be kind to him?"

"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to

everybody. It really doesn't do."

She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.

That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.

CHAPTER II

It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was

coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow

streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain

bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank

Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling

the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.

The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with

a decorated façade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish

cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its

neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed

cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary's. Whether

you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west,

you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so

new. Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over

the pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal of

dazzling globes hung over the doorway at the corner; there, as you

turned, the sombre windows of the second-hand department stretched

half way down the side street; here, in the great thoroughfare, the

newest of new books stood out, solicitous and alluring, in suits of

blazing scarlet and vivid green, of vellum and gilt, of polished

leather that shone like amber and malachite and lapis lazuli.

Within, a wall broken by a wide and lofty arch divided the front from

the back shop. On the right of the arch was the mahogany pew of the

cashier, on the left, a tall pillar stove radiating intolerable heat.

Four steps led through the arch into the back shop, the floor of

which was raised in a sort of platform. On the platform was a table,

and at the table sat the young man compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

Front shop and back shop reeked with the smells of new mahogany, dust,

pillar-stove, gum, hot-pressed paper and Russia leather. He sat in the

middle of them, in an atmosphere so thick that it could be seen

hanging about him like an aura, luminous in the glare of the electric

light. His slender, nervous hands worked rapidly, with a business-like

air of dexterity and dispatch. But every now and then he raised his

head and stared for quite a long time at the round, white, foolish

face of the clock, and whenever he did this his eyes were the eyes of

a young man who has no adequate sense of his surroundings.

The remarkable thing about the new shop was that already, like a bar

or a restaurant, it drew to it a certain group of young men,

punctually, irresistibly. A small group--you could almost count them

on the fingers of one hand--they came from Fleet Street, from the

Temple, from the Junior Journalists' Club over the way. They were

never seen looking in at the windows or hanging about the counter;

they were not the least bit of good to the shop, those customers. But

they were evidently some good to the young man. Whatever they did or

did not do, they always ended by drifting to the platform, to his

table. They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully

glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the

obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power,

his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.

It lay partly, no doubt, in his appearance; not, no, not at all, in

his make-up. He wore, like a thousand city clerks, a high collar, a

speckled tie, a straight, dark blue serge suit. But in spite of the

stiffness thus imposed on him, he had, unaccountably, the shy, savage

beauty of an animal untamed, uncaught. He belonged to the slender,

nervous, fair type; but the colour proper to it had been taken out of

him by the shop. His head presented the utmost clearness of line

compatible with irregularity of outline; and his face (from its heavy

square forehead to its light square jaw) was full of strange

harmonies, adjustments, compensations. His chin, rather long in a

front view, rather prominent in profile, balanced the powerful

proportions of his forehead. His upper lip, in spite of its slender

arch, betrayed a youthful eagerness of the senses; but this effect was

subtilized by the fineness of his lower lip, and, when they closed, it

disappeared in the sudden, serious straightening of the lines. Even

his nose (otherwise a firm feature, straight in the bridge and rather

broad at the end) became grave or eager as the pose of the head hid or

revealed the nostrils. He had queer eyes, of a thick dark blue, large,

though deep set, showing a great deal of iris and very little white.

Without being good-looking he was good to look at, when you could look

long enough to find all these things out. He did not like being looked

at. If you tried to hold him that way, his eyes were all over the

place, seeking an escape; but they held _you_, whether you liked it or

not.

It was uncanny, that fascination. If he had chosen to exert it in the

interests of his shop he could presumably have cleaned those friendly

young men out any day. But he never did exert it. Surrounded by wares

whose very appearance was a venal solicitation, he never hinted by so

much as the turn of a phrase that there was anything about him to be

bought. And after what had passed between them, they felt that to hint

it themselves--to him--would have been the last indelicacy. If they

ever asked the price of a book it was to propitiate the grim grizzled

fellow, so like a Methodist parson, who glared at them from the

counter.

They kept their discovery to themselves, as if it had been something

too precious to be handled, as if its charm, the poetry, the pathos of

it must escape under discussion. But any of them who did compare notes

agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too

big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for

the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being

the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with

lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor

fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt--no--no, he

skipped--his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it

terrible that it should happen at all--to him. They touched it

tenderly; if it was not exactly part of his poetry it was part of his

pathos. The shop was responsible for it. He ought never, never to have

been there.

And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained

by what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he

should not know.

He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of

everything, his great classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, was lying

finished in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the

last month those very modern poems that he called _Saturnalia_ had

been careering through the columns of _The Planet_. But at the moment

he was mainly supported by the coming of Easter.

CHAPTER III

The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and

well-appointed. But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the

dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a

boy. There was something soothing in its very obscurity and

retirement. He could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully

reading his Homer. In that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms

were dimmed with familiarity and dirt. His dreams took shape before

him, they came and went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision

with reality. There was hardly any part of it that was not consecrated

by some divine visitation. It was in the corner by the window,

standing on a step-ladder and fumbling in the darkness for a copy of

Demosthenes, _De Corona_, that he lit on his first Idea. From his seat

behind the counter, staring, as was his custom, into the recess where

the coal-scuttle was, he first saw the immortal face of Helen in

Leuce.

Here, all that beautiful world of thought lay open to the terrific

invasion of things. His dreams refused to stand out with sufficient

distinctness from a background of coloured bindings, plate glass and

mahogany. They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent

contours of customers. A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained

only by dint of much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often

as not Mr. Rickman's eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering

the cashier's eye in its passage from the clock to the paper.

But (as he reflected with some humour) though Mr. Rickman's ideas so

frequently miscarried, owing to that malignant influence, his genius,

like Nature irresistible and indestructible, compelled him perpetually

to bring forth. Exposed on his little daïs or platform, in hideous

publicity, he suffered the divine labour and agony of creation. He was

the slave of his passion and his hour.

CHAPTER IV

A wave of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the

shop, strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it. And through

it all, with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into

his young senses a something delicious and disturbing, faintly

discernible as the Spring.

He thrust his work from him, tilted back his chair at a dangerous

angle, and began reviewing his engagements for the coming Bank

Holiday.

He was only three and twenty, and at three and twenty an infinite

measure of life can be pressed into the great three days. He saw in

fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all

the gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of

_Saturnalia_. For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet

about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama,

but of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and

of a great many things besides. He had made his plans long beforehand,

and was prepared to consign to instant perdition the person or thing

that should interfere with them. Good Friday morning, an hour's

cycling before breakfast in Regent's Park, by way of pumping some air

into his lungs, then, ten hours at least of high Parnassian leisure,

of dalliance in Academic shades; he saw himself wooing some reluctant

classic, or, far more likely, flirting with his own capricious and

bewildering muse. (In a world of prose it is only by such divine

snatches that poets are made) Friday evening, dinner at his club, the

Junior Journalists'. Saturday morning, recovery from dinner at the

Junior Journalists'. Saturday afternoon, to Hampstead or the

Hippodrome with Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who lived in his

boarding-house and never had any fun to speak of. Saturday night,

supper with--well, with Miss Poppy Grace of the Jubilee Variety

Theatre. He had a sudden vision of Poppy as he was wont to meet her in

delightful intimacy, instantaneously followed by her image that

flaunted on the posters out there in the Strand, Poppy as she appeared

behind the foot-lights, in red silk skirts and black silk stockings,

skimming, whirling, swaying, and deftly shaking her foot at him.

Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably,

with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for

worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have

broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable

companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was

indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas.

Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they

floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally large, all made out of Mr.

Rickman's brain. And in the midst of the ideas a figure insanely

whirled, till it became a mere wheel of flying skirts and tossing

limbs.

At this point Mr. Rickman caught the cashier's eye looking at him over

the little mahogany rails of his pew, and he began wondering how on

earth the cashier would behave when they loosed him out for the Bank

Holiday. Then he set to and wrote hard at the Quarterly Catalogue. In

all London there was not a more prolific or versatile writer than

Savage Keith Rickman. But if in ninety-two you had asked him for his

masterpiece, his _magnum opus_, his life-work, he would mention

nothing that he had written, but refer you, soberly and benignly, to

that colossal performance, the Quarterly Catalogue.

"Vandam: Amours of Great Men (a little soiled). Rare. 30s." He was

in the middle of the Vs now and within measurable distance of the end.

Business being slack in the front shop, he finished earlier than

usual, and actually found himself with nearly a whole hour upon his

hands before dinner. He had half a mind to spend it at his club, the

Junior Journalists', in the side street over the way.

Only half a mind; for Mr. Rickman entertained the most innocent

beliefs with regard to that club of his. He was not yet sure whether

it belonged to him or he to it; but in going to the Junior

Journalists' he conceived himself to be going into society. So extreme

was his illusion.

Mr. Rickman's place was in the shop and his home was in a boarding

house, and for years he had thought of belonging to that club; but

quite hopelessly, as of a thing beyond attainment. It had never

occurred to him that anything could come of those invasions of the

friendly young men. Yet this was what had come of them. He was

friends, under the rose, that is to say, over the counter, with Horace

Jewdwine of Lazarus College, Oxford. Jewdwine had proposed him on his

own merits, somebody else had seconded him (he supposed) on

Jewdwine's, and between them they had smuggled him in. This would be

his first appearance as a Junior Journalist. And he might well feel a

little diffident about it; for, though some of the members knew him,

he could not honestly say he knew any of them, except Rankin (of _The

Planet_) who possibly mightn't, and Jewdwine who certainly wouldn't,

be there. But the plunge had to be made some time; he might as well

make it now.

From the threshold of the Junior Journalists' he looked back across

the side street, as across a gulf, at the place he had just left. His

eyes moved from the jutting sign-board at the corner, announcing

_Gentlemen's Libraries Purchased_, to the legend that ran above the

window, blazoned in letters of gold:

_Isaac Rickman: New & Second-Hand Bookseller._

His connexion with it was by no means casual and temporary. It was his

father's shop.

CHAPTER V

The little booksellers of the Strand, in their death struggle against

Rickman's, never cursed that house more heartily than did the Junior

Journalists, in their friendly, shabby little den, smelling of old

leather and tobacco and the town. They complained that it cut on

two-thirds of the light from the front windows of the reading-room.

Not that any of them were ever known to read in it. They used it

chiefly as a place to talk in, for which purpose little illumination

was required.

To-night one of the windows in question was occupied by a small group

of talkers isolated from the rest. There was Mackinnon, of _The

Literary Observer_. There were the three wild young spirits of _The

Planet_, Stables, who had launched it with frightful impetus into

space (having borrowed a sum sufficient for the purpose), Maddox, who

controlled its course, and Rankin, whose brilliance made it twinkle so

brightly in the firmament. With them, but emphatically not of them,

was Horace Jewdwine, of Lazarus, who had come up from Oxford to join

the staff of _The Museion_.

Jewdwine and Mackinnon, both secure of a position and a salary, looked

solemn and a little anxious; but the men of _The Planet_, having

formed themselves into a sort of unlimited liability company, and

started a brand new "weekly" of their own (upon no sort of security

beyond their bare brains) were as persons without a single care, worry

or responsibility. They were exchanging ideas in an off-hand and

light-hearted manner, the only stipulation being that the ideas must

be new; for, by some unwritten law of the club, the conversational

currency was liable at any moment to be called in.

This evening, however, they had hit on a topic almost virgin from the

mint.

"S.K.R.? _Who_ is he? _What_ is he?" said Mackinnon.

"I can't tell you what he _is_; but I can pretty soon tell you what

he's not," said Stables. He was a very young man with a white face and

red eyelids, who looked as if he sat up all night and went to bed in

the day-time, as indeed he generally did.

"_Omnis negatio est determinatio_," murmured Jewdwine, without looking

up from the letter he was trying to write.

"What has he done?" persisted Mackinnon.

"He's done a great many remarkable things," said Rankin; "things

almost as remarkable as himself."

"Who unearthed him?"

"I did," said Rankin, so complacently that the deep lines relaxed

round the five copper-coloured bosses that were his chin and cheeks

and brow. (The rest of Rankin's face was spectacles and moustache.)

"Oh, did you?" said Maddox. Maddox was a short man with large

shoulders; heavy browed, heavy jowled, heavy moustached. Maddox's

appearance belied him; he looked British when he was half Celt; he

struck you as overbearing when he was only top-heavy; he spoke as if

he was angry when he was only in fun, as you could see by his eyes.

Little babyish blue eyes they were with curly corners, a gay light in

the sombre truculence of his face. They looked cautiously round.

"I can tell you a little tale about S.K.R. You know the last time

Smythe was ill--?"

"You mean drunk."

"Well--temporarily extinguished. S.K.R., who knows his music-halls,

was offered Smythe's berth. We delicately intimated to him that if he

liked at any time to devote a little paragraph to Miss Poppy Grace, he

was at perfect liberty to do so."

"A liberty he interpreted as poetic licence."

"Nothing of the sort. He absolutely declined the job."

"Why?"

"Well--the marvellous boy informed me that he was too intimate with

the lady to write about her. At any rate with that noble impartiality

which distinguishes the utterances of _The Planet_."

"Steady, man. He _never_ told ye _that_!" said Mackinnon.

"I didn't say he _told_ me, I said he informed me."

"And whar's the differ'nce? I don't see it at all."

"Trepan him, trepan him."

Stables took out his penknife and indicated by dumb show a surgical

operation on Mackinnon's dome-like head.

"I gathered it," continued Maddox suavely, "from his manner. I culled

his young thought like a flower."

"Perhaps," Rankin suggested, "he was afraid of compromising Poppy."

"He might have left that subtle consideration to Pilkington."

"That was it. He scented Dicky's hand in it, and wasn't particularly

anxious to oblige him. The point of the joke is that he happens to owe

Dicky a great deal more than he can conveniently pay. That'll give you

some faint notion of the magnificence of his cheek."

Stables was impressed. He wondered what sort of young man it could be

who had the moral courage to oppose Dicky Pilkington at such a moment.

He could not have done it himself. Dicky Pilkington was the great and

mysterious power at the back of _The Planet_.

"But this isn't the end of it. I told him, for his future guidance and

encouragement, that he had mistaken cause and effect--that little

variety _artistes_, like other people, are not popular because they

are written about, but written about because they are popular--that

_The Planet_ is the organ of public opinion, not of private opinions;

in short, that he wasn't in it, at all. I thought I'd sat on him till

he was about flat--and the very next week he comes bounding in with

his _Saturnalia_, as he calls them."

"That was your moment. Why didn't you rise up in your majesty and

r-r-reject them?"

"Couldn't. They were too damned good." Maddox smiled at the

reminiscence. "I wasn't going to let him sign them, but he took the

wind out of my sails by stating beforehand that he didn't want

to--that if I didn't mind--_mind_, if you please--he'd very much

rather not. It's only the last week (when the _Saturnalia_ were

getting better and better) that he graciously permitted his initials

to appear. S.K.R.--Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord!" said Rankin; "what must he be like?"

"Ask Jewdwine," said Stables; "he's Jewdwine's man."

"Excuse _me_," said Maddox, "he is _mine_. I say, Jewdwine, what _is_

he like?"

Jewdwine did not respond very eagerly; he wanted to get on with his

letter. But the club had another unwritten law as to writing. If a

majority of members desired to write, silence was vigorously insisted

on. Any number short of a majority wrote as best they could. For this

unfortunate scribe there could be no concession; he was in a minority

of one.

"If"--said he, "you can imagine the soul of a young Sophocles,

battling with that of a--of a junior journalist in the body of a

dissipated little Cockney--"

"Can't," said Stables. "Haven't got enough imagination."

"The child of 'Ellas and of Ollywell Street'--innocent of--er--the

rough breathing," suggested Maddox.

As it was now seven o'clock, and the Junior Journalists were dropping

off one by one to the dining-room below, the young men of _The Planet_

began to stretch their legs, and raise their voices, and behave like

young men who believe their privacy to be inviolable and complete.

They soon had the place to themselves, except for one person whose

entrance had been covered by the outgoing stream; and he had

delicately turned his back on them, and taken a seat in the farthest

window, where his unobtrusive presence could be no possible hindrance

to conversation.

"I've seen him after supper," said Maddox. He was obliged to speak

rather loudly, because of the noise that came up from the overcrowded

dining-room.

"Well, then, how did he strike you?"

Maddox's eyes curled with limpid, infantile devilry.

"Well, I daresay he might be a bit of a bounder when he's sober, but

he's a perfect little gentleman when he's drunk. Softens him down

somehow."

"_In vino veritas_--a true gentleman at heart."

"One of Nature's gentlemen. _I_ know 'em," said Stables.

"One of Art's gentlemen," interposed Jewdwine severely, "and a very

fine gentleman too, if you take him that way."

Jewdwine raised his head from his letter and looked round uneasily.

Personalities were not altogether to his taste; besides, he was really

anxious to finish that letter. He caught sight of a back at the other

window.

"I think," said he quietly, "this conversation had better cease."

The owner of the back had moved, a little ostentatiously. He now got

up and crossed the room. The back was still towards the group of

talkers. Jewdwine followed its passage. He was fascinated. He gasped.

He could have sworn to that back anywhere, with its square but slender

shoulders, its defiant swing from the straight hips, the head tossed a

little backwards as if to correct the student's tendency to stoop. He

looked from the back to Maddox. Maddox could not see what he saw, but

his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine's.

Their voices were inaudible enough now.

"Do you know who it is?"

"I should think I did. It's the man himself."

"How truly damnable," said Rankin. After those words there was a

silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his

correspondence.

It was Maddox who recovered first. "Call him what you like," said he,

in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, "I

consider him an uncommonly good sort. A bit of a bounder, but no end

of a good sort."

The others were evidently impressed by this bold though desperate

policy. Maddox himself was inclined to think that it had saved the

situation, but he was anxious to make sure. Edging his chair by slow

degrees, he turned discreetly round. With the tail of his eye he could

see "the man himself" standing at the far end of the room. He saw too

that his own effort, though supreme, had been unavailing. It had

deceived no one, least of all S.K.R. "The man himself" stood on the

very hearth of the club, with his back to the fireplace. It was the

attitude of mastery, a mastery the more superb because unconscious.

His eyes too, were the eyes of a master, twinkling a little as to

their light, but steady as to their direction, being fixed on Maddox.

He was smiling.

There was nothing malignant, or bitter, or sardonic about that smile.

No devilry of delight at their confusion. No base abandonment of the

whole countenance to mirth, but a curious one-sided smile, implying

delicacies, reservations. A slow smile, reminiscent, ruminant,

appreciative; it expressed (if so subtle and refined a thing could be

said to express anything) a certain exquisite enjoyment of the phrases

in which they had defined him.

And seeing it, Maddox said to himself, "He isn't a gentleman. He's

something more."

In that moment the Celtic soul of Maddox had recognized its master,

and had sworn to him unhesitating allegiance.

CHAPTER VI

It was not until Rankin and the others had left the room that Jewdwine

had courage to raise his head tentatively. He had only seen that young

man's back, and he still clung to the hope that it might not be

Rickman's, after all.

He looked up as steadily as he dared. Oh, no doubt that it was

Rickman's back; no doubt, too, that it was his, Jewdwine's, duty to go

up and speak to him. The young man had changed his place; he was at

his window again, contemplating--as Jewdwine reflected with a pang of

sympathy--the shop. So profound, so sacred almost, was his absorption

that Jewdwine hesitated in his approach.

"_Is_ it Rickman?" he asked, still tentative.

"Mr. Jewdwine!" Rickman's soul leapt to Jewdwine's from the depths;

but the "Mister" marked the space it had had to travel. "When did you

come up?"

"Three hours ago." ("He looks innocent," said Jewdwine to himself.)

"Then you weren't prepared for that?"

Jewdwine followed his fascinated gaze. He smiled faintly.

"You haven't noticed our new departure? We not only purchase

Gentlemen's Libraries, but we sell the works of persons who may or may

not be gentlemen."

Jewdwine felt profoundly uncomfortable. Rickman's face preserved its

inimitable innocence, but he continued to stare fixedly before him.

"Poor fellow," thought Jewdwine, "he must have heard those

imbecilities." He felt horribly responsible, responsible to the Club

for the behaviour of Rickman and responsible to Rickman for the

behaviour of the Club. What could he do to make it up to him? Happy

thought--he would ask him to dinner at--yes, at his sister's, Miss

Jewdwine's, house at Hampstead. That was to say, if his cousin, Lucia

Harden, did not happen to be staying there. He was not quite sure how

Rickman would strike that most fastidious of young ladies. And Rankin

had said he drank.

In the light of Lucia Harden's and his sister's possible criticism, he

considered him more carefully than he had done before.

The contrast between the two men was certainly rather marked. A

gentleman can be neither more nor less than a gentleman, and Rickman,

in a sense not altogether intended by Maddox, was decidedly more. His

individuality was too exuberant, too irrepressible. He had the

restless, emphatic air of a man who has but little leisure and is too

obviously anxious to make the most of what he has. He always seemed to

be talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly,

too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his

remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency

must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's

opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant

impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on

him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from

pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight

elision of the aspirate observed by some of them. But then, he had a

voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into

forgetfulness of these enormities.

It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to

charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye

his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman's. He

looked neither more nor less than he was--an Oxford don, developing

into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow.

There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared

in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the

ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined.

You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why

you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his

pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that

drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out

of sight.

Rickman had always looked up to him. For Jewdwine, as Rankin had

intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R. He was always

discovering him. Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this

argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was

always losing sight of him in between. These lapses in their

intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense),

but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented

Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and

interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him

from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City.

He felt responsible for that, too.

Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism. But he

mistook its nature and its grounds.

"Don't suppose," said he, "I'm ashamed of the shop. It isn't that. I

wasn't ashamed of our other place--that little rat 'ole in the City."

Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.

"--But I _am_ ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern. It's so brutally

big. It can't live, you know, without sucking the life out of the

little booksellers. They mayn't have made a great thing out of it, but

they were happy enough before we came here."

"I never thought of it in that light."

"Haven't you? I have."

It was evident that little Rickman was deeply moved. His sentiments

did him credit, and he deserved to be asked to dinner. At Hampstead?

No--no, not at Hampstead; here, at the Club. The Club was the proper

thing; a public recognition of him was the _amende honorable_.

Besides, after all, it was the Club, not Jewdwine, that had offended,

and it was right that the Club should expiate its offence.

"What are you doing at Easter?" he asked.

Rickman stroked his upper lip and smiled as if cherishing a joy as

secret and unborn as his moustache. He recited a selection from the

tale of his engagements.

"Can you dine with me here on Saturday? You're free, then, didn't you

say?"

Rickman hesitated. That was not what he had said. He was anything but

free, for was he not engaged for that evening to Miss Poppy Grace? He

was pulled two ways, a hard pull. He admired Jewdwine with simple,

hero-worshipping fervour; but he also admired Miss Poppy Grace. Again,

he shrank from mentioning an engagement of that sort to Jewdwine,

while, on the other hand concealment was equally painful, being

foreign to his nature.

So he flushed a little as he replied, "Thanks awfully, I'm afraid I

can't. I'm booked that night to Poppy Grace."

The flush deepened. Besides his natural sensitiveness on the subject

of Miss Poppy Grace, he suffered tortures not wholly sentimental

whenever he had occasion to mention her by her name. Poppy Grace--he

felt that somehow it did not give you a very high idea of the lady,

and that in this it did her an injustice. He could have avoided it by

referring to her loftily as Miss Grace; but this course, besides being

unfamiliar would have savoured somewhat of subterfuge. So he blurted

it all out with an air of defiance, as much as to say that when you

had called her Poppy Grace you had said the worst of her.

Jewdwine's face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite

disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How

a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could

care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was

incomprehensible to Jewdwine.

"I didn't know you cultivated that sort of person."

"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too

light for _that_.

"How long have you known her?"

"About six months, on and off."

"Oh, only on and off."

"On and off the _stage_, I mean. And that's knowledge," said Rickman.

"Anybody can know them on; but it's not one man in a thousand knows

them off--really knows them."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

He changed the subject. In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested;

but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.

Jewdwine had a weak digestion. When he sat at the high table, peering

at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his

fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of

undergraduates in Hall.

Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman's youth.

When it came to women, Rickman _was_ impossible.

Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had

Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and

wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for

dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club. Edith would be annoyed

if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not

good. But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for

one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny

cab, he would save one and tenpence.

"And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote _Helen in

Leuce_ was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."

Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical

faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical

method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be

quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty

accurately.

"Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow. A

poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal,

stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art."

As he looked up at Rickman's, blazing with all its lights, he felt

that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on

this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine's nature, something half-human,

half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly,

"Won't you hear me? I've so much to ask, so much to say. So many

ideas, and you're the only man that can understand them." Jewdwine

impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious

understanding.

The question was, having understood Rickman, having discovered in him

a neglected genius, having introduced him to the Club and asked him to

dinner on the strength of it, how much further was he prepared to go?

Why--provided he was sure of the genius, almost any length, short of

introducing him to the ladies of his family. But was he sure? Savage

Rickman was young, and youth is deceptive. Supposing he--Jewdwine--was

deceived? Supposing the genius were to elude him, leaving him saddled

with the man? What on earth should he do with him?

Things had been simpler in the earlier days of their acquaintance,

when the counter stood between them, and formed a firm natural barrier

to closer intercourse. Nobody, not even Jewdwine, knew what that

handshake across the counter had meant for Rickman; how his soul had

hungered and thirsted for Jewdwine's society; how, in "the little

rat'ole in the City," it had consumed itself with longing. It was his

first great passion, a passion that waited upon chance; to be

gratified for five minutes, ten minutes at the most. Once Jewdwine had

hung about the shop for half an hour talking; the interview being

broken by Rickman's incessant calls to the counter. Once, they had

taken a walk together down Cheapside, which from that moment became a

holy place. Then came the day when, at Jewdwine's invitation, _Helen

in Leuce_ travelled down from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to

Harmouth. Her neo-classic beauty appealed to Jewdwine's taste (and to

the taste of Jewdwine's cousin); he recognized in Rickman a disciple,

and was instantly persuaded of his genius. At one bound Rickman had

leapt the barrier of the counter; and here he was, enthusiastic and

devoted. To be sure, his devotion was not fed largely upon praise;

for, unlike the younger man, Jewdwine admired but sparingly. Neither

was it tainted with any thought of material advantage. Jewdwine was

very free with his criticism and advice; but, beyond these high

intellectual aids, it never occurred to Rickman that he had anything

to gain by Jewdwine's friendship. Discipleship is the purest of all

human relations.

Jewdwine divined this purity, and was touched by it. He prepared to

accept a certain amount of responsibility. He looked at his watch. He

could still get to Hampstead by eight o'clock, if he took a

cab--say,--twenty minutes. He could spare him another ten. The Junior

Journalists were coming back from their dinner and the room would soon

be crowded. He took his disciple's arm in a protecting manner and

steered him into a near recess. He felt that the ten minutes he was

about to give him would be decisive in the young man's career.

"You've still got to find your formula. Not to have found your

formula," he said solemnly, "is not to have found yourself."

"Perhaps I haven't been looking in very likely places," said Rickman,

nobly touched, as he always was by the more personal utterances of the

master.

"The Jubilee Variety Theatre, for instance. Do you go there to find

the ideal, or in pursuit of the fugitive actuality?"

"Whichever you like to call it. Its name on the programme is Miss

Poppy Grace."

"Look here, Rickman," said Jewdwine, gently; "when are you going to

give up this business?"

"Which business?"

"Well, at the moment I referred to your situation in the Gin Palace of

Art--"

"I can't chuck it just yet. There's my father, you see. It would spoil

all his pleasure in that new plate-glass and mahogany devilry. He's

excited about it; wants to make it a big thing--"

"So he puts a big man into it?"

"Oh, well, I must see him started."

He spoke simply, as of a thing self-evident and indisputable. Jewdwine

admired.

"You're quite right. You _are_ handicapped. Heavily handicapped. So,

for Goodness' sake, don't weight yourself any more. If you can't drop

the Gin Palace, drop Miss Poppy Grace."

"Poppy Grace? She weighs about as much as a feather."

"Drop her, drop her, all the same."

"I can't. She wouldn't drop. She'd float."

"Don't float with her."

As he rose he spoke slowly and impressively. "What you've got to do

is to pull yourself together. You can't afford to be dissolute, or

even dissipated."

Rickman looked hard at Jewdwine's boots. Irreproachable boots, well

made, well polished, unspotted by the world. And the only

distinguishable word in Rickman's answer was "Life." And as he said

"Life" he blushed like a girl when for the first time she says "Love,"

a blush of rapture and of shame, her young blood sensitive to the

least hint of apathy in her audience.

Jewdwine's apathy was immense.

"Another name for the fugitive actuality," he said. "Well, I'm afraid

I haven't any more time--" He looked round the room a little vaguely,

and as he did so he laid on the young man's shoulder a delicate

fastidious hand. "There are one or two men here I should have liked to

introduce you to, if I'd had time.--Another night, perhaps--" He

piloted him downstairs and so out into the Strand.

"Good night. Good night. Take my advice and leave the fugitive

actuality alone."

Those were Jewdwine's last words, spoken from the depths of the

hansom. It carried him to the classic heights of Hampstead, to the

haunts of the cultivated, the intellectual, the refined.

Rickman remained a moment. His dreamy gaze was fixed on the massive

pile before him, that rose, solidly soaring, flaunting a brutal

challenge to the tender April sky. It stood for the vast material

reality, the whole of that eternal, implacable Power which is at

enmity with dreams; which may be conquered, propitiated, absorbed, but

never annihilated or denied.

_That_ actuality was not fugitive.

CHAPTER VII

Perhaps it was not to be wondered at if Mr. Rickman had not yet found

himself. There were, as he sorrowfully reflected, so many Mr.

Rickmans.

There was Mr. Rickman of the front shop and second-hand department,

known as "our Mr. Rickman." The shop was proud of him; his appearance

was supposed to give it a certain _cachet_. He neither strutted nor

grovelled; he moved about from shelf to shelf in an absent-minded

scholarly manner. He served you, not with obsequiousness, nor yet with

condescension, but with a certain remoteness and abstraction, a noble

apathy. Though a bookseller, his literary conscience remained

incorruptible. He would introduce you to his favourite authors with a

magnificent take-it-or-leave-it air, while an almost imperceptible

lifting of his eyebrows as he handed you _your_ favourite was a subtle

criticism of your taste. This method of conducting business was called

keeping up the tone of the establishment. The appearance and

disappearance of this person was timed and regulated by circumstances

beyond his own control, so that of necessity all the other Mr.

Rickmans were subject to him.

For there was Mr. Rickman the student and recluse, who inhabited the

insides of other men's books. Owing to his habitual converse with

intellects greater--really greater--than his own, he was an

exceedingly humble and reverent person. A high and stainless soul. You

would never have suspected his connection with Mr. Rickman, the Junior

Journalist, the obscure writer of brilliant paragraphs, a fellow

destitute of reverence and decency and everything except consummate

impudence, a disconcerting humour and a startling style. But he was

still more distantly related to Mr. Rickman the young man about town.

And that made four. Besides these four there was a fifth, the serene

and perfect intelligence, who from some height immeasurably far above

them sat in judgement on them all. But for his abnormal sense of

humour he would have been a Mr. Rickman of the pure reason, no good at

all. As it was, he occasionally offered some reflection which was

enjoyed but seldom acted upon.

And underneath these Mr. Rickmans, though inextricably, damnably one

with them, was a certain apparently commonplace but amiable young man,

who lived in a Bloomsbury boarding-house and dropped his aitches. This

young man was tender and chivalrous, full of little innocent

civilities to the ladies of his boarding-house; he admired, above all

things, modesty in a woman, and somewhere, in the dark and unexplored

corners of his nature, he concealed a prejudice in favour of marriage

and the sanctities of home.

That made six, and no doubt they would have pulled together well

enough; but the bother was that any one of them was liable at any

moment to the visitation of the seventh--Mr. Rickman the genius. There

was no telling whether he would come in the form of a high god or a

demon, a consolation or a torment. Sometimes he would descend upon Mr.

Rickman in the second-hand department, and attempt to seduce him from

his allegiance to the Quarterly Catalogue. Or he would take up the

poor journalist's copy as it lay on a table, and change it so that its

own editor wouldn't know it again. And sometimes he would swoop down

on the little bookseller as he sat at breakfast on a Sunday morning,

in his nice frock coat and clean collar, and wrap his big flapping

wings round him, and carry him off to the place where the divine ideas

come from leaving a silent and to all appearances idiotic young

gentleman in his place. Or he would sit down by that young gentleman's

side and shake him out of his little innocences and complacencies, and

turn all his little jokes into his own incomprehensible humour. And

then the boarding-house would look uncomfortable and say to itself

that Mr. Rickman had been drinking.

In short, it was a very confusing state of affairs, and one that made

it almost impossible for Mr. Rickman to establish his identity. Seven

Rickmans--only think of it! And some reckon an eighth, Mr. Rickman

drunk. But this is not altogether fair; for intoxication acted rather

on all seven at once, producing in them a gentle fusion with each

other and the universe. They had ceased to struggle. But Mr. Rickman

was not often drunk, or at least not nearly so often as his friends

supposed.

So it was all very well for Jewdwine, who was not so bewilderingly

constructed, to talk about finding your formula and pulling yourself

together. How, Mr. Rickman argued, could you hope to find the formula

of a fellow who could only be expressed in fractions, and vulgar

fractions, too? How on earth could you pull yourself together when

Nature had deliberately cut you into little pieces? Never since poor

Orpheus was torn to tatters by the Mænads was there a poet so horribly

subdivided. Talk of being dissolute, dissipated! Those adjectives were

a poor description of S.K.R. It was more than sowing a mere handful of

wild oats, it was a disintegration, a scattering of Rickmans to all

the winds of the world.

Find himself, indeed!

Still, he was perfectly willing to try; and to that end (after dining

with people who were anything but cultivated, or intellectual, or

refined) he turned himself loose into the streets.

The streets--he was never tired of them. After nine or ten hours of

sitting in a dusty second-hand bookshop, his soul was dry with thirst

for the living world, and the young joy of the world, "the fugitive

actuality." And her ways were in the streets.

Being a young poet about town, he turned to the streets as naturally

as a young poet in the country turns to the woods and fields. For in

the streets, if you know how to listen, you can hear the lyric soul of

things as plainly, more plainly perhaps, than in the woods or fields.

Only it sings another sort of song. And going into the streets was

Rickman's way (the only way open to him as yet) of going into society.

The doors were thrown hospitably wide to him; one day was as good as

another; the world was always at home.

It was a world where he could pick and choose his acquaintance;

where, indeed, out of that multitudinous, never-ending procession of

persons, his power of selection was unlimited. He never had any

difficulty with them; their methods were so charmingly simple and

direct. In the streets the soul is surprised through the lifting of an

eyelid, and the secret of the heart sits lightly on the curl of the

lip. These passers by never wearied him; they flung him the flower of

the mystery and--passed by. The perfection of social intercourse he

conceived as a similar succession of radiant intimacies.

To-night he went southwards down Gower Street, drawn by the

never-ending fugitive perspective of the lamps. He went westwards down

Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly. The Circus was a gleaming basin

filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with

lights. Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness

into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in

their flight. Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings

leading into the night. The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed

piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden

white façade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with

clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of

the dark above them. Over all was an illusion of immensity.

Nine o'clock of an April night--the time when a great city has most

power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and

subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems;

when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her

grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate

temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and

darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging

out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the

senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to

distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his

imagination and his soul.

He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night.

He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that

went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers'

eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of

the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing. A very ordinary

spectacle. But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic,

processional resonance and grandeur. It was an unrhymed song out of

_Saturnalia_, it was the luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets.

Half-past nine; a young girl met him and stopped. She laughed into his

face.

"Pretty well pleased with yourself, aren't you?" said the young girl.

He laughed back again. He was pleased with the world, so of course he

was pleased with himself. They were one. The same spirit was in Mr.

Rickman that was in the young girl and in the young April night.

They walked together as far as the Strand, conversing innocently.

CHAPTER VIII

At ten o'clock he found himself in a corridor of the Jubilee Variety

Theatre. The young girl had vanished.

For a moment he stood debating whether he would go home and work out

some ideas he had. Or whether he would pursue the young Joy, the

fugitive actuality, to the very threshold of the dawn. Whether, in

short, he would make a night of it.

He was aroused by the sound of a box-door opening and shutting; and a

shining shirt-front and a shining face darted suddenly into the light.

At the same moment a voice hailed him.

"Hello, Razors! That you?"

Voice, face, and shining shirt-front belonged to Mr. Richard

Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue.

"Razors" was the name by which Rickman was known to his intimates in

subtle allusion to his youth. He responded sulkily to the hail. Dicky

Pilkington was the last person he desired to meet. For he owed Dicky a

certain sum, not large, but larger than he could conveniently pay, and

Dicky was objectionable for other reasons. He had mysterious relations

with the Management of the Jubilee Theatre, and consequently unlimited

facilities of access to Miss Poppy Grace. Besides, there was something

about him that was deadly to ideas.

Ideas or no ideas, Mr. Pilkington was not to be evaded. He bore down

on Rickman, shining genially, and addressed him with an air of banter.

"Couldn't have arranged it better. You're the very fellow I want."

There was a suggestion of a chuckle in his voice which sent Rickman's

thoughts flying fearfully to his last I.O.U. The alert mind of

Pilkington followed their flight. He was intensely amused. He always

was amused when anybody showed a marked distaste for his society.

"Your business, not mine, this time, Rick. I happen to know of a

ripping old library for sale down in Devonshire. Shouldn't have

thought of it if I hadn't seen you."

"Well?" Rickman's face expressed an utter inability to perceive the

connection. Once the iron shutters had closed on Rickman's he felt

that he was no more a part of it. Words could not express his

abhorrence of the indecent people who insisted on talking shop out of

shop hours. And Dicky never had any decency.

"Well--it's practically on our hands, d'ye see? And if your people

care to take over the whole lot, I can let you have it pretty

reasonably."

Rickman's face emptied itself of all expression whatever.

"I say, you are a cool young cuss. Is this the way you generally do

business?"

"I'll think it over."

"Wouldn't think too long if I were you. It ought to go by auction, and

it might; only private contract's preferred."

"Why preferred?"

"Out of respect for the feelin's of the family."

Rickman's eyes were wandering dreamily from the matter in hand. They

had alighted on an enormous photograph of Miss Poppy Grace. For an

instant thought, like a cloud, obscured the brilliance of Mr.

Pilkington's face.

"Anyhow I've given you the straight tip," said Pilkington.

"Thanks. We'll send a fellow down to overhaul the thing."

"He'd better hurry up then. It _may_ have to go by auction after all.

But if you'd like the refusal of it, now's your chance."

But Rickman betrayed no enthusiasm.

"You'd better see the guv'nor about it."

Mr. Pilkington looked Rickman up and down, and encountered an

immovable determination in his gaze.

"Right you are. I'll send him word to-night. Ta-ta!" He turned again

in the moment of departing. "I say, he must send a good man down, you

know. It'll take an expert. There's a lot of old things--Greek and

Latin--that's something in _your_ line, isn't it?"

But Rickman's line at present was the line of least resistance. It was

ten past ten, and Poppy Grace was "on" from ten fifteen to ten forty.

CHAPTER IX

She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her

little programme pretty well by heart. But her fascinations were

independent of the glamour of the foot-lights. It was off the stage

that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at

the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great goddess Diana is

not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a

popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life. Poppy's rooms were

next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that

did it.

Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding

wooden partition as a partition, and sit very far back behind it, you

will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see

nothing, neither will you be seen. If, however, you prefer, as Mr.

Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe

things passing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing

some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to

be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the

region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on

either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But

to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other

boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite,

or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots,

without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in

its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening

the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In

common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether

she objected to his smoking (she did not). Then it came to

acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy's coming

out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would

be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman's looking to see if

Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her

home from the Jubilee Theatre. The stars were out; not that Poppy

cared a rap about the stars.

Her first appearance to-night was in the character of a coster-girl, a

part well suited to her audacity and impertinent prettiness. Poppy was

the tiniest dancer that ever whirled across a stage, a circumstance

that somewhat diminished the vulgarity of her impersonation, while it

gave it a very engaging character of its own. Her small Cockney face,

with its impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small),

its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side

curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket

with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with

white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from the perpendicular.

The secret of Poppy's popularity lay in this, that you could always

depend on her; she always played the same part in the same manner; but

her manner was her own. To come on the stage quietly; to look, in

spite of her coster costume, the picture of suburban innocence, and

pink and white propriety; to stand facing her audience for a second of

time, motionless and in perfect gravity--it was a trick that, though

Poppy never varied it, had a more killing effect than the most

ingenious impromptu.

"Sh--sh--sh--sh!" A flutter of programmes in the pit was indignantly

suppressed by the gallery. There was a movement of Poppy's right

eyelid which in a larger woman would have been called a wink; in Poppy

it appeared as an exaggerated twinkle. It was greeted with a roar of

rapturous applause. Then Poppy, with her hands on her hips, and her

head on one side, raised her Cockney voice in a high-pitched song,

executing between each verse a slow, swinging chassée to the stage

Humorist with the concertina.

"Oh, she's my fancy girl,

With 'er 'air all outer curl,

'Ooks orf, eyes orf, petticoats all awry.

For then she isn't shy;

She gives 'er bangs a twirl,

And it's--'Kiss me quick!'--and--'That's the Trick!'

--and--(_dim_)--'_Wouldn't_ yer like to try?'"

When the stage Humorist with the concertina stopped chasséeing, and

put his finger to his nose, and observed, "That's wot you might call a

dim innuender," Rickman could have kicked him.

(_cresc._),

'But got up fit ter kill,

In 'er velverteen an' frill,

It's--'Ands orf!'--'Heyes orf!'--'Fetch yer one in the heye!'--

A strollin' down the 'Igh,

With 'Enery, Alf an' Bill,

It's--'None er that!'--and 'Mind my 'at!'--and

(_fortissimo_)--'WOULDN'T yer like to try!'"

"To try! To try!" Her chassée quickened ever so little, doubled on

itself, and became a tortuous thing. Poppy's feet beat out the measure

that is danced on East End pavements to the music of the concertina.

In the very abandonment of burlesque Poppy remained an artist, and her

dance preserved the gravity of the original ballet, designed for

performance on a flagstone. Now it unfolded; it burst its bounds; it

was a rhythmic stampede. Louder and louder, her clicking heels beat

the furious time; higher and higher her dexterous toes flew to her

feathers that bowed to meet them, and when her last superhuman kick

sent her hat flying, and the Humorist caught it on his head, they had

brought the house down.

Rickman went out to the bar, where he found Dicky Pilkington, and at

Dicky's suggestion he endeavoured to quench with brandy and soda his

inextinguishable thirst.

He returned to the storm and glare of the ballet, the last appearance

of that small, incarnate genius of Folly. There were other dancers,

but he saw none but her. He knew every pose and movement of her body,

from her first tentative, preluding pirouette, to her last moon-struck

dance, when she tossed her tall grenadier's cap to the back of the

stage, and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself

backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her

dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and

black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant

morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury of the

foot-lights.

There was a noise of many boots beating the floor of the house; it

grew into a thick, solid body of sound, torn at intervals by a

screaming whistle from the galleries. Someone up there shouted her

name--"Poppy--Poppy Grace!" and Rickman shivered.

To Rickman's mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it

suggested--absurdly and abominably--a certain cheap drink of sudden

and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those

dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of

her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined,

extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably

wandering about in a world too gross for it; and now as the Young Joy,

the fugitive actuality. To-night, after brandy and soda, his

imagination possessed itself of Poppy, and wove round her the glory

and gloom of the world. It saw in her, not the incarnation of the rosy

moment, but the eternal sacrifice of woman, the tragedy of her

abasement, her obedience to the world. Which, when he came to think of

it, was really very clever of his imagination.

Meanwhile Poppy was behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty

nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the

intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as

she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying

delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light

of her flickering flamewise. There was a stir, a wave, as if the heart

of the house had heaved. Pit and gallery breathed hard. Rickman leaned

forward with clouded eyes and troubled forehead, while the young

shop-men--the other young shop-men--thrilled with familiar and

delicious emotion. Now she curtsied, as she had curtsied for the last

fifty nights, bowing lower and lower till her hair fell over her face

and swept the stage; and now she shook her head till the great golden

whorl of hair seemed the only part of her left spinning; then Poppy

folded her arms and sank, sank till she sat on her heels, herself

invisible, curtained in modest and mystic fashion by her hair.

"Bravo! Bravo!" "That's the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, _she's_ my fancy

girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"

It was all over.

CHAPTER X

He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house

of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was

half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the

yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the

balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been

once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of

Propriety. Now it was Poppy's drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure

respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your

eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and

inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung

with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself.

Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a

litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could

have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the

waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was

so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl

that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.

Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and

Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing

perspective. But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he

found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as

"Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some

supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of

the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished

she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made

cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said

she.

Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her

heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over

Ricky-ticky's head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before

Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr.

Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on

the table. She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the

table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a

prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this

meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she

wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice. After all, it came to the same

thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his

innocence.

The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his

hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain,

Poppy's canary woke out of his first sleep. He untucked his head from

under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.

"Oh, dicky," said Poppy, "it's time you were in your little bed!"

He did not take the hint. He was intent on certain movements of

Poppy's fingers and the tip of her tongue concerned in the making of

cigarettes.

He was gazing into her face as if it held for him the secret of the

world. And that look embarrassed her. It had all the assurance of age

and all the wonder of youth in it. Poppy's eyes were trained to look

out for danger signals in the eyes of boys, for Poppy, according to

those lights of hers, was honest. If she knew the secret of the world,

she would not have told it to Ricky-ticky; he was much too young. Men,

in Poppy's code of morality, were different. But this amazing,

dreamy, interrogative look was not the sort of thing that Poppy was

accustomed to, and for once in her life Poppy felt shy.

"I say, Rickets, there goes a quarter to twelve. _Did_ I wake him out

of his little sleep?"

Poppy talked as much to the canary as to Rickets, which made it all

quite proper. As for Rickman, he talked hardly at all.

"You'll have to go in ten minutes, Rick." And by way of softening this

announcement she gave him some champagne.

He had paid no attention to that hint either, being occupied with a

curious phenomenon. Though Poppy was, for her, most unusually

stationary, he found that it was making him slightly giddy to look at

her.

He was arriving at that moment of intoxication when things lose their

baldness and immobility, and the world begins to float like an

enchanted island in a beautiful blood-warm haze. Nothing could be more

agreeable than the first approaches of this blessed state; he

encouraged it, anticipating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of

the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was;

but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine.

He moved in a region of gross but glorious exaggeration, where his

wretched little Cockney passion assumed the proportions of a superb

romance. His soul that minute was the home of the purest, most exalted

emotions. Yes, he could certainly feel it coming on. Poppy's face was

growing bigger and bigger, opening out and blossoming like an enormous

flower.

"Nine minutes up. In another minute you go."

It seemed to him that Poppy was measuring time by pouring champagne

into little tumblers, and that she gave him champagne to drink. He

knew it was no use drinking it, for that thirst of his was

unquenchable; but he drank, for the sake of the illusion; and as he

drank it seemed to him that not only was Poppy worthy of all

adoration, but that his passion for her was no mere vulgar and earthly

passion; it was a glorious and immortal thing.

Poppy looked at him curiously. She was the soul of hospitality, but

it struck her that she was being a little too liberal with the

champagne.

"No, Razors. No more fizz. If I were to drink a drop more it would

spoil my little dance that always fetches the boys."

She turned her tumbler upside down in token of renunciation and led

the way into the front room. He followed her with enchanted feet. He

was now moving as in an Arabian Night's dream.

In the front room was a sofa--No, a divan, and on the divan the skin

of a Polar bear sprawling. Rickman and Poppy sat on the top of the

bear. Such a disreputable, out-of-elbow, cosmopolitan bear! His little

eye-holes were screwed up in a wicked wink, a wink that repudiated any

connection with his native waters of the Pole.

The house was very still. Behind his yellow gauze curtain the canary

stirred in his sleep. "Swe-eet," he murmured plaintively in his dream.

"Swe-eet, dicky!" echoed Poppy. Then because she had nothing to say

she began to sing. She sang the song of Simpson the tenor, Simpson the

master of tears.

"'Twas on the night our little byby died,

And Bill, 'e comes, and, 'Sal,' 'e sez,'look ere,

I've signed a pledge,'ser 'e, 'agains the beer.

'D'ye see?'

Sez 'e.

'And wot I 'ope ter syve

Will tittervyte 'is bloomin' little gryve.'

Then--Well--yo' should 'ave 'eard us 'ow we cried--

Like bloomin' kids--the--night--the byby--died.

"That song," said Poppy, "doesn't exactly suit my style of beauty. You

should have heard Simpey sing it. _That_ 'd 'ave given you something to

'owl for."

For Rickman looked depressed.

The sound of Poppy's song waked the canary; he fluttered down from his

perch and stretched his wings, trailing them on the floor of his cage

to brush the sleep out of them.

"Did you ever see such affectation," said Poppy, "look at him,

striking attitudes up there, all by 'is little self!"

Poppy seemed to cling to the idea of the canary as a symbol of

propriety.

"Do you know, Rickets, it's past twelve o'clock?"

No, he didn't know. He had taken no count of time. But he knew that he

had drunk a great many little tumblers of champagne, and that his love

for Poppy seemed more than ever a supersensuous and immortal thing. He

pulled himself together in order to tell her so; but at that moment he

was confronted by an insuperable difficulty. In the tender and

passionate speech that he was about to make to her, it would be

necessary to address her by name. But how--in Heaven's name--could he

address a divinity as Poppy? He settled the difficulty by deciding

that he would not address her at all. There should be no invocation.

He would simply explain.

He got up and walked about the room and explained in such words as

pleased him the distinction between the corruptible and the

incorruptible Eros. From time to time he chanted his own poems in the

intervals of explaining; for they bore upon the matter in hand.

"Rickets," said Poppy, severely, "you've had too much fizz. I can see

it in your eyes--most unmistakably. I know it isn't very nice of me to

say so, when it's my fizz you've been drinking; but it isn't really

mine, it's Dicky Pilkington's--at least he paid for it."

But Rickets did not hear her. His soul, soaring on wings of champagne,

was borne far away from Dicky Pilkington.

"Know" (chanted Rickets) "that the Love which is my Lord most high,

He changeth not with seasons and with days,

His feet are shod with light in all his ways.

And when he followeth none have power to fly.

"He chooseth whom he will, and draweth nigh.

To them alone whom he himself doth raise

Unto his perfect service and his praise;

Of such Love's lowliest minister am I."

"If you'd asked me," said Poppy, "I should have said he had a pretty

good opinion of himself. What do you say, Dicky?"

"Sweet!" sang the canary in one pure, penetrating note, the voice of

Innocence itself.

"Isn't he rakish?" But Poppy got no answer from the sonneteer. He had

wheeled round from her, carried away in the triumph and rapture of the

sestette. His steps marked the beat of the iambics, he turned on his

heel at the end of every line. For the moment he was sober, as men

count sobriety.

"For he I serve hath paced Heaven's golden floor,

And chanted with the Seraphims' glad choir;

Lo! All his wings are plumed with fervent fire;

He hath twain that bear him upward evermore,

With twain he veils his holy eyes before

The mystery of his own divine desire.

"Does it remind you of anything?" he asked. It struck her as odd that

he seemed to realize her presence with difficulty.

"No, I can't say that I ever heard anything like it in my life."

"Well, the idea's bagged from Dante--I mean Dante-gabrier-rossetti.

But he doesn't want it as badly as I do. In fac', I don' think he

wants it at all where he is now. If he does, he can take any of mine

in exchange. You bear me out, Poppy--I invite the gentleman to step

down and make 's own s'lection: Nobody can say I plagiarize

anyborry--anyborry but myself."

"All right, don't you worry, old chappy," said Poppy soothingly. "You

come here and sit quiet."

He came and sat down beside her, as if the evening had only just

begun. He sat down carefully, tenderly, lest he should crush so much

as the hem of her fan-like, diaphanous skirts. And then he began to

talk to her.

He said there was no woman--no lady--in the world for whom he felt

such reverence and admiration; "Pop-oppy," he said, "you're fit to

dance before God on the floor of Heaven when they've swept it."

"Oh come," said Poppy, "can't you go one better?"

He could. He did. He intimated that though he worshipped every hair of

Poppy's little head and every inch of Poppy's little body, what held

him, at the moment, were the fascinations of her mind, and the

positively gorgeous beauty of her soul. Yes; there could be no doubt

that the object of his devotion was Poppy's imperishable soul.

"Well," said Poppy, "that tykes the very tip-top macaroon!"

Then she laughed; she laughed as if she would never have done. She

laughed, first with her eyes, then with her throat, then with her

whole body, shaking her head and rocking herself backwards and

forwards. She laughed till her hair came down, and he took it and

smoothed it into two sleek straight bands, and tied them in a loose

knot under her chin.

Then she stopped laughing. Her face between the two tight sheaths of

hair seemed to close and shrink to a thin sharp bud. It closed and

opened again, it grew nearer and bigger, it bent forward and put out

its mouth (for it had a mouth, this extraordinary flower) and kissed

him.

"I sy, it's nearly one o'clock," said she. "You've got to clear out of

this. Come!"

She rose; she stood before him holding out her hands to help him to

get up and go. She laughed again. She laughed wide-mouthed, her head

flung back, her face foreshortened, her white throat swelled and

quivering--the abandoned figure of Low Comedy incarnate. But that was

not what he saw.

To him it was as if the dark, impenetrable world had suddenly

unfolded, had blossomed and flowered in the rose of her mouth; as if

all the roses of all the world went to make up the petals of that

rose. Her body was nothing but a shining, transparent vessel for the

fire of life. It ran over; it leapt from her; the hands she stretched

out to him were two shallow lamps that could hardly hold the tall,

upward shooting, wind-tortured splendour of the flame.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. The movement, being somewhat

complicated, brought him within a yard of his own figure as presented

in one of the long mirrors. He stood there, arrested, fascinated,

shocked by that person in the mirror. The face he was accustomed to

see in mirrors was grave, and not high coloured, and it always kept

its mouth shut. This person's face was very red, and his mouth was

slightly open, a detail he noticed with a peculiar disgust. He could

not get away from it, either. It was held there, illuminated, insisted

on, repeated for ever and ever, smaller and smaller, an endless

procession of faces, all animated by one frenzy and one flame. He was

appalled by this mysterious multiplication of his person, and by the

flushed and brilliant infamy of his face. The face was the worst; he

thought he had never seen anything so detestable as the face. He sat

down and hid it in his hands.

"Poor Rickets," said Poppy softly. She drew his hands from his face by

a finger at a time.

"Oh, Ricky-ticky, you are such a rum little fellow. I suppose that's

why I like you. But for the life of me I can't think why I kissed you;

unless it was to say Good-night."

A kiss more or less was nothing to Poppy. And that one, she felt, had

been valedictory. She had kissed, not Ricky-ticky, but his dying

Innocence, the boy in him. And she had really wanted him to go.

The house was stiller than ever. The canary had tucked his head under

his wing and gone to sleep again. Out of the silence the clock of St.

Pancras Church struck one.

And yet he had not gone.

CHAPTER XI

A step was heard on the pavement outside; then the click of a

latch-key; a step on the stairs, at the threshold, and Mr. Pilkington

walked in with the air of being the master of the house and everything

in it.

The little laughing mask slipped from Poppy's face, her eyes were two

sapphire crescents darting fright under down-dropped lids. There was a

look in Dicky's face she did not care for. But Rickman--as Maddox had

testified--was a perfect little gentleman when he was drunk, and at

the sight of Pilkington, chivalry, immortal chivalry, leapt in his

heart.

He became suddenly grave, steady and coherent.

"I was just going, Miss Grace. But--if you want me to stay a little

longer, I'll stay."

"You'd better _go_," said Miss Grace.

Her eyes followed him sullenly as he went; so did Pilkington's.

"Well," she said, "I suppose that's what you wanted?"

"Yes, but there's no good overdoing the thing, you know. This," said

Pilkington, "is a damned sight too expensive game for him to play."

"He's all right. It wasn't his fault. I let him drink too much

champagne."

"What did you do that for? Couldn't you see he'd had enough already?"

"How was I to know? He's nicer when he's drunk than other people are

when they're sober."

He looked at her critically. "I know all about him. What I'd like to

know is what you see in him."

Poppy returned his look with interest. Coarseness in Dicky

Pilkington's eyes sat brilliant and unashamed.

"Would you? So would I. P'raps it's wot I don't see in him."

Now subtlety was the last thing Dicky expected from Poppy, and it

aroused suspicion.

Whatever Poppy's instructions were she had evidently exceeded them.

Poppy read his thoughts with accuracy.

"I only did what you told me. If you don't like it, you can finish the

job yourself. I'm tired," said Poppy, wearily coiling up her hair.

She was no longer in spirits.

CHAPTER XII

A tiny jet of gas made a glimmer in the fan-light of Mrs. Downey's

boarding-house next door. Mrs. Downey kept it burning there for Mr.

Rickman.

Guided by this beacon, he reached his door, escaping many dangers. For

the curbstone was a rocking precipice, and the street below it a grey

and shimmering stream, that rolled, and flowed, and rolled, and never

rested. The houses, too, were so drunk as to be dangerous. They bowed

over him, swaying hideously from their foundations. They seemed to be

attracted, just as he was, by that abominable slimy flow and glister

of the asphalt. Another wriggle of the latch-key, and they would be

over on the top of him.

He approached his bedroom candle with infinite precaution. He had

tried to effect a noiseless entry, but every match, as it spurted and

went out, was a little fiendish spit-fire tongue betraying him. From

behind a bedroom door, ajar at the dark end of the passage, the voice

of Mrs. Downey gently reminded him not to forget to turn the gas out.

There was a bright clear space in his brain which Pilkington's

champagne had not penetrated, so intolerably clear and bright that it

hurt him to look at it. In that space three figures reeled and

whirled; three, yet one and the same; Poppy of the coster-dance, Poppy

of the lunatic ballet, and Poppy of the Arabian night. Beyond the

bright space and the figures there was a dark place that was somehow

curtained off. Something had happened there, he could not see what.

And in trying to see he forgot to turn the gas out. He turned it up

instead.

He left it blazing away at the rate of a penny an hour, a witness

against him in the face of morning. But he did not forget to sit down

at the bottom of the stairs and take his boots off, lest he should

wake Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who worked so hard, and had to

be up so early. He left them on the stairs, where Flossie tripped over

them in the morning.

On the first landing a young man in a frowsy sleeping suit stood

waiting for him. A fresh, sober, and thoroughly wide-awake young man.

"Gurra bed, Spinks," said Mr. Rickman severely to the young man.

"All right, old man." Mr. Spinks lowered his voice to a discreet

whisper. "I say--do you want me to help you find your legs?"

"Wish you'd fin' any par' of me that is n' legs," said Mr. Rickman.

And he went on to explain and to demonstrate to Mr. Spinks the

resemblance (amounting to identity) between himself and the Manx arms.

"Three legs, rampant, on the bend, proper. Amazin', isn't it?"

"It _is_ amazin'."

Feigning surprise and interest, Mr. Spinks relieved him of his candle;

and under that escort Mr. Rickman managed to attain to the second

floor.

Mr. Rickman's room was bared to the glimmer of a lamp in the street

below. He plunged and stumbled through a litter of books. The glimmer

fell on the books, on many books; books that covered three walls from

floor to ceiling; books ranged above and beside the little camp-bed in

the corner; books piled on the table and under it. The glimmer fell,

too, on the mantel-piece, reflected from the glass above it, right on

to the white statuette of the Venus of Milo that supported a

photograph of a dancing Poppy--Poppy, who laughed in the face of the

goddess with insatiable impudence, and flung to the immortal forehead

the flick of her shameless foot. White and austere gleamed the Venus

(if Venus she be, for some say she is a Wingless Victory, and Rickman,

when sober, inclined to that opinion). White and austere gleamed the

little camp-bed in the corner. He ignored Mr. Spinks' discreet

suggestion. He wasn't going to undress to please Spinks or anybody.

He'd see Spinks in another world first. He wasn't going to bed like a

potman; he was going to sit up like a poet and write. That's what he

was going to do. This was his study.

With shaking hands he lit the lamp on his study table; the wick

sputtered, and the light in his head jigged horribly with the jigging

of the flame. It was as if he was being stabbed with little knives of

light.

He plunged his head into a basin of cold water, threw open his window

and leaned out into the pure regenerating night. Spinks sat down on a

chair and watched him, his fresh, handsome face clouded with anxiety.

He adored Rickman sober; but for Rickman drunk he had a curious

yearning affection. If anything, he preferred him in that state. It

seemed to bring him nearer to him. Spinks had never been drunk in his

life, but that was his feeling.

Rickman laid his arms upon the window sill and his head upon his arms.

"'The blessed damozel leaned out,'" he said (the idea in his mind

being that _he_ was a blessed damozel).

"'From the gold bar of heaven.'"

("Never knew they had 'em up there," murmured Spinks.)

"'Her eyes were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at

even'--Oh--my--God!"

A great sigh shook him, and went shuddering into the night like the

passing of a lost soul. He got up and staggered to the table, and

grasped it by the edge, nearly upsetting the lamp. The flare in his

brain had died down as the lamp burnt steadily. Under its shade a

round of light fell on his Euripides, open at the page he had been

reading the night before.

[Greek: ELENÊ]

He saw it very black, with the edges a little wavering, a little

blurred, as if it had been burnt by fire into the whiteness of the

page. Below, the smaller type of a chorus reeled and shook through all

its lines. Set up by an intoxicated compositor.

Under the Euripides was the piled up manuscript of Rickman's great

neo-classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_. He implored Spinks to read it.

(Spinks was a draper's assistant and uncultured.) He thrust the

manuscript into his hands.

"There," he said, "rea' that. Tha's the sor' o' thing I write when I'm

drunk. Couldn' do it now t' save my life. Temp'rance been _my_ ruin."

He threw himself on his bed.

"It's all righ'. At nine o'clock to-morrow morning, no--at a quar'er

pas' nine, I mean three quar'ers pas' nine, I shall be drunk. Not

disgustingly and ridicklelously, as you are, Spinky, at this minute,

but soo-p-p-perbubbly, loominously, divinely drunk! You don' know what

I could do if I was only drunk."

"Oh, come, I shouldn't complain, if I was you. You'll do pretty well

as you are, I think."

With an almost maternal tenderness and tact Mr. Spinks contrived to

separate the poet from his poem. He then undressed him. That is to

say, by alternate feats of strength, dexterity and cunning, he

succeeded in disengaging him from the looser portion of his clothing.

From his shirt and trousers Rickman refused to part, refused with a

shake of the head, slow, gentle, and implacable, and with a smile of

great sweetness and gravity and wisdom. He seemed to regard those

garments with a peculiar emotion as the symbols of his dignity, and

more especially, as the insignia of sobriety.

Spinks sat down and stared at the object of his devotion. "Poor old

chappie," he murmured tenderly. He was helpless before that slow

melancholy shaking of the head, that mysterious and steadfast smile.

He approached tip-toe on deprecating feet. But Rickman would none of

him; his whole attitude was eloquent of rebuke. He waved Spinks away

with one pathetic hand; with the other he clutched and gathered round

him the last remnants of his personal majesty. And thus, in his own

time and in his own fashion, he wandered to his bed. Even then he

conveyed reproach and reproof by his manner of entering it; he seemed

to vanish subtly, to withdraw himself, as into some sacred and

inviolable retreat.

Spinks crept away, saddened by the rebuff. After all, he was no nearer

to Rickman drunk than to Rickman sober. Half an hour later, he was

asleep in the adjoining room, dreaming a lightsome dream of ladies and

_mousselines de laine_, when suddenly the dream turned to a

nightmare. It seemed to him that there descended upon him a heavy

rolling weight, as of a bale of woollens. He awoke and found that it

was Rickman.

The poet lay face downwards across the body of his friend, and was

crooning into his ear the great chorus from the third act of Helen in

Leuce. He said that nobody but Spinky understood it. And Spinky

couldn't understand it if he wasn't drunk.

Whereupon Spinks was most curiously uplifted and consoled.

CHAPTER XIII

He woke tired out, as well he might be, after spending half the night

in the pursuit of young Joy personified in Miss Poppy Grace, young

Joy, who, like that little dancer, is the swiftest of all swift

things.

Rickman carried into this adventure a sort of innocence that renewed

itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin

because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the

gaiety, the naïveté of the pursuit. She was always in front of him,

that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all

the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on

her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was

that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the

secret of the world. And long before the morning she would pick up her

skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with

her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the

oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in

no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him,

formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the

burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching

in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in

all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew

the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling

it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard

before. He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the

loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent,

accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure

spirit inside him. And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet,

because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through

his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For

all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too,

somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the

great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and

turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he

had to bear.

Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after

that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April

fool of himself. He knew it by the pain in his head and other

disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the

shirt and trousers of the day.

And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go

down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet

Mr. Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's

wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey's tender womanly concern, as he

turned white over the bacon and the butter. He didn't know which were

worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones. He had to be at the shop

by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to

its eight hours' work.

In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and

body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of

"Rickman's". At nine o'clock in the morning it was more real to him

than any real thing; it even assumed an abominable personality; it was

an all-compelling, all-consuming power that sucked from him his time,

his life, his energy, and for six days out of the seven required of

him his soul. That at the same time it provided him with the means of

bodily subsistence only added to the horror of the thing. It was as if

"Rickman's", destroyer and preserver, renewed his life every quarter

day that it might draw in, devour, annihilate it as before. There was

a diabolical precision in the action of the machine that made and

unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part

of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer

pause--when for three days his soul would be given back to him. The

only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the

Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed,

the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up

and eager for the day. By the time Keith had got down to breakfast

Isaac had caught the early train that landed him in the City at nine.

Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.

And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on

the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his

assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great

front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and

frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart

swelled with thankfulness and pride. For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer,

too, in his way. There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable

merit and glory of Isaac's dreams was that they had all, or very

nearly all, come true. They were of the sort that can be handed over

the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank. His

latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it

towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola

at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son. Keith, presumably, took

after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the

supreme effort of his birth. On her own birth there had been something

in the nature of a slur. She had taken it to heart, and exhausted

herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband

the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City

restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village

sempstress and a village squire. Isaac, before he dreamed of

greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her

because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty. She left to her boy her

fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother's

passion. Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a

fleshless refinement of physique. Coarseness in grain, usually

revealed by the lower half of a man's countenance, had with the elder

Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region.

Isaac's eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the

rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the

spirit. Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat,

smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost

suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion. His lips were

hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was

smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a

meditative hand. Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain genius to the man who had raised that

mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art. Those stately premises, with their

clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings,

were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row

where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen. When Isaac grew

great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted

to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature. For

Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the

successful tradesman he aspired to be. There were, in fact, two

Rickman's: Rickman's in the City and Rickman's in the Strand.

Rickman's in the Strand bore on its fore-front most unmistakeably the

seal of the world; Rickman's in the City was sealed with the Lord's

seal.

So that now there was not a single need of the great book-buying,

book-loving Public that Rickman's did not provide for and represent.

It pandered to (Isaac said "catered for") the highest and the lowest,

the spirit as well as the flesh. Only Isaac was wise enough to keep

the two branches of the business separate and distinct. His right hand

professed complete ignorance of the doings of his left.

It may be that Isaac's heart was in his City shop. But there was

something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was

colossal. He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great

House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him. He aimed

at nothing less than supremacy. He proposed to spread his nets till

they had drawn in the greater part of the book trade of London; till

Rickman's had reared its gigantic palaces in every district of the

capital. In '92 there was some talk of depression in the book trade.

Firms had failed. Isaac did not join in the talk, and he had his own

theory of the failure. Men went smash for want of will, for want of

brains, for want of courage and capital. Above all for want of

capital. As if any man need want capital so long as he had the pluck

to borrow, that is to say, to buy it. So ran his dream. And Isaac

believed in his dream, and what was more, he had made Mr. Richard

Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue, believe in it.

"Rickman's," backed by Pilkington, would stand firm, firm as a rock.

Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater. It was not only

by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman

had raised himself from those obscure beginnings. Isaac was an artist

in his own enormous way, and he had made an exhaustive study of the

Public. With incredible versatility he followed every twist and turn

of the great mind; the slow colossal movements which make capital, the

fitful balancing, the sudden start and mad rush forward by which, if

you can but foresee and keep pace with it, you reap the golden harvest

of the hour. He never took his eye off the Public. He laid his finger,

as it were, on that mighty pulse and recorded its fluctuations in his

ledger.

But there was a region beyond those fluctuations. With new books there

was always a pound's worth of risk to a pennyworth of profit; but

there was no end of money to be got out of old ones, if only you knew

how to set about it. And Isaac did not quite know how. In his front

shop it was the Public, in his side shop it was the books that

mattered, and knowledge of the one, however exhaustive, was no guide

to the other. Isaac by himself cut a somewhat unfortunate figure; he

stood fully equipped in the field where there was much danger and but

little gain; he was helpless where the price of knowledge ruled

immeasurably high. In the second-hand department audacity without

education can do nothing. What he still wanted, then, was brains and

yet more brains; not the raw material, mind you, he had plenty of

that, but the finished product, the trained, cultured intellect. Isaac

was a self-made man, a man ignorant of many things, religious, but

uneducated.

But he had a son, and the son had a head on his shoulders a

magnificent head that boy had. Mr. Horace Jewdwine had noticed it the

first minute he came into the shop. And the magnificence of Keith's

head had been pointed out to Isaac long before that, when Keith

couldn't have been more than ten--why, nine he was; that was the

beginning of it. Isaac could remember how Sir Joseph Harden of

Lazarus, the great scholar, who was one of Isaac's best customers,

poking round the little dingy shop in Paternoster Row (it was all

second-hand in those days), came on the young monkey perched on the

step-ladder, reading Homer. Sir Joseph had made him come down and

translate for him then and there. And Keith went at it, translating

for twenty minutes straight on end. Sir Joseph had said nothing, but

he asked him what he was going to be, and the young Turk grinned up at

him and said he was going to be a poet, "like 'Omer, that was what he

was going to be." Isaac had said that was just like his impudence, but

Sir Joseph stood there looking at him and smiling on the side of his

face that Keith couldn't see, and he told the little chap to "work

hard and mind his rough breathings." Isaac had supposed that was some

sort of a joke, for Keith, he tried hard to grin, though his face went

red hot all over. Then Sir Joseph had turned round very serious and

asked if he, Rickman, had any other sons, because, whatever he did

with the rest of them, he must make this one a scholar. Isaac had said

No, he hadn't any but that one boy, and he would have to be brought up

to the business. He was afraid he couldn't spare the time to make much

of a scholar of him. Time, said Isaac, was money. What Sir Joseph said

then Isaac had never forgotten. He had said; "True, time was money,

loose cash in your pockets; but brains were capital." And there wasn't

a better investment for them, he had added, than a good sound

classical education. Isaac was to send the boy to the City of London,

then to the London University, if he couldn't rise to Oxford; but Sir

Joseph's advice was Oxford. Let him try for a scholarship. He added

that he would like to do something for him later on if he lived. Isaac

had never forgotten it; his memory being assisted by the circumstance

that Sir Joseph had that very same day bought one hundred and

twenty-five pounds' worth of books for his great library down in

Devonshire.

The boy was sent to an "Academy," then to the City of London; Isaac

had not risen to Oxford. Keith never tried for a scholarship, and if

he had, Isaac would have drawn the line at a university education, as

tending towards an unholy leisure and the wisdom of this world.

Otherwise he had spared no expense, for he had grasped the fact that

this was an investment, and he looked to have his money back again

with something like fifty per cent. interest. And the boy, the boy was

to come back, too, with a brain as bright as steel, all its queer

little complicated parts in working order; in short, a superb machine;

and Isaac would only have to touch a spring to set it going.

But the question was, what spring? And that, unfortunately, was what

old Rickman never could lay his finger on.

Still it went, that machine of his, apparently of its own accord. It

went mysteriously, capriciously, but fairly satisfactorily on the

whole. And Isaac was wise; his very respect for the thing that had

cost him so much prevented him from tampering with it.

It was in accordance with this policy of caution that they lived

apart. Isaac loved the suburbs; Keith loved the town, and it was as

well for one of them to live in it, near to their place of business.

Isaac had married again, and though he was proud of his boy and fond

of him, he contrived to be completely happy without him. He loved his

little detached villa residence at Ilford in Essex, with its little

flower-garden showing from the high road, its little stable for the

pony and little paddock for the cow. He loved his large smooth-faced

second wife, with her large balance at the bank and still larger

credit in the Wesleyan circle they lived and moved in. He loved that

Wesleyan circle, the comfortable, safe community that knew only the

best, the Sunday best, of him. And Keith loved none of these things.

By the education he had got and which he, Isaac, had given him, by the

"religion" he hadn't got, and which nothing would induce him to take,

by the obscure barriers of individuality and temperament, the son was

separated from the father. As for meeting each other half-way, Isaac

had tried it once or twice of a Sunday, when Keith had met him indeed,

but with a directness that shocked Isaac and distressed him. He was

made positively uncomfortable by his son's money-bought superiority;

though the boy didn't bring it out and show it, Isaac felt all the

time that it was there. He was very much happier without the boy.

Keith among other things suggested vividly the thoughts which the

Wesleyan desired to put away from Saturday afternoon to Monday

morning, thoughts of the present evil world, for which, on Sundays, he

more than half suspected that he might be imperilling his immortal

soul.

Sometimes in the watches of the night, especially of a Sunday night,

it occurred to him that (owing to the domestic arrangement which kept

the boy in a place which, when all was said and done, was a place of

temptation) Keith's soul, no less immortal, might be in jeopardy too.

He thought of him, an innocent lad, thrown on the mercy of London, as

it were. But Isaac had faith in the mercy of the Lord. Besides, he

wasn't the sort, a quiet, studious young fellow like Keith wasn't. And

when Isaac's conscience began to feel a little uncertain upon that

point, he simply laid the case circumstantially before the Lord, who

knew all his difficulties and all his sins, and was infinitely able

and eternally willing to bear them for him. By casting Keith upon the

Lord an immense burden of responsibility was slipped from his

conscience; and by the time Monday morning came round Isaac was again

convinced that he had made the very best arrangements.

For not only was the state of Keith's soul a reproach to Isaac's

conscience, but the brilliance of Keith's intellect was a terror to

it. Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to

the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable

discrepancies between his inner and his outer life. He wanted his son

and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith's lucid sincerity

at times appalled him. He had not yet discovered that his protection

was in the very thing he feared. Keith was so recklessly single-minded

that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double

life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the

Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so

lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply

could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in

itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The

book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply

the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it

all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In

fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father

as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.

But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop.

He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop

had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell. It was books found

in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the

glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his

Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single

gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender

recollection of Paternoster Row. It was to Rickman's that he owed his

education. Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically,

abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do. At times he even

appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate.

Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the

thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for

that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his

father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him. He

simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that

he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn't going to throw him

over at the start.

But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so.

As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a

brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman's and beyond it,

shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a

broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead

back there. He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of

him to be made into a machine.

Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of

this machine were hidden from Isaac. He hadn't even found out that the

secret spring was not in the brain but the heart of it. He would look

up a little uneasily as Keith pushed through the big swinging doors

and took his seat at the table on the platform, and while he wondered

what Keith was thinking of him, ten to one Keith wasn't thinking of

him at all.

This morning, however, he _was_ thinking of him, as it happened. And

when the old man saw him up there, holding his poor bursting head in

his hands, and said: "'Ead achin' my boy, again? That comes of

studyin' too 'ard!" he thought with a touch of compunction, "What

would he say if he knew I'd gone drunk to bed last night? And if he

knew about Poppy?"

Isaac approached his son gingerly and with a certain fear. The only

thing he had discovered about this admirable machine of his was that

it went better when you left it alone. It had not been going quite so

well lately though, and this morning it seemed decidedly out of order.

He took a seat at the table and busied himself with a catalogue.

Presently he rose and touched the boy gently on the shoulder.

"Come into the office a minute, will you?" he said, with a glance at

the cashier. And Keith, wondering what on earth he wanted with him,

followed into a recess shut on from the shop by a plate-glass and

mahogany screen. Isaac hunted among the papers on his writing-table

for a letter he could not find.

"You remember your old friend, Sir Joseph Harden, don't you?"

"Yes." Keith was in fact devoted to Sir Joseph's memory. He had often

wondered what it was, that mysterious "something" which Sir Joseph

would have done for him, if he had lived, and whether, if he had done

it, it would have made a difference.

"Well, I got a letter from his place in Devonshire this morning.

They've asked me to send them some one down to catalogue his library.

They want an expert, and he must go at once and finish by the

twenty-seventh, or it's no use. Dear me, where is that letter?"

Keith goaded his brain to an agonizing activity. It seemed to him

that some such proposal had been made to him before. But where or when

he couldn't for the life of him remember.

"Pilkington says he told you something about it, last night. I've

heard from him this morning, too."

Pilkington--he remembered now. Dicky had bothered him about a library

last night; and he had wished Dicky at the devil. He beat his brains

till he struck from them an illuminating flash (Lord, how it hurt

too!).

"He didn't say it was the Harden Library."

"It is, though." Isaac's coarse forehead flushed with triumph. "He's

promised me the refusal of it when it comes into the market."

At any other time Keith would have been interested; but his head ached

too much now. Still he was not too far gone to recognize the magnitude

of the affair.

"You'll have to go down and look at it," continued Isaac persuasively,

"and here's the opportunity. You go on their business, and do mine at

the same time, and get well paid for it, too."

"I don't quite like going that way. If the thing's got to be sold why

do they want it catalogued?"

"That's their business, not mine."

"It looks like 'their' mistake, whoever they are. Where's the letter?"

"I've mislaid it. That's not my business either. My business is to

send you off before they find out their mistake. You can catch the

eleven express from Waterloo if you look sharp."

Sharp? Never had he looked less so. Still, with his aching head he

dimly perceived that his Easter was being tampered with.

"And supposing they want me to stay?"

"Stay then. The longer the better."

"I'll go after Easter then. I can't go before. I can't possibly.

It's--it's out of the question."

His brain was clear enough on that point. He had suffered many things

from the brutality of Rickman's; but hitherto its dealings had always

been plain and above-board. It had kept him many an evening working

overtime, it had even exacted an occasional Saturday afternoon; but

it had never before swindled him out of a Bank holiday. The thing was

incredible; it could not be. Rickman's had no rights over his Easter;

whatever happened, that holy festival was indubitably, incontestably

his.

"Don't be afraid. You'll get your holiday, my boy, when you come back.

I'll make it worth your while."

"It isn't money--damn my head! It's so confoundedly inconvenient. You

see, I'd made no end of engagements."

"It's a foolish thing to make engagements so long beforehand. We never

know the day or the hour--"

"I knew both."

"Well, in any case you couldn't be going to any place of amusement on

the Sunday."

Isaac and his conscience had agreed together to assume that young

Keith walked habitually and of his own fancy in the right way.

"Come," he continued, "you're not going to fling up a chance like this

without rhyme or reason."

"I don't know," said Keith, with a queer little one-sided smile, "I'd

fling up a good many chances for a really good rhyme."

As for reason, there were at least two reasons why the present chance

should not lightly be let go. One was the Harden Library. If the

Harden Library was not great, it was almost historic, it contained the

Aldine Plato of 1513, the Neapolitan Horace of 1474, and the _Aurea

Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. The other reason was Dicky Pilkington,

the Vandal into whose hands destiny had delivered it. Upon the Harden

Library Pilkington was about to descend like Alaric on the treasures

of Rome. Rickman's was hand in glove with Pilkington, and since the

young barbarian actually offered them the chance of buying it outright

for an old song, no time was to be lost. It would not do to trust too

long to Dicky's ignorance. At any moment knowledge might enter into

him and corrupt his soul.

No; clearly, he would have to go; he didn't see how he was to get out

of it.

Isaac became uneasy, for the spirit of imprecation sat visibly on his

son's brow. "When I said I'd make it worth your while I meant it."

"I know. It isn't that--"

"Wot is it? Wot is it then? Wot's the matter with you? Wot tomfoolery

are you up to? Is it--" (Isaac's gross forehead flushed, his speech

came thick through his stern lips.) "Is it a woman?"

He had also been young; though he had denied his youth.

The boy's white face quivered with a little wave of heat and pain. He

clasped his forehead with his hands.

"Let me think."

His fingers tightened their hold, as if to grasp thought by holding

the dizzy aching head that contained it. He could think of nothing but

Poppy. He had seen his father's point quite steadily and clearly a

minute ago; but when he thought of Poppy his brain began to turn round

and round again. He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.

His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of

concentrating itself on the matter in hand. "It takes a poet," he said

to himself, "to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior

Journalist." Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of

transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated? Or was it a cruel

young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy?

Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility. He saw

through it. He saw through most things, Himself included. He knew

perfectly well that he had developed this sudden turn for speculative

thought because he was baulked of an appointment with a little variety

actress. That he should see through the little variety actress was not

to be expected. Poppy was in her nature impenetrable, woman being the

ultimate fact, the inexorable necessity of thought. Supposing the

universe to be nothing more than a dance of fortuitous atoms, then

Poppy, herself a fortuitous atom, led the dance; she was the whirligig

centre towards which all things whirled. No wonder that it made him

giddy to think of her.

Suddenly out of its giddiness his brain conceived and instantly

matured a plan. A practical plan. He would catch that eleven-thirty

express all right. He would go down into Devonshire, and stay in

Devonshire till Saturday. If necessary, he would sit up with those

abominable books all Thursday night and Friday night. And on Saturday

he would return. At the worst he would only have to go down again on

Monday. He would have missed the Junior Journalists' dinner, he would

be lucky if he saw the ghost of an idea on this side Whit Sunday, but

he would have torn the heart out of his holiday.

He rose abruptly. "All right. It's a most awful nuisance, as it

happens, but I'll go."

"I'm glad you're willing to oblige me. You'll not regret it."

Isaac was really meditating something very handsome in the way of a

commission. As he looked benignly into his son's face and saw its deep

misery and repugnance, he answered his own question.

"It _is_ a woman."

BOOK II

LUCIA'S WAY

CHAPTER XIV

He wondered how much longer they were going to keep him waiting. His

head still ached, and every nerve was irritable. He began to suspect

the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of

ringing for him and announcing himself a second time. Then he

remembered that he was only the man who had come about the books; he

was there on the Hardens' business, and their time was his time. And

there were worse places to wait in than the library of Court House.

He found himself in a long low room that seemed to him immense. It was

lighted by four deep-set windows, one to the south, one (a smaller

side lattice) to the east, two to the west, and still the corners were

left in gloom. The bookcases that covered the length and height of the

walls were of one blackness with the oak floor and ceiling. The

scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones

in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and

here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some

dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight

made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a

new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every

patch of vellum; it streamed out of the great golden white busts on

their pedestals in the windows, it lay in pale gleams over the eastern

walls till it perished in the marble blackness of the roof and floor,

sucked in as by an upper and nether abyss. This blackness intensified

the glory of the April world outside whose luminous greens and blues

were held like blazonry in the leaded lozenge panes. The two western

windows thrown open looked over the valley to the hills; Castle Hill

with its black battlement of pines, and round-topped Core; to Harmouth

Gap, the great doorway of the west wind, and the straight brown flank

of Muttersmoor, stretching to the sea. He seated himself by one of

these open lattices, looked at the view, one of the loveliest in south

Devon, and thought of Miss Poppy Grace. The vision of her that had

still attended him on his journey down faded as if rebuked by the

great tranquil presence of the hills. He was left supremely, magically

alone.

Now it may have been prescience, it may have been merely the

deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon

that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became

almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness,

a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave a deep sigh and turned his

back on it abruptly.

He picked up a book that lay on the window seat; it was the _History

of Harmouth_, and the history of Harmouth was the history of the

Hardens of Court House. Court House was older than Harmouth and the

Hardens were older than Court House. In early Tudor times, the

chronicler informed him, the house was the court of justice for east

Devon. Under Elizabeth it and the land for miles around it passed to

the Hardens as a reward for their services to the Crown. The first

thing they did was to pull down the gibbet on the north side and build

their kitchen offices there. Next they threw out a short gable-ended

wing to the east, and another to the west, enclosing a pleasant

courtyard on the south. The west wing was now thrown into one with the

long room that held the Harden Library.

Rickman searched carefully for information under this head. He learnt

that the Harden library was the work of ten generations of scholars

beginning with Sir Thomas, a Jacobean maker of madrigals, and ending

with Sir Joseph, the Victorian Master of Lazarus; that the founder's

date is carved on the oak chimney-piece at the north end, with the

Harden motto:

16 INVICTUS 20;

that the late Master of Lazarus bought books by the cartload, and was

obliged to break through the south wall and sacrifice the west wing

(his wife's boudoir) to make room for them. But where he looked for

some record of these treasures he found nothing but an elaborate

description of the Harden arms with all their quarterings. The

historian was not useful for Rickman's purposes. He was preoccupied

with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before

them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of

observing that their motto was _Invictus_. He certainly seemed to have

found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious

contortions and prostrations of his spirit. The poor wretch, in the

pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till

he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint

hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in

a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the

east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And

with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently

exhausted itself. "The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden," said the

chronicler, "has made no addition to the library of his ancestors."

What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens. It

was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyond drawing

attention to the curious fact that no woman had ever been permitted to

inherit the Harden Library. The inspired pen of the chronicler evoked

the long procession of those Hardens whose motto was _Invictus_;

crossed-legged crusading Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in

ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and

patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and

never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman

reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after

him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have

received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of

madrigals, had spared it a shadowy smile.

He looked round and realized that his separation from Poppy would be

disagreeably prolonged if he was expected to catalogue and arrange all

the books in the Harden Library. Allowing so much time to so much

space, (measuring by feet of bookshelf) hours ran rapidly to days, and

days to weeks--why, months might pass and find him still labouring

there. He would be buried in the blackness, forgotten by Poppy and the

world. That was assuming that the Harden Library really belonged to

the Hardens. And if it was to belong to Dicky Pilkington, what on

earth had he been sent for?

"You were sent in answer to my letter, I suppose?"

Rickman's nervous system was still so far under the dominion of

Dicky's champagne that he started violently. Double doors and double

carpets deadened all sound of coming and going, and the voice seemed

to have got into the room by itself. As from its softness he judged it

to be still some yards distant, he suffered a further shock on finding

a lady standing by his elbow.

It had been growing on him lately, this habit of starting at nothing,

this ridiculous spasm of shoulder-blade, eyelids and mouth. It was a

cause of many smiles to the young ladies of his boarding-house; and

this lady was smiling too, though after another fashion. Her smile was

remote and delicately poised; it hovered in the fine, long-drawn

corners of her mouth and eyes; it sobered suddenly as a second and

less violent movement turned towards her his white and too expressive

face. He could not say by what subtle and tender transitions it passed

into indifference, nor how in passing it contrived to intimate her

regret at having taken him somewhat at a disadvantage. It was all done

and atoned for in the lifting of an eyelid, before he could take in

what she had actually said.

Her letter? He murmured some sort of assent, and entered on a dreamy

and protracted search for his pocket handkerchief. He was miserably

conscious that she was looking, looking down on him all the time. For

this lady was tall, so tall indeed that her gaze seemed to light on

his eyelids rather than his eyes. When he had found his courage and

his handkerchief he looked up and their eyes met half way. Hers were

brown with the tinge of hazel that makes brown eyes clear; they had a

liquid surface of light divided from their darkness, and behind the

darkness was more light, and the light and darkness were both

unfathomable.

These eyes were entirely unembarrassed by the encounter. They still

swept him with their long gaze, lucid, meditative, and a little

critical.

"You have been very prompt."

"We understood that no time was to be lost."

She hesitated. "Mr. Rickman understood, did he not, that I asked for

some one with experience?"

Most certainly Mr. Rickman understood.

"Do you think you will be able to do what I want?"

Her eyes implied that he seemed to her too young to have had any

experience at all.

Knowing that a sense of humour was not one of the things required of

him, he controlled a smile.

"We understood you wanted an expert, so I came myself."

"You are Mr. Rickman then?"

"Well--Mr. Rickman's son."

The lady puckered her brows as if trying to recall something, an idea,

a memory that escaped her. She gave it up.

"Have you been waiting long?"

"Not more than half an hour or so."

"I am sorry. Perhaps you had better stay now and see what has to be

done."

He was tired, he had eaten nothing all day, his nerves were out of

order, and he had an abominable headache, but he intimated that he and

his time were at her service. She spoke with authority, and he

wondered who she was. Sir Frederick Harden's daughter? Or his sister?

Or his wife?

"As you see, the books are fairly well arranged. It will not take very

long to sort them."

Oh wouldn't it, though! His heart sank miserably as he followed her

progress round the room.

"They'll have to be catalogued under their subjects--alphabetically,

of course."

"Quite so."

She continued with the same swiftness and serenity, mistress of his

time and intelligence, as of her own luminous and elaborate plan.

"Their size will have to be given, the edition, the place and date of

publication, the number of their shelf, and their place on the

shelves."

Their place on the shelves indeed! If those books had got into Dicky

Pilkington's clutches their place would know them no more. He

wondered; did she know nothing about Dicky Pilkington? Her plan

implied certainty of possession, the permanence of the Harden Library

world without end. He wondered whether he ought not to remind her that

it might be about to come into the market, if it were not already as

good as sold?

"Besides the cataloguing I want notes on all the rare or remarkable

books. I believe some of them are unique."

He wondered more and more, and ended by wondering whether Dicky

Pilkington were really so sure of his game?

"I see. You want a catalogue _raisonné_."

"I want something like this." She opened a drawer and showed him one

of Rickman's Special Quarterly Catalogues of a year back. He

remembered; it used to be sent regularly to old Sir Joseph Harden,

their best customer.

"My grandfather said these catalogues were models of their kind--they

could only have been done by a scholar. He wanted the library

catalogued on the same lines. It was to have been done in his

lifetime--"

"I wish it had been. I should have liked to have worked for Sir Joseph

'Arden."

Stirred by the praise, and by a sudden recollection of Sir Joseph, he

spoke with a certain emotion, so that an aitch went by the board.

"Are you quite sure," said she, "that you know all about this sort of

work?"

Had she noticed that hideous accident? And did it shake her belief in

his fitness for the scholarly task?

"This _is_ my work. I made that catalogue. I have to make them every

quarter, so it keeps my hand in."

"Are you a quick worker?"

"Yes, I can be pretty quick."

"Could you finish my catalogue by the twenty-seventh? That's a little

more than three weeks."

"Well--it would depend rather on the number of notes you wanted. Let

me see--there must be about fourteen or fifteen thousand books here--"

"There are fifteen thousand."

"It would take three weeks to make an ordinary catalogue; and that

would be quick work, even for me. I'm afraid you must give me rather

more time."

"I can't. I'm leaving England on the twenty-sixth."

"Couldn't I go on with it in your absence?"

"No, that would hardly do."

"If you could only give me another week--"

"I couldn't possibly. I have to join my father at Cannes on the

twenty-seventh."

So she was Sir Frederick Harden's daughter then, not his wife. Her

last words were illuminating; they suggested the programme of a family

whose affairs were in liquidation. They also revealed Sir Frederick

Harden's amazing indifference to the fate of the library, an

indifference that argued a certain ignorance of its commercial value.

His father who had a scent keen as a hound's for business had taken in

the situation. And Dicky, you might trust Dicky to be sure of his

game. But if this were so, why should the Hardens engage in such a

leisurely and expensive undertaking as a catalogue _raisonné_? Was the

gay Sir Frederick trying to throw dust in the eyes of his creditors?

"I see," he said, "Sir Frederick Harden is anxious to have the

catalogue finished before you leave?"

"No, he isn't anxious about it at all. He doesn't know it's being

done. It is entirely my affair."

So Sir Frederick's affairs and his daughter's were separate and

distinct; and apparently neither knew what the other was about.

Rickman's conscience reproached him for the rather low cunning which

had prompted him to force her hand. It also suggested that he ought

not to take advantage of her ignorance. Miss Harden was charming, but

evidently she was a little rash.

"If I may make the suggestion, it might perhaps be wiser to wait till

your return."

"If it isn't done before I go," said Miss Harden, "it may never be

done at all."

"And you are very anxious that it should be done?"

"Yes, I am. But if you can't do it, you had better say so at once."

"That would not be strictly true. I could do it, if I worked at it

pretty nearly all day and half the night. Say sixteen hours out of the

twenty-four."

"You are thinking of one person's work?"

"Yes."

"But if there are two persons?"

"Then, of course, it would take eight hours."

"So, if _I_ worked, too--"

"In that case," he replied imperturbably, "it would take twelve

hours."

"You said eight just now."

"Assuming that the two persons worked equally hard."

She crossed to a table in the middle of the room, it was littered with

papers. She brought and showed him some sheets covered with delicate

handwriting; her work, poor lady.

"This is a rough catalogue as far as I've got. I think it will be some

help."

"Very great help," he murmured, stung by an indescribable compunction.

He had not reckoned on this complication; and it made the ambiguity of

his position detestable. It was bad enough to come sneaking into her

house as his father's agent and spy, and be doing his business all the

while that this adorably innocent lady believed him to be exclusively

engaged on hers. But that she should work with him, toiling at a

catalogue which would eventually be Rickman's catalogue, there was

something in the notion extremely repulsive to his sense of honour.

Under its muffling of headache his mind wrestled feebly with the

situation. He wished he had not got drunk last night so that he could

see the thing clearly all round. As far as he could see at present the

only decent course was to back out of it.

"What I have done covers the first five sections up to F."

"I see," he said with a faint interest, "you are keeping the classical

and modern sections distinct."

"Yes, I thought that was better."

"Much better."

"I haven't begun the classical section yet. Can I leave that to you?"

"Certainly." He felt that every assent was committing him to he knew

not what.

"You see a great deal of the work is done already. That makes a

difference, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yes; it makes all the difference." And indeed it did.

"In this case you can undertake it?"

"No. I think that in this case I couldn't undertake it at all."

"But--why not?" she asked, as well she might.

Why not, indeed? He walked two or three paces from her, trying to

think it out. If only his head didn't ache so abominably! To refuse to

share the work with her was of course to lay himself open to a most

disgusting suspicion.

He paced back again. Did she suspect him of mercenary motives? No; she

suspected nothing. Her face expressed disappointment and bewilderment,

so far as she allowed it to express anything. One more turn. Thank

Goodness, she was not looking at him; she was giving him time. Only a

second, though. She had seated herself, as much as to say she was now

waiting for an explanation. He mustn't keep her waiting; he must say

something, but what on earth was he going to say?

And as he looked at the lady so serenely seated, there rose up before

him a sudden impertinent, incongruous vision of Miss Poppy Grace's

legs. They reminded him that certain affairs of his own imperatively

called him back to town. Happy thought--why not say so?

"I ought to have said that in any case I couldn't undertake it. I

couldn't make time without giving up some very important engagements."

"Could you not have thought of that before you came?"

"I did think of it. I thought I could fit everything in by going up to

town from Saturday to Monday. But if I'm to finish by the

twenty-seventh, even--even with your help, I oughtn't to lose a day,

much less three days."

"I see. You are afraid of not being able to finish?"

He wavered, selecting some form of expression that might shadow forth

what was passing in his mind.

"I'm afraid of making any promises I mightn't be able to keep."

Man's vacillation is Fate's determination, and Miss Harden was as firm

as Fate. He felt that the fine long hands playing with the catalogue

were shaping events for him, while her eyes measured him with their

meditative gaze.

"I must risk that," she said. "I should lose more than three days in

finding a substitute, and I think you will do the work as I want it

done."

"And supposing I can't do it in time?"

"Will you do your best--that's all?"

"Certainly; whatever I do, I shall do my best. And if I fail you--"

Left unfinished, hanging in mid air, the phrase suggested the vague

phantasmal contingencies for which he could find no name.

"I am willing to take the risk."

Her phrase too was satisfying. Its generous amplitude covered him like

a cloak.

"But we haven't arranged anything about terms."

No, they had not. Was it in her adorable simplicity, or in the mere

recklessness of her youth, that she engaged him first and talked about

terms afterwards? Or did she know an honest man when she saw one? He

took his note-book and pencil and made out an estimate with the

rapidity of happy inspiration, a fantastic estimate, incredibly and

ludicrously small.

"Then," said she, "there will be your expenses."

He had not thought of that difficulty; but he soared above it, still

reckless and inspired.

"Expenses? Oh, expenses are included."

She considered the estimate with the prettiest pucker of her

meditative brows.

"I don't understand these things; but--it seems very little."

"Our usual charge."

So swiftly did the wings of his inspiration carry him into the blue

ideal, high above both verbal verity and the gross material fact.

She acquiesced, though with some reluctance. "Well, and when do you

think you can begin?"

"Whenever it's most convenient to you. I shall have to take a look

round first."

"You can do that at once."

By this time he had forgotten that whatever he might have drunk he had

eaten nothing since the dinner of last night. He had ceased to feel

faint and headachy and hungry, having reached that stage of faintness,

headache and hunger when the body sheds its weight and seems to walk

gloriously upon air, to be possessed of supernatural energy. He went

up and down library steps that were ladders, and stood perilously on

the tops of them. He walked round and round the walls, making

calculations, till the library began to swing slowly round too, and a

thin circle of grey mist swung with it. And all the time he was

obscurely aware of a delicate grey-clad figure going to and fro in the

grey mist, or seated intent at the table, doing his work. He felt that

her eyes followed him now and then.

Heroism sustained him for an hour. At the end of the hour his progress

round the room grew slower; and in passing by the table where she sat,

he had to steady himself with one hand. A cold sweat broke on his

forehead. He mopped it furtively. He had every reason to believe that

his appearance was repulsive; and, in the same painful instant in

which this conviction sank into him, she raised her head and he saw

that she was beautiful. The upward look revealed her. It was as if

some veil, soft but obscuring, had dropped from her face. As her eyes

scanned him gently, it occurred to him that she had probably never

before had an opportunity of intimately observing a gentleman

suffering from the remoter effects of intoxication.

"You look tired," she said. "Or are you ill?"

He stood shame-faced before her; for her eyes were more disconcerting

than when they had looked down on him from their height. They were

tranquil now, full of kind thought and innocence and candour. Of

innocence above all, a luminous innocence, a piercing purity. He was

troubled by her presence; but it was not so much her womanhood that

troubled him as the deep mystery of her youth.

He could not look at it as it looked at him; for in looking at it he

remembered last night and many nights before. Somehow it made him see

the things it could not see, his drunkenness, his folly, his passion,

the villainous naked body of his sin. And it was for their work, and

their marks upon him, that she pitied him.

"Have you had anything to _eat_?" said she.

"Oh, yes, thanks," he answered vaguely.

"When?"

"Well--as far as I can remember it was about eight o'clock last

night."

"Oh--how very thoughtless of me. I am so sorry."

"It's my own fault entirely. I wouldn't have mentioned it, except to

account for my stupidity."

She crossed the room with a quick movement of distress and rang the

bell. With horror he perceived her hospitable intention.

She was actually ordering his dinner and his room. He heard every word

of her soft voice; it was saying that he was to have some soup, and

the chicken, and the tart--no, the jelly, and a bottle of burgundy, in

the morning-room. He saw the young footman standing almost on tip-toe,

winged for service, fired with her enthusiasm and her secrecy.

Coming on that sinister and ambiguous errand, how could he sleep under

her roof? How could he eat her chicken, and drink her burgundy, and

sit in her morning-room? And how could he explain that he could not?

Happily she left him to settle the point with the footman.

With surprise and a little concern Lucia Harden learnt that the rather

extraordinary young man, Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, had betaken himself

to an hotel. It appeared, that courteously, but with an earnestness

that admitted of no contradiction, he had declined all hospitality

whatever.

CHAPTER XV

It was Friday morning, and Mr. Rickman lay in bed, outwardly beholding

through the open window the divinity of the sea, inwardly

contemplating the phantoms of the mind. For he judged them to be

phantoms (alcoholic in their origin), his scruples of last night.

Strictly speaking, it was on Wednesday night that he had got drunk;

but he felt as if his intoxication had prolonged itself abnormally, as

if this were the first moment of indubitable sobriety.

And as he lay there, he prepared himself to act the part of the cold,

abstracted, supercilious man of business, the part already too

horribly familiar to him as young Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He

reflected how nearly he had wrecked his prospects in that character.

He bade himself beware of woman and of drink, the two things most

fatal to stability of judgement. He recalled, painfully, the events of

last evening. He was not quite sure what he had done, or hadn't done;

but he believed he had all but flung up the chance of securing for

Rickman's the great Harden Library. And he had quite a vivid and

disturbing recollection of the face, the person that had inspired him

with that impulse of fantastic folly.

In the candid light of morning this view of his conduct presented

itself as the sane thinking of a regenerated intellect. He realized,

as he had not realized before, how colossal was the opportunity he had

so narrowly let slip. The great Harden Library would come virgin into

the market, undefiled by the touch of commerce, the breath of

publicity. It had been the pure and solitary delight of scholar lovers

who would have been insulted by the suggestion that they should

traffic in its treasures. Everything depended on his keeping its

secret inviolate. Heavens! supposing he had backed out of that

catalogue, and Miss Harden had called in another expert. At this

point he detected in himself a tendency to wander from the matter in

hand. He reminded himself that whatever else he was there for, he was

there to guard the virginal seclusion of the Aldine Plato, the

Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. He tried

to shut his eyes against his vivid and disturbing vision of the lady

of the library. It suggested that he was allowing that innocent person

to pay fifteen pounds for a catalogue which he had some reason to

believe would be of no earthly use to her. He sat up in bed, and

silenced its suggestions with all the gravity of his official

character. If the young lady insisted on having a catalogue made, he

might as well make it as any one else; in fact, a great deal better.

He tried to make himself believe that he regretted having charged her

fifteen pounds when he might have got fifty. It was more than

unbusiness-like; it was, even for him, an incredibly idiotic thing to

do; he would never have done it if he had not been hopelessly drunk

the night before.

He got out of bed with a certain slow dignity and stepped into his

cold bath solemnly, as into a font of regeneration. And as he bathed

he still rehearsed with brilliance his appointed part. No criticism of

the performance was offered by his actual self as revealed to him in

the looking-glass. It stared at him with an abstracted air,

conspicuous in the helpless pathos of its nakedness. It affected

absorption in the intricate evolutions of the bath. Something in its

manner inspired him with a vague distrust. He noticed that this

morning it soaped itself with a peculiar care, that it displayed more

than usual interest in the trivial details of dress. It rejected an

otherwise irreproachable shirt because of a minute wine stain on the

cuff. It sniffed critically at its coat and trousers, and flung them

to the other end of the room. It arrayed itself finally in a brand-new

suit of grey flannel, altogether inexpressive of his rôle. He could

not but feel that its behaviour compromised the dignity of the

character he had determined to represent. It is not in his best coat

and trousers that the book-dealer sets out on the dusty quest of the

Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of

Wynkyn de Worde.

He could no longer conceal the fact that he had dressed himself

elaborately for an interview with Miss Harden. But he endeavoured to

adjust his mind to a new and less disturbing view of the lady. He had

seen her last night through a flush of emotion that obscured her; he

would see her to-day in the pure and imperturbable light of the

morning, and his nerves should not play the devil with him this time.

He would be cool, calm, incorruptibly impersonal, as became Rickman,

the man of business, Rickman of Rickman's.

Unfortunately, though the rôle was rehearsed with ease in the privacy

of his bedroom, it proved impossible to sustain it under Miss Harden's

candid eyes. At the first sight of them he lost all grasp and memory

of his part; he broke down disgracefully, miserably. The sound of her

voice revived his agony of the previous night. True, the flush of

emotion had subsided, but in the fierce intellectual light that

followed, his doubts and scruples showed plainer than ever. They even

acquired a certain logical order and cohesion.

He concealed himself behind the projecting wing of a bookcase and

wrestled with them there. Dispassionately considered, the situation

stood thus. He was possessed of certain knowledge relating to Sir

Frederick Harden's affairs. That was neither bad nor good. He had

allowed Sir Frederick Harden's daughter to engage him in a certain

capacity, knowing perfectly well that she would not have done so had

she herself possessed that knowledge. That was bad--distinctly bad. He

was going to take advantage of that engagement to act in another

capacity, not contemplated by his employer, namely, as valuer of said

employer's property and possibly as the agent for its purchase, well

knowing that such purchase would be effected without reference to its

intrinsic or even to its market value. That was worse.

These were the simple data of his problem. The problem (seen with

excruciating lucidity) stated itself thus. Assuming, first of all,

Miss Harden's ignorance and his own knowledge, what was the correct

attitude of his knowledge to her ignorance? In other words, was it his

business to enlighten her as to the state of her father's finances?

No; it might be somebody else's business, but most decidedly it was

not his. His business, as far as he could see it, was simply to

withdraw as gracefully as possible from a position so difficult to

occupy with any decency.

He must then make another attempt to back out of it. No doubt it would

be an uncommonly awkward thing to do. The lady had already shown a

very pretty little will of her own, and supposing she insisted on

holding him to his bargain? There was that estimate, too; it seemed to

have clinched things, somehow, between him and Miss Harden. He did not

exactly know how to deal with that high-handed innocence, but he would

ask her to allow him to re-consider it.

He approached her with his head tossed up a little more than usual,

his way when he was about to do something disagreeable, to drive a

bargain or to ask a favour.

"Miss Harden, may I speak to you one moment?"

She looked up. Her face and figure were radiant in the light from the

south window.

"What is it?" she asked.

She was busy at one of the bookcases with a note-book and pencil,

cataloguing on an absurd but independent plan of her own. He gave a

rueful glance at her.

"I'm not sure that I ought to have let you engage me last night. I

wonder if I might ask you--"

"To release you from your engagement?"

"You must think I'm behaving very badly."

She did not contradict him; neither did she assent. She held him for

the moment under her long penetrating gaze. Her eyes were not of the

detective sort, quick to penetrate disguises. They were (though she

did not know it) eyes that possessed the power of spiritual seduction,

luring souls to confession. Your falseness might escape them; but if

there was any truth in you, she compelled you to be true.

She compelled Rickman to be impulsive.

"I'd give anything to know what I ought to do."

She did not help him out.

"I can't make up my mind about this work."

"Is it the question of time? I thought we had made that clear? You

didn't undertake to finish by the twenty-seventh."

"The question is whether I should have undertaken it at all."

"It might have been as well to have answered that question first."

"I couldn't answer it. There were so many things--"

"Do you want a longer time in town?"

"I want a longer time here, to think it over, to make up my mind

whether I can go on--"

"And in the meanwhile?"

"The work goes on just the same."

"And if you decide that you can't continue it?"

"I should find a substitute."

"The substitute might not be just the same. For instance, he might not

have so scrupulous a conscience."

"You mean he might not be so eager to back out of his engagements."

"I mean what I said. Your position seems to be a little difficult."

"I wish to goodness, Miss Harden, I could explain it."

"I don't suggest that you should explain it. It doesn't seem to be so

very clear to yourself."

"It isn't. I really _don't_ know what I ought to do."

"No more do I. But I can tell you what you ought to have done. You

ought to have made up your mind last night."

"Well, the fact is--last night--I hadn't very much mind left to make

up."

"No, I remember. You _were_ rather done up. I don't want to bind you

by last night, if it's at all unfair to you."

"It isn't in the least unfair to me. But I'm not sure that it mightn't

be very unfair to you; and, you see, I want to think it out."

"Very well, think it out, and let me know some time to-night. Will

that satisfy you?"

"It ought to."

And for the moment it did satisfy him. He felt that conscience, that

stern guardian of his conduct, was off duty for the day. He was free

(for the day) to abandon himself to the charm of Miss Harden's

society. The experience, he told himself, would be altogether new and

delightful.

New it undoubtedly was; but he remained a little uncertain as to the

delight; the immediate effect of Miss Harden's presence being an

intellectual disturbance amounting almost to aberration. It showed

itself, first of all, in a frightful exaltation of the consciousness

of self. To Mr. Rickman, striving to be noiseless, it seemed that the

sound of his boots, as he crossed the library, reverberated through

the immensity of space, while the creaking of his new braces

advertised in the most horrible manner his rising up and his sitting

down. Things were worse when he sat down; for then his breathing,

light but noticeably frequent, made him the unquiet centre of the

room. In the surrounding stillness the blowing of his nose became a

monstrous and appalling act. And no sooner was his attention

abstracted from his nose than it settled in his throat, producing a

series of spasmodic contractions which he imagined to be distinctly

audible. It was really as if his body had somehow detached itself, and

was rioting in a conspicuous and unseemly individuality of its own. He

wondered what Miss Harden thought of its behaviour.

This state of things was bad enough when he was separated from her by

the entire length of the room; but their work required a certain

collaboration, and there were occasions when he was established near

her, when deliberately, in cold blood and of his own initiative, he

was compelled to speak to her. No language could describe the anguish

and difficulty of these approaches. His way was beset by obstacles and

perils, by traps and snares; and at every turn there waited for him

the shameful pitfall of the aitch. He whose easy courtesy charmed away

the shyness of Miss Flossie Walker, whose conversation (when he

deigned to converse) was the wonder and delight of the ladies of his

boarding-house, now blushed to hear himself speak. The tones of his

voice were hateful to him; he detected in them some subtle and

abominable quality that he had not observed before. How would they

appeal to Miss Harden? For this miserable consciousness of himself was

pervaded, transcended by his consciousness of her.

Of her beauty he grew every minute more aware. It was not of the

conspicuous and conquering kind; it carried no flaming banner of

triumphant sex; indeed, it demanded a kindred fineness of perception

to discern it, being yet vague with the softness of her youth. Her

hair was mere darkness without colour or flame, her face mere

whiteness without a flush; all her colour and her light were, where

her soul was, in her mouth and eyes. These showed more vivid for that

toneless setting; they dominated her face. However he looked at her

his gaze was led up to them. For the long dim lines of her body flowed

upwards from her feet like the curves of a slender flame, mingling,

aspiring, vanishing; the edges of her features were indistinct as the

edges of a flame. This effect of an upward sweep was repeated in the

tilt of her vivid mouth and emphasised by the arch of her eyebrows,

giving a faintly interrogative expression to her face. All this he

noticed. He noticed everything about her, from the fine curling

flame-like edges of her mouth and the flawless rim of her ears, to her

finger-tips and the slope of her small imperious feet. He caught every

inflection of her voice; without looking at her, he was aware of every

turn of her head, every movement of her eyelids; he watched with

furtive interest her way of touching and handling things, of rising

and sitting, of walking and being still. It was a new way, unlike

Poppy's way, or Flossie's way, or the way of any woman he had yet

seen. What struck him most was the intense quiet of her presence; it

was this that made his own so noisy and obtrusive.

And yet, she didn't, she really didn't appear to notice it. She might

have been unaware that there was any such person as Mr. Savage Keith

Rickman in the room. He wondered how on earth she achieved that serene

unconsciousness; he came to the conclusion that it was not her own

achievement at all, but the achievement of her race. Theirs too that

something subtly imperious in her bearing, which seemed not so much

the attitude of her mind as the way her head was set on her shoulders.

He could not say that she betrayed any sense of his social

inferiority, unless it were in a certain courtesy which he gathered to

be rather more finished than any she would have shown to a man of her

own class.

It was not only finished, it was final. The thing was so perfect in

itself that obviously it could lead no further. She would say in her

exquisite voice, "Would you mind taking these five volumes back to

your shelf?" or, "I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you tell me

whether this is the original binding?" Under no circumstances could he

imagine himself replying, "I wouldn't mind taking fifty volumes," or

"I like being interrupted." All this was a complete inversion of the

rules that Keith Rickman was acquainted with as governing polite

intercourse between the sexes, and he found it extremely

disconcerting. It was as if some fine but untransparent veil had been

hung between him and her, dividing them more effectually than a

barricade.

The wonder, which grew with the morning, was not so much in the things

she said as in the things she didn't say. Her powers of reservation

seemed to Rickman little short of miraculous. Until yesterday he had

never met a woman who did not, by some look or tone or movement of her

body, reveal what she was thinking about him. Whatever Miss Harden

thought about him she kept it to herself. Unfortunately the same high

degree of reticence was expected from him, and to Keith Rickman, when

not restrained by excess of shyness, reticence came hard. It was apt

to break down when a severe strain was put on it, as had been the case

that morning. And it was appointed that the same thing should happen

to him this afternoon.

As far as he could remember it happened in this way. He was busy

getting the Greek dramatists into their places, an enterprise which

frequently took him to her end of the room where Sir Joseph had

established his classical library. He was sitting on the top of the

steps, when she approached him carrying six vellum bound volumes in

her arms, Sir Joseph's edition of Euripides of which the notes

exceeded the text. He dismounted and took the books from her, turning

very red as he did so.

"You should let me do all the carrying. These books are too heavy for

you."

"Thank you, I think they ought to go with the others, on this shelf."

He did not answer all at once. He was absorbed in the Euripides. It

was an _édition de luxe_, the Greek text exquisitely printed from a

fount of semi-uncial type, the special glory of the Harden Classics.

He exclaimed, "What magnificent type!"

She smiled.

"It's rare too. I've never seen any other specimen--in modern

printing."

"There is no other specimen," said she.

"Yes, there is. One book at least, printed, I think, in Germany."

"Is there? It was set up from a new fount specially made for this

edition. I always supposed my grandfather invented it."

"Oh no, he couldn't have done that. He may have adapted it. In fact,

he must have adapted it."

This young man had set aside a cherished tradition, as lightly as if

he were blowing the dust off the leaves. She was interested.

"How can you tell that?"

"Oh, I know. It's very like a manuscript in the British Museum."

"What manuscript?"

"The Greek text of the Complutensian Polyglot." (He could not help

saying to himself, 'That ought to fetch her!') "But it doesn't follow

that it's the same type. Whatever it is, it's very beautiful."

"It's easier to read, too, than the ordinary kind."

He was still turning over the pages, handling the book as a lover

handles the thing he loves. The very touch of the vellum thrilled him

with an almost sensual rapture. Here and there a line flashed from a

chorus and lured him deeper into the text. His impulse was still to

exclaim, but a finer instinct taught him to suppress his scholarly

emotion. Looking up as she spoke he saw her eyes fixed on him with a

curious sympathy. And as he thought of the possible destiny of the

Euripides he felt guilty as of a treachery towards her in loving the

same book.

"Do you read Euripides?" he asked with naïve wonder.

"Yes."

"And Æschylus and Sophocles and Aristoph--?" Mr. Rickman became

embarrassed as he recalled certain curious passages, and in his

embarrassment he rushed upon his doom--"and--and 'Omer?"

It was a breakdown unparalleled in his history. Never since his

childhood had he neglected the aspirate in Homer. A flush made

manifest his agony. He frowned, and gazed at her steadily, as if he

defied her to judge him by that lapse.

"Yes," said the lady; but she was not thinking of Homer.

"By Jove," he murmured pensively. His eyes turned from her and

devoured the text. He was torn between abject admiration of the lady

and of the book.

"Which do you like best?" he asked suddenly. Æschylus or Sophocles?

But it's an absurd question."

"Why absurd?"

"Because they're so different."

"Are they?" To tell the truth she was not thinking of them any more

than she had been thinking of Homer.

He became perfectly hectic with excitement. "Rather! Can't you see the

difference? Sophocles carved his tragedies. He carved them in ivory,

polished them up, back and front, till you can't see the marks of the

chisel. And Æschylus jabbed his out of the naked granite where it

stood, and left them there with the sea at their feet, and the mist

round their heads, and the fire at their hearts."

"But--but he left the edges a little rough."

"He did. God leaves them so sometimes when he's making a big thing."

Something like a faint ripple of light passed over her face under the

obscuring veil it wore for him.

"But Sophocles is perfect," said she. She was not thinking of

Sophocles one bit; she was thinking that when God made Mr. Rickman he

had left the edges rough, and wondering whether it was possible that

he had made "a big thing."

"Oh yes, he's perfect." He began to quote softly and fluently, to her

uttermost surprise. His English was at times a thing to shudder at,

but his Greek was irreproachable, perfect in its modulation and its

flow. Freed from all flaws of accent, the musical quality of his voice

declared itself indubitably, marvellously pure.

The veil lifted. Her smile was a flash of intelligence, the sexless,

impersonal intelligence of the scholar. This maker of catalogues, with

the tripping tongue that Greek made golden, he had touched the

electric chain that linked them under the deep, under the social gulf.

"Did you ever hear such a chorus? Pure liquid gold, every line of it.

Still, you can read Sophocles with your hair on. I should have thought

most worn--most ladies would like Euripides best?"

"Why? Because they understand him best?"

"No. Because he understood them best."

"Did he understand them? Euripides," said the young lady with

decision, "was a decadent."

"Was he? How about the _Bacchæ_? Of course, it's worth all the rest of

his plays put together; they're not in the same street with it. It's a

thing to dream about, to go mad about."

"My grandfather says it's not Euripidean." "Good Lord! How do we know

it isn't the most Euripidean of the lot?"

"Well, it stands alone, doesn't it?"

"Yes. And he stands with it."

"Does he? My grandfather was judging him by his average."

"His average? Oh, I say, you know, you could reduce some very great

poets to mediocrity by striking their average. Wouldn't you allow a

man to be at least as great as his greatest achievement?"

"I wonder--"

"Anyhow, those are ripping good notes in that edition."

"They ought to be. They were by a good scholar--his greatest

achievement."

He put down the Harden Euripides; and it struck Lucia that if Sir

Joseph had been there this truthful young man would not have hesitated

to put him down too. She laid her hand on the book with an air of

possession and protection, which was a lesson in tact for the truthful

young man. He leaned up against the bookcase with his hands in his

pockets.

"I say," said he, "I hope you don't mind my talking like this to you?"

"No. Why shouldn't you?"

"Well, it isn't exactly what I'm here for."

That exciting conversation had lasted barely fifteen minutes; but it

had set him for the time being at his ease. He had at any rate proved

himself a scholar, and he was so far happier. He felt that he was

beginning to get on with Miss Harden, to see a little way across the

gulf, discerning the outlines of the further shore where that high

lady walked unveiled.

Then suddenly, owing to a most humiliating incident, the gulf yawned

again.

It was five o'clock, and he was left alone in the company of a

fascinating little tea-table, laid, as if for a guest, with fine white

linen, silk embroidered, with early Georgian silver and old china. It

was laid for him, that little tea-table. He had delayed a little

before beginning his repast, and it happened that when Miss Harden

appeared again she found him holding a tea-cup to his lips with one

hand, while the other groped in a dish of cream cakes, abstractedly,

and without the guidance of a selective eye. Both eyes indeed were

gazing dreamily over the rim of the tea-cup at her empty chair. He was

all right; so why, oh why did he turn brick-red and dash his cup down

and draw back his innocent hand? That was what he had seen the errand

boy at Rickman's do, when he caught him eating lunch in a dark

passage. He always had compassion on that poor pariah and left him to

finish his meal in privacy; and with the same delicacy Miss Harden,

perceiving his agony, withdrew. He was aware that the incident had

marked him.

He stood exactly where he stood before. Expert knowledge was nothing.

Mere conversational dexterity was nothing. He could talk to her about

Euripides and Sophocles till all was blue; he could not blow his nose

before her, or eat and drink before her, like a gentleman, without

shame and fear.

They talked no more that evening.

CHAPTER XVI

At seven he again refused Miss Harden's hospitality and withdrew to

his hotel. He was to return before nine to let her know his decision,

and as yet he had done nothing towards thinking it out.

A letter had come for him by the evening post. It had been forwarded

from his rooms and ran thus.

"My dear Rickets:

"I haven't forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn

up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne.

It's going to be awfully select.

"Ever your own and nobody else's,

"Poppy Grace.

"P.S.--How is your poor head?"

There are many ways of being kind and that was Poppy's way. She wanted

to tell him not to be cut up about Wednesday night; that, whatever

Dicky Pilkington thought of his pretensions, she still reckoned him in

the number of the awfully select. And lest he should have deeper

grounds for uneasiness her postscript hinted in the most delicate

manner possible that she had not taken him seriously, attributing his

utterances to their true cause. And yet she was his own and nobody

else's. She was a good sort, Poppy, taking her all round.

He tried to think about Poppy and found it difficult. His mind

wandered; not into the realms of fancy, but into paths strange and

humiliating for a scholar and a poet. He caught himself murmuring,

"Harmouth--Harcombe--Homer--Harden." He had got them all right. He

never dreamed of--of dropping them when he wasn't excited. It was

only in the beaten tracks where his father had gone before him that he

was apt to slide. He was triumphant over Harmouth where he might have

tripped over Hammersmith. Homer and Hesiod were as safe with him as

with Horace Jewdwine. (He couldn't think how he had managed to come to

grief over Homer just now. It was nerves, or luck, or pure accident,

the sort of thing that might have happened to anybody.) Thank Heaven,

his tongue was almost virgin to the aitch in Harden.

Harden--Lucia Harden. He knew her name and how to pronounce it; for he

had seen it written in the fly-leaf of a book, and heard it spoken by

the footman who called her Miss Loocher. This he took to be a

corruption of the Italian form.

Here he again tried to evoke a vivid image of Poppy; but without

success. And then he remembered that he had still to think it out.

First of all, then, he would eliminate sentiment. Sentiment apart, he

was by no means sure that he would do well to act on the impulse of

the morning and decamp. After all, what _was_ he sure of? Was he sure

that Sir Frederick Harden's affairs, including his library, were

involved beyond redemption? Put it that there was an off-chance of Sir

Frederick's financial recovery.

From the bare, uninteresting, financial point of view that event would

entail some regrettable consequences for himself. He had been

extremely rash. He had undertaken to accomplish three weeks' expert

work to the value of fifty pounds for which he had charged fifteen, an

estimate that at Rickman's would have been considered ridiculous for a

man's bare time. He had not so much as mentioned his fare; he had

refused board and lodging; and on the most sanguine computation his

fees would only cover his expenses by about five pounds. The

difference between fifteen pounds and fifty would have to be refunded

out of his own private pocket. When it came to settling accounts with

Rickman's his position would be, to say the least of it, embarrassing.

It was difficult to unravel the mental process that had led him into

it; but it was not the first time that these luxurious subtleties of

conscience had caused him to run short of ready money. It was only

another of those innumerable occasions when he and his father failed

to see face to face, and when he had had to pay for the pleasure of

supporting a fantastic personal view. Only the view in this case was

so hideously complicated and--and exaggerated. And this time in order

to clear himself he would be compelled to borrow again from Dicky

Pilkington. There was no other way. No sooner did Sir Frederick's head

appear rising above water than he saw his own hopelessly submerged.

Nevertheless it was this prospect that he found himself contemplating

with all the ardour of desire. It justified not only his presence in

the Harden Library, but Miss Harden's presence as his collaborator.

With all its unpleasantness it was infinitely preferable to the other

alternative. He let his mind dwell on it until the off-chance began to

look like an absolute certainty.

Put it then that Sir Frederick recovered. In this case the Hardens

scored. Since he had charged Miss Harden fifteen where he was entitled

to fifty, the best part of his labour might be considered a free gift

to the lady. What was more, in the matter of commission, he stood to

lose a very considerable sum. Put it that the chances were even, and

the whole business resolved itself into a game of pitch and toss.

Heads, Miss Harden lost; tails, she won; and he wasn't responsible for

the tossing.

But put it that Sir Frederick did not recover. Then he, Keith Rickman,

was in a position most unpleasant for himself; but he could not make

things a bit pleasanter for Miss Harden by wriggling out of it. The

library would be sold whether he stayed there or not; and by staying

he might possibly protect her interests in the sale. It wasn't a nice

thing to have to be keeping his eye all the time on the Aldine Plato

and the Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde;

but he would only be doing what must be done by somebody in any case.

Conclusion; however unpleasant for him to be the agent for the sale,

it would be safer for Miss Harden.

And how about those confounded profits, represented by his commission?

That was easily settled. He would have nothing to do with the filthy

things. He wouldn't touch his commission with the end of the poker.

Unfortunately he would never be able to explain all this to her, and

Heaven only knew what she would think of him when it all came out in

the long-run, as it was bound to come. Well, it wouldn't matter what

she thought of him so long as he knew that his hands were clean.

Rickman's' hands might not be so presentable, but they were not human

hands as his were; they were the iron, irresponsible hands of a

machine.

There remained his arrangements for the Bank holiday. They seemed to

have been made so long ago that they hardly counted. Still, there was

that engagement to Poppy Grace, and he had promised to take poor

Flossie to the Hippodrome. Poor Flossie would be disappointed if he

did not take her to the Hippodrome. At the moment Flossie's

disappointment presented itself as considerably more vital than his

own.

To-morrow, then, being Saturday, he would go up to town; and on Monday

he would return to his ambiguous post.

He had thought it out.

CHAPTER XVII

"There's a lot of rot," said Mr. Rickman, "talked about Greek tragedy.

But really, if you come to think of it, it's only in Sophocles you get

the tragedy of Fate. There isn't any such thing in Æschylus, you

know."

He had gone up to acquaint Miss Harden with his decision and had been

led off into this hopeful track by the seductions that still lurked in

the Euripides.

"There's Nemesis, which is the same thing," said she.

"Not at all the same thing. Nemesis is simply the horrid jealousy of

the gods; and the responsibility lies with the person who provokes

them, whether it's Prometheus, or Agamemnon, or Agamemnon's great

great grandfather. It's the tragedy of human responsibility, the most

brutal tragedy of all. All these people are crumpled up with it, they

go about tearing their hair over it, and howling out [Greek: drasanti

pathein]. There isn't any Fate in that, you know. Is there?"

He did not wait for an answer.

"In Sophocles now, it's all the other way about. His people aren't

responsible in the least. They're just a thundering lot of lunatics.

They go knocking their poor heads against the divine law, and trying

to see which is the hardest, till they end by breaking both. There's

no question of paying for the damage. It's pure Fate."

"Well--and Euripides?"

"Oh, Euripides goes on another tack altogether. There aren't any laws

to break, yet everybody's miserable all round, and nobody's

responsible. It's [Greek: tô pathonti pathein]. They suffer because

they suffer, and there's an end of it. And it's the end of Fate in

Greek tragedy. I know this isn't the orthodox view of it."

He paused, a little out of breath, for he had talked as usual against

time, leaving behind him a luminous trail of ideas struck out

furiously as he rushed along. His excitement was of the strong-winged

kind that carried him triumphantly over all obstacles, even the

barrier of the aitch.

Was she listening?

She was; but as she listened she looked down, and her fingers played

with the slender gold chain that went twice round her throat and fell

among the laces of her gown. On her mouth there was the same smile he

had seen when he first saw her; he took it for a smile of innermost

amusement. It didn't lurk; there was nothing underhand about it. It

hovered, delicately poised for flight.

"Euripides," she said, "had the deeper insight, then. He knew that

character is destiny."

"That character is destiny? Whose character? For all I know your

character may be my destiny."

It was one of those unconsidered speeches, flashed out in the heat of

argument, which nevertheless, once uttered are felt to be terrific and

momentous. He wondered how Miss Harden would take it. She took it (as

she seemed to take most things) calmly.

"No character could have any power over you except through your own."

"Perhaps not. All the same, you are not me, you are something outside.

You would be my destiny."

He paused again. Personalities were pitfalls which he must avoid. No

such danger existed for the lady; she simply ignored it; her mind

never touched those deeper issues of the discussion where his

floundered, perilously immersed. Still she was not unwilling to pursue

the theme.

"It all depends," said she, "on what you mean by destiny."

"Well, say I mean the end, the end I'm moving towards, the end I

ultimately arrive at--"

"Surely that depends on your character, your character, of course, as

a whole."

"It may or mayn't. It may depend on what I eat or don't eat for

dinner, on the paper I take in or the pattern of my waistcoat. And the

end may be utterly repellent to my character as a whole. Say I end by

adopting an unsuitable profession. Is that my character or my

destiny?"

"Your character, I think, or you wouldn't have adopted it."

"H'm. Supposing it adopts me?"

"It couldn't--against your will."

"No. But my will in this instance might not be the expression of my

character as a whole. Why, I may be doing violence to my character as

a whole by--by the unique absurdity that dishes me. That's destiny, if

you like, but it's not character--not my character, anyhow."

Personalities again. Whither could he flee from their presence? Even

the frigid realm of abstractions was shaken by the beating of his own

passionate heart. Her eyes had the allurements of the confessional; he

hovered, fascinated, round the holy precincts, for ever on the brink

of revelation. It was ungovernable, this tendency to talk about

himself. In another minute--But no, most decidedly that was not what

he was there for.

If it came to that, what _was_ he there for? It was so incredible that

he should be there at all. And yet there he was going to stay, for

three weeks, and more. He had come to tell her so.

Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone

conclusion.

"It is settled, then?" said she, "you will have no more scruples?"

"None."

"There's only one thing. I must ask you not to give anybody any

information about the library. We don't want to be bothered with

dealers and collectors. Some of the books are so valuable that we

should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known. Can you

keep the secret?"

His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan

Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. But he pledged

himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy. Why not? He was

a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other

dealers in the dark. It was an entirely sensible and business-like

pledge. And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to

something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable. He

had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman's. If

it were Miss Harden's interest that he should defend that secret from

his own father, he would have to defend it. He had given his word; and

for the life of him he could not tell why.

In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments

his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and

unforeseen. He had said to her, "Your character may be my destiny."

And perhaps it was. He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his

decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from

outside himself, rather than from within. And yet, as he sat there

feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogue

_raisonné_, he decided further that he would not go away at all.

He would not go back to town to-morrow. He could not afford the time.

He must and would finish that catalogue _raisonné_ by the

twenty-seventh. He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden.

Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was

none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more. For he and she

could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in

an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic

assumption that the library was hers. Such a pledge would, he

imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden

met face to face. And on him it was conceivably more binding than the

promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or to

intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss

Poppy Grace. Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more

trivial and the grosser claim. His word to Miss Harden was one of

those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of

the actual. To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the

sacrifice of the great three days.

He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town

by the river path at the bottom of the garden. Half-way to the river

he stopped and looked back. The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope

of glimmering lawn. The house loomed in the background, a grey mass

with blurred outlines. From a window open in the east wing he could

hear the sound of a piano.

He stood still and listened. All around was the tender, indescribable

Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt

its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue

transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and

sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night,

dividing the darkness. It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult,

rhythmic and controlled. What was she playing? If he stayed till

midnight he must hear it through. Night sheltered him, and he drew

nearer lest he should lose a note. He stretched himself on the lawn,

and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the

stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata

Appassionata.

It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not

tell him why he was there and what he was there for.

And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking

up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn.

He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every

person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life

that he knew not and that knew not him.

"Lucia--Lucia!" Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition

standing in the south window. "Lu-chee-a!--" it pleaded. "You can't

say you're out when I can see perfectly well that you're in."

"Go away Kitty, I'm busy."

"You've no business to be busy at five o'clock in the afternoon."

Miss Kitty Palliser's body was outside the window, but her head,

crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was

already within the room.

"I'm dying of thirst," she said; "take me in and be kind to me and

give me tea."

Lucia rose and went to the window, reluctant but resigned. Scraps of

their conversation floated down to Mr. Rickman's end of the room.

"Yes, you may well look at my hat."

"I wasn't looking at it, I was looking through it."

"Well, if you can see through my hat, Lucia, you can see through me.

What do you think of it?"

"Of the hat? Oh, the hat is a poem."

"Isn't it? Did you ever see anything so inspired, so impassioned?"

"Inspired, but--don't you think--just a little, a little meaningless?"

"Meaningless? It's _packed_ with meaning."

"I should like to know what it means."

"If it means nothing else it means that I've been going to and fro

the whole blessed afternoon, paying calls in Harmouth for my sins."

"Poor Kitty."

"The last three times I paid calls in Harmouth," said poor Kitty, "I

sported a cycling skirt, the blousiest of blouses, and a tam-o'shanter

over my left ear. Of course everybody was in. So I thought if I went

like this--brand new frock--swagger hat--white gloves--that everybody

would be out."

"And were they?"

"No. Just like my luck--they were all--all in!"

"And yet you have the audacity to come here and ask for tea?"

"For Goodness' sake, don't talk of tea."

"I thought you were so thirsty."

"So I am. I thirst for amusement."

"Kitty! You've been amusing yourself all afternoon--at other people's

expense."

"Yes. It's cheap--awfully cheap, but fatiguing. I don't want to amuse

myself; I want to be amused."

Mr. Rickman took a longer look at the brilliant apparition.

Now, at a little distance, Miss Palliser passed as merely an ordinary

specimen of a brilliant but conventional type. This effect was an

illusion produced by her irreproachably correct attire. As she drew

nearer it became apparent that convention could never have had very

much to do with her. Tailor and milliner were responsible for the

general correctness of Miss Palliser's appearance, Miss Palliser

herself for the riot and confusion of the details. Her coat, flung

open, displayed a tangle of laces disposed after her own fancy. Her

skirts, so flawless and sedate, swept as if inspired by the storm of

her long-legged impetuous stride. Under her too, too fashionable hat

her brown hair was twisted in a way entirely her own; and fashion had

left untouched the wild originality of her face. Bumpy brows, jutting

eyebrows, and nose long in the bridge, wide in the nostril, tilted in

a gentle gradient; a wide full-lipped nervous mouth, and no chin to

speak of. A thin face lit by restless greenish eyes; stag-like,

dog-like, humorous and alert.

Miss Palliser sent the gaze of those eyes round the room. The hungry,

Satanic humour in them roved, seeking what it might devour. It fell

upon Mr. Rickman.

"What have you got there?"

Miss Harden's reply was inaudible.

"Let me in. I want to look at it."

"Don't, Kitty." Apparently an explanation followed from Miss Harden.

It also was inaudible.

"Lu-_chee_-a.! Where is Miss Roots, B.A.?"

"Please, _please_, Kitty. Do go into the morning-room."

This painful scene was cut short by Robert, who announced that tea was

served.

"Oh joy!" said Miss Palliser, and disappeared.

Lucia, following, found her examining the tea-tray.

"Only two cups," said Miss Palliser. "Isn't it going to get any tea

then?"

"Isn't what going to get any tea?"

"It. The man thing you keep in there."

"Yes. But it doesn't get it here."

"I think you might ask it in. It might amuse me."

Lucia ignored the suggestion.

"I haven't talked," said Miss Palliser, "to a man thing for ages."

"It hasn't come to be talked to. It's much too busy."

"Mayn't it come in, just for a treat?"

Lucia shook her head.

"What's it like? Is it nice to look at?"

"No--yes--no."

"What? Haven't you made up your mind yet?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"Lucia, you're a perfect dog in the manger. You don't care a rap about

the creature yourself, and yet you refuse to share it with your

friend. I put it to you. Here we are, you and I, living in a howling

wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, where even curates are at a

premium--is it right, is it fair of you, to have a presentable

man-thing in the house and to keep it to yourself?"

"Well--you see, it--it isn't so very presentable."

"Rubbish, I saw it. It looked perfectly all right."

"That," said Lucia, "is illusion. You haven't heard it speak."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing--nothing. Only it isn't exactly what you'd call a gentleman."

"Oh. Well, I think you might have told me that before."

"I've been trying to tell you."

Kitty reflected a moment. "So it's making a catalogue, is it? Whose

bright idea is that?"

"It was grandpapa's. It's mine now." She did not mention that it was

also Horace Jewdwine's.

"And what will your little papa say?"

"He won't say anything. He never does. The library's mine--mine to do

as I like with."

"You've broken the spell. Isn't there some weird legend about women

never inheriting it?"

"Well, they never have. I shall be the first."

"I say, if I were you, I should feel a little creepy."

"I do--sometimes. That's one reason why I want to get this thing made

in my lifetime, before I go away."

"Good gracious. You're not going away to die."

"I don't know what I'm going away to do. Anyhow, the catalogue will be

done. All ready for Horace when he steps into my shoes."

"Unless--happy thought--you marry him. That, I suppose, is _another_

pair of shoes?"

There was a pause, during which Miss Palliser gazed thoughtfully at

her friend.

"What have you been doing to yourself? You look most awfully tired."

"I've been sitting up rather late the last few nights, cataloguing."

"What on earth did you do that for?"

"Because I want to finish by the twenty-seventh."

There was a pause while Miss Palliser ate tea-cake.

"Is Horace coming down before you go?"

"No. He's too busy. Besides, he never comes when father isn't here."

"Oh dear no, he doesn't think it proper. It's odd," said Miss

Palliser, looking down at her tea-cake with an air of profound

philosophic reflection. "You can't ask your cousin to stay with you,

because it's improper; but it isn't improper to sit up making

catalogues with young Mr. Thing-um-a-jig till all hours of the night."

"Why should it be improper?"

"For Goodness' sake don't ask me. How should _I_ know? Don't you find

yourself wishing sometimes that Mr. Thing-um-a-jig was Mr. Jewdwine?"

"More tea, Kitty?"

"Rather! I'm going into the library to choose a book when I've

finished my tea. I shall take the opportunity of observing for myself

whether Mr.--Mr.--"

"Mr. Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord deliver us! Whether Mr. Savage Keith Rickman is a proper

person for you to know. That reminds me. Dearest, do you know what

they talk about in Harmouth? They talk about _you_. Conversation

jiggers round you like a silly moth round a candle. Would you like to

know what Harmouth thinks of you?"

"No. I haven't the smallest curiosity."

"I shall tell you all the same, because it's good for you to see

yourself as others see you. They say, dear, that you do put on such a

thundering lot of side. They say that attitude is absurd in one so

young. They say you ought to marry, that if you don't marry you can't

possibly hope to keep it up, and they say you never will marry if you

continue to be so exclusive. Exclusive was the word. But before I left

they'd married you to Mr. Jewdwine. You see dear, you're so exclusive

that you're bound to marry into your own family, no other family being

good enough."

"It's certainly a new light on my character."

"I ought to tell you that Mrs. Crampton takes a charitable view. She

says she doesn't believe you really mean it, dear, she thinks that you

are only very, _very_ shy. She has heard _so_ much about you, and is

_dying_ to know you. Don't be frightened, Lucia, I was most discreet."

"How did you show your discretion?"

"I told her not to die. I tried to persuade her that she wouldn't love

you so much if she did know you."

"Kitty, that wasn't very kind."

"It was the kindest thing I could think of. It must soothe her to

feel that this exclusiveness doesn't imply any reflection on her

social position, but merely a weird unaccountable dislike. How is it

that some people can't understand that your social position is like

your digestion or the nose on your face, you're never aware of either,

unless there's something wrong with it."

"Kitty, you're not in a nice mood this afternoon."

"I know I'm not. I've been in Harmouth. Lucy, there are moments when I

loathe my fellow-creatures."

"Poor things. Whatever have they been doing now?"

"Oh, I don't know. The same old thing. They make my life a burden to

me?"

"But how?"

"They're always bothering me, always trying to get at you through me.

They're always asking me to tea to meet people in the hope that I'll

ask them back to meet you. I'm worn out with keeping them off you.

Some day all Harmouth will come bursting into your drawing-room over

my prostrate form, flattened out upon the door-mat."

"Never mind."

"I wouldn't, sweetheart, if they really cared about you. But they

don't. If you lost your money and your social position to-morrow they

wouldn't care a rap. That's why I hate them."

"Why do you visit them if you hate them?"

"Because, as I told you, I hunger and thirst for amusement, and they

do amuse me when they don't make me ill."

"Dear Kitty, I'm sure they're nicer than you think. Most people are,

you know."

"If you think so, why don't _you_ visit them?" snapped Kitty.

"I would, if--"

"If they ceased to be amusing; if they broke their legs or lost their

money, or if they got paralytic strokes, or something. You'd visit

them in their affliction, but not in the ordinary playful

circumstances of life. That's because you're an angel. _I_," said Miss

Palliser sententiously, "am not. Why do I always come to you when I

feel most hopelessly the other thing?"

Lucia said something that had a very soothing effect; it sounded like

"Skittles!" but the word was "Kitti-kin!"

"Lucy, I shouldn't be such a bad sort if I lived with you. I've been

here exactly twenty minutes, and I've laid in enough goodness to last

me for a week. And now," said Miss Palliser with decision, "I'm

going."

Lucia looked up in some trepidation.

"Where are you going to?"

"I am going--to choose that book."

"Oh, Kitty, do be careful."

"I am always careful," said Miss Palliser, "in choosing a book."

In about ten minutes' time she returned. Her chastened mood had

vanished.

"Lucia," said she, "you have an immense regard for that young man."

"How do you know that I have an immense regard for him?"

"I suppose you expect me to say that I can tell by your manner. I

can't. Your manner is perfection. It's by Robert's manner that I

judged. Robert's manner is not perfection; for a footman, you know,

it's a shade too eager, too emotional."

"That, to my mind, is the charm of Robert."

"Still, there are drawbacks. A footman's face ought not to betray the

feelings of his mistress. That's how I knew that Mabel Flosser was

cooling off--by the increasing frostiness of Blundell. I shall feel

sure of you, Lucia, as long as Robert continues to struggle against

his fascinating smile. Take my advice--if you should ever cherish a

secret passion, get rid of Robert, for, sure as fate, he'll give you

away. Perhaps," she added meditatively, it _was_ a little mean of me."

"Kitty, what have you been up to?"

"It was your fault. You shouldn't be so mysterious. Wishing to

ascertain your real opinion of Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, I watched

Robert as he was bringing in his tea."

"I hope he was properly attentive."

"Attentive isn't the word for it. He may have felt that my eye was

upon him, and so got flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the

thing. He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him. That

won't do, you know. He'll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the

Savage Keith. Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant."

"He is, as it happens, excessively observant."

"So I found out. I found out all sorts of things."

"What things?"

"Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious. He doesn't waste

time. He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other;

which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous

so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my

eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some

horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance.

Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?"

"What a shame."

"Yes. I'm afraid he'll have to do a little re-copying."

"Oh, Kitty, why couldn't you leave the poor thing in peace?"

"There wasn't any peace to leave him in. Really, you'd have thought

that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the

Act. He couldn't have been more excited if I'd caught him in his bath.

Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty."

"Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you. You might have had the

decency to go away."

"There wouldn't have been any decency in going away. Flight would have

argued that I shared the theory of his guilt. I stayed where I was for

two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away--to the other end

of the room."

"You should have gone away altogether."

"Why? The library is big enough for two. It's so big that you could

take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of

it at the other. I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even

hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him

at his."

"In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly

could."

"I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything. I did

it on purpose. I am nothing if not subtle. _You_ would have crushed

him with a delicate and ladylike retreat; _I_ left him as happy as he

could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue."

"And then?"

"Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go. But before I went I

made another discovery. You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to

look at. Adieu, my exclusive one."

CHAPTER XIX

The chronicler who recorded that no woman had ever inherited the

Harden Library contented himself with the bare statement of the fact.

It was not his business to search into its causes, which belonged to

the obscurer regions of psychology. Sir Joseph Harden and those

book-lovers who went before him had the incurable defects of their

qualities. Hereditary instinct, working in them with a force as of

some blind fatality, drove too many of them to espouse their

opposites. Their wives were not expected to do anything noteworthy,

beyond sitting for their portraits to the masters of their day;

though, as a matter of fact, many of them contrived to achieve a far

less enviable distinction. The portraits have immortalized their faces

and their temperaments. Ladies of lax fibre, with shining lips and

hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads,

they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious

lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old

scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable

element in things, or that the library had been handed down from

father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by

devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its

men should be scholars and its women beauties, occasionally frail.

And scholarship, in obedience to the family tradition, ran superbly in

the male line for ten generations, when it encountered an insuperable

obstacle in the temperament of Sir Frederick. Then came Sir

Frederick's daughter, and between them they made short work of the

family tradition. Sir Frederick had appropriated the features of one

of his great grandmothers, her auburn hair, her side-long eyes, her

fawn-like, tilted lip, her perfect ease of manners and of morals. By a

still more perverse hereditary freak the Harden intellect which had

lapsed in Sir Frederick appeared again in his daughter, not in its

well-known austere and colourless form, but with a certain brilliance

and passion, a touch of purely feminine uncertainty and charm.

The Harden intellect had changed its sex. It was Horace Jewdwine who

had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable

discoveries. Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a

Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but

voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of

Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition. Now in the

opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a

contradiction in terms. Having engaged the best masters in the county,

whose fees together with their fares (second class from Exeter to

Harmouth) he had himself punctually paid, he had declined to take any

further interest in his grand-daughter. He had no objection to her

taking up music, a study which, being no musician, he was unable to

regard as in any sense intellectual. He supported his view by frequent

allusions to the brainlessness of song-birds; in fact, he had been

always a little bitter on the subject, having before his eyes the

flagrant instance of his son Frederick.

Frederick was no scholar. He despised his forefathers as a race of

pedants, and boasted that he never opened a book, barring the book of

life, in which he flattered himself he could have stood a very stiff

examination. He used a certain unbowdlerized edition which he was

careful to conceal from the ladies of his family. Before he was forty

Frederick had fiddled away the family tradition, and not only the

family tradition, but the family splendour and the family credit. When

Lucia at seventeen was studying the classics under Horace Jewdwine,

Frederick's debts came rolling in; at about the same period old Sir

Joseph's health showed signs of failing, and Frederick took to raising

money on his expectations. He had just five years to do it in.

It was then that Lucia first began to notice a change in her

grandfather's manner towards her. Sometimes she would catch his eyes

fixed on her with a curious, scrutinizing gaze, and once or twice she

thought she detected in them a profound sadness. Whenever at these

moments they happened to meet her eyes they were immediately averted.

Sir Joseph had not been given to betraying emotion, save only on

points of scholarship, and it was evident that he had something on his

mind.

What he had on his mind was the thought that at the rate Frederick was

living he might at any moment cease to live, and then what would

become of Lucia? And what would become of the Harden Library? What of

the family tradition? By much pondering on the consequences of

Frederick's decease Sir Joseph had considerably hastened his own.

Lucia knew nothing of all this. She was only aware that her

grandfather had sent for Horace Jewdwine on his death-bed. What had

passed between them remained known only to Horace. But part of a sum

of money left by Sir Joseph's will towards the founding of a Harden

scholarship was transferred by a codicil to Lucia for her education.

The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady,

Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when

Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he

pronounced her the worst educated young woman in Europe. Of all that

Miss Roots had so laboriously imparted to her she retained, not a

smattering, but a masterly selection. And now at four and twenty she

had what is called a beautiful view of life; with that exciting book

which her father kept so sedulously out of her reach she was

acquainted as it were through anthologies and translations. For

anything Lucia knew to the contrary, life might be all bursts of lyric

rapture and noble sequences of selected prose. She was even in danger

of trusting too much to her own inspired version of certain passages.

But anthologies are not always representative, and nobody knew better

than Lucia that the best translations sometimes fail to give the

spirit of the original.

Something of this spirit she caught from her father's brilliant and

disturbing presence. Lucia adored her father. He brought into her life

an element of uncertainty and freedom that saved it from the tyranny

of books. It was a perpetual coming and going. A dozen times in a year

Sir Frederick hurled himself from Harmouth to London, from London to

the Continent, and from the Continent back again to Harmouth, to

recruit. The very transience of his appearances and Lucia's ignorance

of all that lay behind them preserved her in her attitude of

adoration.

Sir Frederick took precious good care that it should not be disturbed

by the familiarity born of frequent intercourse, that she should see

him only in his moods of unnatural sobriety. And as he left Lucia to

the library so much, it was to be supposed that, in defiance of the

family tradition, he would leave the library to Lucia. But after all

Sir Frederick had some respect for the family tradition. When it

seemed only too likely that a woman would inherit the Harden Library,

he stepped in and saved it from that supreme disgrace by the happy

expedient of a bill of sale. Otherwise his natural inclination would

have been to leave it to his daughter, for whom he had more or less

affection, rather than to his nephew, for whom he had none.

As it happened, it was Horace Jewdwine who was responsible for the

labour which Lucia had so impetuously undertaken. Lucia was aware that

her grandfather's desire had been to rearrange and catalogue the

library. When she came of age and found herself mistress of a tiny

income (derived from capital left by her mother, carefully tied up to

keep it from Sir Frederick, and enlarged by regular accumulations at

compound interest) her first idea was to carry out her grandfather's

wishes; but it was not until Horace Jewdwine's last visit that her

idea became a determination. Horace had been strolling round the

library, turning over the books, not exactly with the covetous eye of

the heir apparent, but with that peculiar air of appropriation which

he affected in all matters of the intellect. In that mood Lucia had

found him irritating, and it had appeared that Horace had been

irritated, too. He had always felt a little sore about the library;

not that he really wanted it himself, but that he hated to see it in

the possession of such a rank barbarian as his uncle Frederick. A

person who, if his life depended on it, could not have told an Aldine

from an Elzevir. A person, incapable not only of appreciating valuable

books, but of taking ordinary decent care of them. There were gaps on

the shelves, a thing that he hated to see. Lucia, too; Lucia would

take books out by tens and twenties at a time and leave them lying all

over the house, and they would be stuck in again anywhere and anyhow.

No sort of method in their arrangement. No blinds, no glass doors to

protect them. He had pointed this out to Lucia, suggesting that it was

not a good thing to let too much dust accumulate on the tops of books,

neither was it altogether desirable that a strong south-westerly light

should play upon them all day long. Had she ever noticed how the

bindings were cracking and fading? For all this he seemed to be

blaming Lucia; and this, Lucia tried to persuade herself, was no great

matter; but when he asked for a catalogue, and she calmly told him

that there was none, he became involved in a sentence about a scandal

and a Vandal in which his opinion of his uncle Frederick unmistakably

appeared. He even forgot himself so far as to reflect on the sanity of

the late Master of Lazarus, at which point Lucia had left him to his

reflections.

She had not yet forgiven Horace for his interference that day, nor for

his remark about the scandal and the Vandal. As for his other

observations, they were insufferably rue. Hence her desperate efforts

to set the library in order before she went abroad; hence the secrecy

and haste with which she had applied to Rickman's, without asking

Horace's advice as she naturally would have done; hence, too, her vast

delight at the success of her unassisted scheme. Mr. Rickman was

turning out splendidly. If she had looked all through London she could

not have found a better man.

CHAPTER XX

It was Easter Sunday and Lucia's heart was glad, for she had had a

letter from her father. There never was such a father and there never

were such letters as, once in a blue moon and when the fancy seized

him, he wrote to his adorable Lucy. Generally speaking they were all

about himself and his fiddle, the fiddle that when he was at home he

played from morning to night. But this letter was more exciting. It

was full of all the foolish and delightful things they were to do

together in Cannes, in Venice and in Florence and in Rome. He was

always in one or other of these places, but this was the first time he

had proposed that his adorable Lucy should join him. "You're too young

to see the world," he used to say. "You wouldn't enjoy it, Lucy, you

really wouldn't. The world is simply wasted on any woman under five

and thirty." Lucia was not quite five and twenty. She was not very

strong, and she felt that if she didn't see the world soon she might

not enjoy it very much when she did see it. And it was barely a month

now till the twenty-seventh.

Lucia went singing downstairs and into the library to throw all its

four windows open to the delicious spring, and there, to her amazement

(for it was Sunday), she came upon Mr. Rickman cataloguing hard.

She felt a little pang of self-reproach at the sight of him. There was

something pathetic in his attitude, in his bowed head and spread

elbows, the whole assiduous and devoted figure. How hard he was

working, with what a surprising speed in his slender nervous hands.

She had not meant him to give up the whole of his three days' holiday

to her, and she really could not take his Easter Sunday, poor little

man. So, with that courtesy which was Mr. Rickman's admiration and

despair, she insisted on restoring it to him, and earnestly advised

his spending it in the open air. In the evening he could have the

library to himself, to read or write or rest in; he would, she

thought, be more comfortable there than in the inn. Mr. Rickman

admitted that he would like to have a walk to stretch his legs a bit,

and as she opened the south window she had a back view of him

stretching them across the lawn. He walked as rapidly as he wrote,

holding his head very high in the air. He wore a light grey suit and a

new straw hat with a dull olive green ribbon on it, poor dear. She was

glad that it was a fine day for the hat.

She watched him till the beech-tree hid him from her sight; then she

opened the west windows, and the south wind that she had just let in

tried to rush out again by them, and in its passage it lifted up the

leaves of Mr. Rickman's catalogue and sent them flying. The last of

them, escaping playfully from her grasp, careered across the room and

hid itself under a window curtain. Stooping to recover it, she came

upon a long slip of paper printed on one side. It was signed S.K.R.,

and Savage Keith Rickman was the name she had seen on Mr. Rickman's

card. The headline, _Helen in Leuce_, drew her up with a little shock

of recognition. The title was familiar, so was the motto from

Euripides,

[Greek: su Dios ephus, ô HElena thugatêr,]

and she read,

The wonder and the curse of friend and foe,

She watched the ranks of battle cloud and shine,

And heard, Achilles, that great voice of thine,

That thundered in the trenches far below.

Tears upon tears, woe upon mortal woe,

Follow her feet and funeral fire on fire,

While she, that phantom of the heart's desire,

Flies thither, where all dreams and phantoms go.

Oh Strength unconquerable, Achilles! Thee

She follows far into the shadeless land

Of Leuce, girdled by the gleaming sand,

Amidst the calm of an enchanted sea,

Where, children of the Immortals, hand in hand,

Ye share one golden immortality.

It was a voice from the sad modern world she knew so well, and in

spite of its form (which was a little too neo-classic and conventional

to please her) she felt it to be a cry from the heart of a living man.

That man she had identified with the boy her grandfather had found,

years ago, in a City bookshop. There had been no room for doubt on

that point when she saw him in the flush of his intellectual passion,

bursting so joyously, so preposterously, into Greek. He had,

therefore, already a certain claim on her attention. Besides, he

seemed to be undergoing some incomprehensible struggle which she

conceived to be of a moral nature, and she had been sorry for him on

that account.

But, if he were also--Was it possible that her grandfather's

marvellous boy had grown into her cousin's still more marvellous man?

Horace, too, had made his great discovery in a City shop. _Helen in

Leuce_ and a City shop--it hardly amounted to proof; but, if it did,

what then? Oh then, she was still more profoundly sorry for him. For

then he was a modern poet, which in the best of circumstances is to be

marked for suffering. And to Mr. Rickman circumstances had not been

exactly kind.

A modern poet, was he? One whom the gods torment with inspired and

hopeless passion; a lover of his own "fugitive and yet eternal bride,"

the Helen of Homer, of Æschylus and Euripides, the Helen of Marlowe

and Goethe, the Helen of them all. And for Mr. Rickman, unhappy Mr.

Rickman, perdition lurked darkly in her very name. What, oh what must

it feel like, to be capable of eliding the aitch in "Helen" and yet

divinely and deliriously in love with her? Here Lucia was wrong, for

Mr. Rickman was entirely happy with the aitch in Helen.

She was so sorry for him. But she did not see at the moment what she

could do for him besides being sorry. And yet, if he were Horace's

friend, she must do more. She was aware that she had been sorry for

him chiefly because he was not a gentleman. Well, she had seen men

before who were not gentlemen and she had been very far from feeling

any sort of sorrow for them. But she had never in all her life seen

anything like this inspired young Cockney, with his musical voice and

afflicting accent, a person whose emotions declared themselves

publicly and painfully, whose thoughts came and went as transparently

as the blood in his cheeks, who yet contrived somehow to remain in the

last resort impenetrable.

She could not ignore him. Apart from Horace he had established his

claim; and if he _was_ Horace's friend he had another and a stronger

title to consideration. But was he? She had really no proof.

She wondered whether Mr. Rickman had missed his sonnet. She laid it

almost tenderly in a conspicuous place on his table, and put a bronze

head of Pallas Athene on it to keep it down. Then she wondered again

whether he enjoyed the bookshop, whether he enjoyed making catalogues

_raisonnés_, whether he enjoyed himself generally, and she hoped that

at any rate he would enjoy his Easter Sunday. Poor little man.

Lucia was so happy herself that she wanted Mr. Rickman to be happy

too.

CHAPTER XXI

Mr. Rickman was anything but happy as he set out for his walk that

glorious April morning.

Outside the gate of Court House he stood and looked about him,

uncertain of the way he would go. All ways were open to him, and

finally, avoiding the high road, he climbed up a steep and stony lane

to the great eastern rampart which is Harcombe Hill. Beneath him lay

Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles

into the sea through a barrier of shingle. Two gigantic and flaming

cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet. In any

other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air,

but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a

haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two

huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.

But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first

thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and

apparently capricious versatility. Nature, round about Harmouth, is

never in the same mood for a mile together. The cliffs change their

form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like

blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their

seams. Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods,

pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes

where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day. It is not so much a

landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of

the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on

a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a

beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing;

and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness,

for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he

climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity

he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the

hills and the prone backs of the long ridges are all of one height;

the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that

has no boundary but the sky. The country has revealed its august,

eternal soul. He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves

it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman

whose soul he knows.

Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the

bay. To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia

Harden, had put on a veil. The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to

the valley and the town. Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth,

divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of

meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more

acutely conscious of his misery. He sat down among the furze and

heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit

there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love

makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.

And Nature never turned to a poet a lovelier and more appealing face.

It had rained in the night. From the enfolding blue, sky blue and sea

blue, blue of the aerial hills, the earth flung out her colours, new

washed, radiantly, immaculately pure. Bared to the sea, she flamed

from rose pink to rose red. Only the greater hills and the dark flank

of Muttersmoor waited for their hour, the hour of the ling and the

heather; the valleys and the lower slopes were glad with green. There

was an art in Nature's way; for, lest a joyousness so brimming and so

tender should melt and overflow into mere pathos, it was bounded and

restrained by that solemn and tragic line of Muttersmoor drawn

straight against the sky.

It was the same scene that had troubled him when he first looked at

it, and it troubled him still; not with that thrill of prescient

delight and terror, but with a feeling more mysterious and baffling,

an exquisite and indefinable reproach. He stared, as if he could hope

by staring to capture the meaning of the beautiful tender face; but

beyond that inscrutable reproach it had no meaning for him and no

expression. He had come to a land prophetic of inspiration, where, if

anywhere, he might have hoped to hear the lyric soul of things; and

the lyric soul of things absolutely refused to sing to him. It had

sung loud enough in the streets last Wednesday; it had hymned the

procession of his dreams and the loud tumultuous orgy of his passions;

and why could he not hear it now? For here his senses were satisfied

to the full. Never had Nature's material loveliness been more vividly,

piercingly present to him. The warm air was like a touch, palpable yet

divine. He lay face downwards on the earth and pressed it with his

hands; he smelt the good smell of the grass and young bracken, and the

sweet almond-scented blossom of the furze. And he suffered all the

torment of the lover who possesses the lips and body of his mistress,

and knows that her heart is far from him and that her soul is not for

him.

He felt himself to be severed from the sources of his inspiration;

estranged, profoundly and eternally, from the beauty he desired. And

that conviction, melancholy in itself, was followed by an overpowering

sense of intellectual dissolution, the corruption and decay of the

poetic faculty in him. He was aware, feverishly aware, of a faint

flowing measure, the reverberation of dead songs; of ideas, a

miserable attenuated procession, trailing feebly in the dark of his

brain, which when he tried to grasp them would be gone. They were only

the ghosts of the ideas that he had brought with him from London, that

had died on the journey down. The beauty of this place was devilish

and malign. He looked into Harmouth valley as if it had been a

graveyard. They were all buried down there, his dead dreams and his

dead power, buried without hope of any resurrection. Rickman's genius,

the only thing he genuinely trusted, had forsaken him.

It may be that every poet once in his lifetime has to come to this

Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out

after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani. For Rickman no agony

could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul. He could see

nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it

before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk. His

ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive

them. But this time, though he had not been drinking, he felt that

they had gone for ever, and that all his songs were sung. And over his

head high up in the sky, a lark, a little fiend of a lark, had chosen

that moment for bursting into music. With diabolical ease and

maddening ecstasy, he flung out his perfect and incommunicable song. A

song of joy and mockery and triumph.

He did not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage

Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty. Was it, he wondered,

the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of

the soul? Was he a precocious genius? Had he taken to the immortal

drink too early and too hard? Or was it, as Jewdwine had suggested,

that there were too many Rickmans, and that this poor seventh part of

him had been crushed by the competition of the other six? The horrible

thing was that they would live on for years, eating and getting drunk

and falling in love and buying suits of clothes, while the poet in him

was dead, like Keats, at three and twenty.

Then suddenly, for no reason whatever, a vision of Lucia Harden rose

before him like a light and refused to leave him.

It wrought in him, as he contemplated it, a gradual burning

illumination. He perceived that it was he himself who was responsible

for all this. He perceived the real nature of the things he had

pursued so passionately, the thing he called pleasure, the thing he

called love, and the thing he called his imagination. His notion of

pleasure was getting drunk and making love to Miss Poppy Grace; the

love he made was better described by a stronger and coarser

monosyllable, and he had used his imagination to glorify it. Oh yes,

because he had imagination, because he was a poet, he had not gone

down into the clay-pits and wallowed in the clay; neither had he been

content to dabble in it; he had taken it up in his hands and moulded

it into the form of a divinity, and then fallen down and worshipped

it. Fallen down and worshipped at the feet, the gaily twirling feet of

Miss Poppy Grace.

Poor Poppy, if he could have thought of her at all, he might have felt

a sort of pity for her transience, the transience of the feeling she

inspired. But he did not think of her; he did not even try to think

of her. Her image, once so persistent, had dropped clean out of his

mind, which was one reason why it was so empty. It had not been much

to boast of, that infatuation for Poppy, and yet somehow, after living

so intimately with it, he felt quite lost without it. It was a little

odd, if you came to think of it, that the thing he called his genius,

and the thing he called his love, should have chosen the same moment

to abandon him. Was it--was it possible--that there was some vital

connection between them? As the singing of birds in the pairing

season, was his genius merely a rather peculiar symptom of the very

ordinary condition known as falling in love? So that, failing that

source of inspiration--? That no doubt _was_ what was the matter with

him. His imagination languished because his passion for Poppy was

played out, and he had nothing to put in its place.

Well, yes, there was something; something that was not an instinct or

a passion, but an acquired taste. To be sure he had acquired it very

quickly, it had only taken him three days. In those three days he had

developed a preference for the society of ladies (the women of his own

class were not ladies but "young ladies," a distinction he now

appreciated for the first time). It was a preference that, as things

stood, he would never be able to gratify; there was something about it

ruinous and unhappy, like a craze for first editions in an impecunious

scholar, for ever limited to the twopenny bundle and the eighteenpenny

lot. He could not hope to enjoy Miss Harden's society for more than

three weeks at the outside. He only enjoyed it at all through an

accident too extraordinary, too fantastic to occur again. Between him

and her there stood the barrier of the counter. The barrier itself was

not insuperable: he might get over the counter, so might Miss Harden;

but there were other things that she never could get over. Though in

some ways he was all right, in others, again, he was not--he could see

very well that he was not--what Miss Harden would call a gentleman. He

was, through that abominable nervousness of his, an impossible person,

hopelessly, irredeemably involved in social solecisms. Or if not

impossible, he was, at any rate, highly improbable.

Perceiving all this, he was still unable to perceive the meaning of

his insight and his misery. He did not know, and there was nobody to

tell him, that this emptiness of his was the emptiness created by the

forerunners and servants of Love, who sweep and purify the

death-chamber where a soul has died and another soul is waiting to be

born. For in the house of Love there is only one chamber for birth and

for dying; and into that clean, unfurnished place the soul enters

unattended and endures its agony alone. There is no Mother-soul to

bear for it the birth-pains of the new life.

But Mr. Rickman was young, and youth's healthy instinct urged him to

vigorous exercise as the best means of shaking off his misery. He

crossed the road that runs along the top of Harcombe Hill and made for

the cliffs in a south-easterly direction across the fields. He then

kept along the coast-line, dipping into Harcombe valley, climbing

again to Easton Down. Here the coast was upheaved into terraces of

grey limestone, topped by a layer of sand riddled with rabbit holes.

Before one of these two young hawks were watching, perched on a

projecting boulder. So intent was their gaze and they so motionless

that the air seemed to stand still and wait for the sweep of their

wings. Mr. Rickman, whom youth made reckless, lay flat on his stomach

and peered over the edge of the cliff. He was fascinated, breathlessly

absorbed. He pressed the turf a little closer in his eagerness, and so

loosened a large stone that rolled down, starting a cataract of sand

and rubble. He had just time to throw himself back sideways, as the

hollow fringe of turf gave way and plunged down the cliff-side. So far

from taking his escape with becoming seriousness, he amused himself by

trying to feel as he would have felt if he had actually gone over the

cliff. He found that his keenest emotion was a thrill of horror, as he

imagined Miss Harden a possible spectator of the ridiculous evolutions

performed by his person in its passage through the air.

After an hour of dipping and climbing he reached a small fishing

village. Here he dined and rested, and it was mid-afternoon before he

turned again towards Harmouth. There was no chance of missing his way;

he had nothing to do but follow the coast-line as he had done before.

There were signs in the valley of the white fog that sometimes, even

in April, comes in before sunset; already a veil of liquid air was

drawn across the hills, and when he crossed Easton Down (if it was

Easton Down) again the sea's face was blurred with mist.

As he went on westwards the mist kept pace with him, gradually

diminishing the view he had hoped to see. And as it shifted and closed

round him, his movements became labyrinthine, then circular.

And now his view was all foreground; he was simply walking through

circles of moor, enclosed by walls of fine grey fog. He passed through

these walls, like a spirit, into smaller and smaller circles; then,

hopelessly bewildered, he stopped, turned, and walked in what he took

to be a contrary direction, feeling that the chance of going over the

cliff-side lent an agreeable excitement to a pastime that threatened

to become monotonous. This was assuming the cliff-side to be somewhere

near; and he was beginning to feel that it might be anywhere, under

his feet for all he knew, when the fog lifted a little from the high

ground, and he saw that he had lost his bearings altogether. He had

been going round and round through these circles without returning to

the point he started from. He went forward less cautiously in a larger

round, and then he suddenly stood still. He was not alone.

His foreground had widened slightly and a figure stood in the middle

of it. There was something familiar in the blurred outlines, traced as

if by a watery finger on the wall of mist. An idea had taken shape

stealthily behind him and flung its shadow there. The idea was Lucia

Harden. The fog hung in her hair in drops like rain; it made her grey

dress cling close about her straight, fine limbs; it gave its own

grandeur and indistinctness to her solitary figure.

She turned, unstartled, but with an air of imperfect recognition. He

raised his hat; the hat with the green ribbon on it.

"I beg your pardon, but can you tell me the shortest cut to Harmouth?

I think I've lost my way."

She answered absently. "You are all right. Turn to the left, and

you'll find the path along the cliff. It will bring you out on to

Harmouth beach."

He followed the path she had pointed out. Still absently she looked

after him, a dim figure going down into the fog, and it occurred to

her that she had sent him on a dangerous way. There were rabbit wires

and pitfalls on that path; places where the cliff was eaten away under

its curling edge of turf, and for Mr. Rickman, who didn't know his

ground, a single step might mean death.

She could not see him now. She called to him; "Mr. Rickman!" but there

was no answer; only the sound of Mr. Rickman going down deeper. She

called again, a little imperiously, and yet again. The last time her

voice carried well, for there was the vibrating note of terror in it.

He turned and saw her coming down the path towards him.

"I forgot," she said, still with the slight tremor of fear in her

voice. It seemed to draw out and intensify its sweetness. "That path

isn't safe in a fog like this. You had better go round by the road."

"Oh, thanks. You shouldn't have troubled. I should have got on all

right." They were climbing up the moor together.

"I'm afraid you wouldn't. I wasn't thinking, or I would never have

sent you that way."

"Why not? It was a very good way."

"Yes. But you were going down into the thick of the fog. You might

easily have walked over the cliff--and broken your neck."

He laughed as if that was the most delightfully humorous idea.

"I don't know," said he, "that it would have mattered very much if I

had."

She said nothing. She never did when he made these excursions into the

personal. Of course it would not have mattered to Miss Harden if he

had gone over the cliff. He had been guilty, not only of an

unpardonable social solecism, but of a still more unpardonable

platitude.

They had reached the top of the cliff, and Lucia stood still.

"Isn't there another short cut cut across the valley?" he asked.

"There is; but I don't advise you to try it. And there is a way round

by the road--if you can find it."

He smiled. Had he tried to approach her too soon, and was she

reminding him that short cuts are dangerous? There was a way round--if

he could find it. If indeed!

"Oh, I shall find it all right," said he, inspired by his double

meaning.

"I don't think you will, if the fog lasts. I am going that way and I

had better show you."

Show him? Was it possible?

She led the way, all too swiftly, yet with a certain leisure in her

haste. He followed with a shy delight.

He was familiar enough by this time with her indoor aspect, with her

unique and perfect manner of sitting still; now he saw that her beauty

was of that rare kind that is most beautiful in movement. He would

have liked that walk to last for ever, for the pure pleasure of

following, now the delicate poise of her head, now the faint ripple of

her shoulders under her thin coat, now the lines of her skirt breaking

and flowing with the almost imperceptible swinging of her hips.

Her beauty, as he now reflected, was of the sort that dwells less in

the parts than in the whole, it was subtle, pervading, and profound.

It rejected all but the finer elements of sex. In those light

vanishing curves her womanhood was more suggested than defined; it

dawned on him in tender adumbration rather than in light. Such beauty

is eloquent and prophetic through its richness of association, its

kindred with all forms of loveliness. As Lucia moved she parted with

some of that remoter quality that had first fascinated, then estranged

him; she took on the grace of the creatures that live free in the

sunlight and in the open air.

The mist shut them in with its grey walls. There was nothing to be

seen but the patch of grass trodden by her feet, and her moving

figure, grey on grey.

The walk was somewhat lacking in incident and conversational openings.

Such as occurred seemed, like Kitty Palliser's hat, to be packed with

meaning. There was the moment, the dreadful moment, when he lagged

behind and lost sight of her. The moment, his opportunity, when an

enormous bramble caught and pinned her by the feet and skirt. She

tried to tread on it with one foot and walk away from it with the

other, a thing manifestly impossible and absurd. Besides, it

hurt--horribly. He knelt before her on the wet moor, unconscious of

his brand-new trousers, conscious of nothing but the exquisite moment;

and, with hands that trembled violently, freed first her delicate feet

and then her skirt. He breathed hard, for the operation was intricate

and took time. That bramble seemed to have neither beginning nor end,

it branched out in all directions and was set with multitudinous and

powerful thorns. Lucia stood still, being indeed unable to move, and

watched his long, slender fingers adroitly disentangling her.

"I'm afraid you're hurting yourself," said she.

"Not at all," said Mr. Rickman gallantly, though the thorns tortured

his hands, drawing drops of blood. His bliss annihilated pain.

"Take care," said she, "you are letting yourself get terribly torn."

He took no notice; but breathed harder than ever. "There, I've got it

all off now, I think."

"Thank you very much." She drew her skirt gently from his detaining

grasp.

"No--wait--please. There's a great hulking brute of a thorn stuck in

the hem."

She waited.

"Confound my clumsiness! I've done it now!"

"Done what?" She looked down; on the dainty hem there appeared three

distinct crimson stains. Mr. Rickman's face was crimson, too, with a

flush of agony. Whatever he did for her his clumsiness made wrong.

"I'm awfully sorry, but I've ruined your--your pretty dress, Miss

Harden."

For it was a pretty, a very pretty, a charming dress. And he was

making matters worse by rubbing it with his pocket-handkerchief.

"Please--please don't bother," said she, "it doesn't matter." (How

different from the behaviour of Miss Walker when Spinks spilt the

melted butter on her shoulder!) "You've hurt your own hands more than

my dress."

The episode seemed significant of the perils that awaited him in his

intercourse with Miss Harden.

She went on. The narrow hill-track ended in the broad bridle-path that

goes straight up Harcombe (not Harmouth) valley. He wondered, with

quite painful perplexity, whether he ought still to follow at a

discreet distance, or whether he might now walk beside her. She

settled the question by turning round and waiting for him to come up

with her. So they went up the valley together, and together climbed

the steep road that leads out of it and back in the direction they had

just left. The mist was thinner here at the top of the hill, and

Rickman recognized the road he had crossed when he had turned

eastwards that morning. He could now have found his way back perfectly

well; but he did not say so. A few minutes' walk brought them to the

place where he had sat down in his misery and looked over Harmouth

valley.

Here they stopped, each struck by the strange landscape now suddenly

revealed to them. They stood in clear air above the fog. It had come

rolling in from the south, submerging the cliffs, and the town, and

the valley; and now it lay smooth and cold and blue-white, like the

sea under a winter sky. They might have been looking down on some

mysterious world made before man. No land was to be seen save the tops

of the hills lashed by the torn edges of the mist. Westward, across

the bay, the peaks of the cliffs showed like a low, flat coast, a dull

purplish line tormented by a livid surf. The flooded valley had become

an arm of that vague sea. And from under the fog, immeasurably far

below, there came the muffled sound of the mother sea, as if it were

beating on the invisible floor of the world.

"I say, that's rather uncanny, isn't it?" So uncanny did it seem to

him that he felt that it called for remark.

She looked at him with that faintly interrogative lifting of the

eyebrows, which always seemed familiar to him. He remembered

afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick. But in her,

accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth,

it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain

insolence. And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break

it to him that their ways must now diverge.

"There's a horrible unconsciousness about it," he went on, pursuing as

usual his own fancy. "If you _could_ get bare nature without spirit,

it would look like that."

"It _doesn't_ look quite real," she admitted. (After that, there must

be no more concessions. They must separate.)

"It hasn't any reality but what we give it."

"Hasn't it?"

(A statement so sweeping challenged contradiction.)

"You think that's only my Cockney view?"

"I think it isn't Nature. It's your own idea."

"It isn't even my own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P'raps you'll

say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn't tell which was

Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober

as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my Cockney view is the

view of the modern poets. They don't--they can't distinguish between

Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature--we wouldn't

know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets have got so near

it that they've blocked the view for themselves and everybody else."

"Really, you talk as if they were a set of trippers."

"So they are! Wordsworth was nothing but a tripper, a glorified

tripper. Nature never looked the same since he ran his Excursion-train

through the Lake country--special service to Tintern and Yarrow."

"This is slightly profane."

"No--it only means that if you want Nature you musn't go to the poets

of Nature. They've humanized it. I wouldn't mind that, if they hadn't

womanized it, too."

"That only means that they loved it," she said softly.

"It means that they've demoralized it; and that now it demoralizes us.

Nature is the supreme sentimentalist. It's all their fault. They've

been flinging themselves on the bosom of Mother Earth, and sitting and

writing Stanzas in Dejection on it, and lying down like a tired child

on it, and weeping away their lives of care, that they have borne and

yet must bear on it, till they've saturated it with their beastly

pathos. There isn't a dry comfortable place left for anybody else."

"Perhaps that's just the way Nature inspires poets, by giving out the

humanity it absorbs."

"Perhaps. I can't say it inspires me."

"Are you a poet?" she asked. She was beginning to think it must be a

case of mistaken identity; for this was not what she had expected of

him.

He did not answer at first, neither did he look at her. He looked at

the beautiful face of Nature (the sentimentalist), and a wave of hot

colour rushed again over his own.

"I don't know whether I am or not."

"Let us hope not, since you want to make a clean sweep of them."

"I'd make a clean sweep of myself if I stood in my own light. Anything

for a good view. But I'm afraid it's too late." His tone dropped from

the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest. "We've done our

work, and it can't be undone. We've given Nature a human voice, and

now we shall never--never hear anything else."

"That's rather dreadful; I wish you hadn't."

"Oh, no, you don't. It's not the human voice you draw the line

at--it's the Cockney accent."

Lucia's smile flickered and went out, extinguished by the waves of her

blush. She was not prepared to have her thoughts read--and read aloud

to her--in this way; and that particular thought was one she would

have preferred him not to read.

"I daresay Keats had a Cockney accent, if we did but know; and I

daresay a good many people never heard anything else."

"I'm afraid you'd have heard it yourself, Miss Harden, if you'd met

him."

"Possibly. It isn't what I should have remembered him by, though. That

reminds me. I came upon a poem--a sonnet--of yours--if it was

yours--this morning. It was lying on the library floor. You will find

it under the bronze Pallas on the table."

Mr. Rickman stooped, picked up a sod and examined it carefully.

"Thank you very much. It _was_ mine. I was afraid it was lost."

"It would have been a great pity if it had been."

Mr. Rickman dropped his sod.

She answered the question that appeared in his eyes, though not on his

tongue. "Yes, I read it. It was printed, you see. I read it before I

could make up my mind whether I might or not."

"It was all right. But I wish you hadn't."

To look at Mr. Rickman you would have said that all his mind was

concentrated on the heel of his boot, as it slowly but savagely ground

the sod to dust. Even so, the action seemed to say, even so could he

have destroyed that sonnet.

"What did you think of it?"

He had looked up, when she least expected, with his disarming and

ingenuous smile. Lucia felt that he had laid an ambush for her by his

abstraction; the question and the smile shot, flashed, out of it with

a directness that made subterfuge impossible.

The seriousness of the question was what made it so awkward for a lady

with the pleasure-giving instinct. If Mr. Rickman had merely asked her

if she liked his new straw hat with the olive green ribbon (supposing

them to be on terms that made such a question possible) she would

probably have said "Yes," whether she liked it or not; because she

wanted to give pleasure, because she didn't care a straw about his

straw hat. But when Mr. Rickman asked her how she liked his sonnet, he

was talking about the things that really mattered; and in the things

that really mattered Lucia was sincerity itself.

"I thought," said she, "I thought the first dozen lines extremely

beautiful."

"In a sonnet _every_ line should be beautiful--should be perfect."

"Oh--if you're aiming at perfection."

"Why, what else in Heaven's name should I aim at?"

Lucia was silent; and he mistook her silence for distrust.

"I don't want you to judge me by that sonnet."

"But I shouldn't dream of judging you by that sonnet, any more than I

should judge that sonnet by its last two lines. They're not the last

you'll ever write."

"They're the last you will ever read."

"Well, it's something to have written one good sonnet."

"One swallow doesn't make a spring."

"No; but it tells us spring is coming, and the other swallows."

"There won't be any other swallows. All my swallows have flown."

"Oh, they'll fly back again, you'll see, if you wait till next

spring."

"You weren't serious just now when you asked me if I was a poet. _I_

was serious enough when I said I didn't know."

Something passed over Lucia's face, a ripple of shadow and flame, some

moving of the under currents of the soul that told him that he was

understood, that something had happened there, something that for the

moment permitted him to be personal.

"What made you say so?"

"I can't tell you. Not natural modesty. I'm modest about some things,

but not about that."

"Yet surely you must know?"

"I did yesterday."

"Yesterday?"

"Yesterday--last night; in fact up to eleven o'clock this morning I

firmly believed that I had genius, or something uncommonly like it. I

still believe that I _had_ it."

He seemed to himself to have become almost grossly personal; but to

Lucia he had ceased to be personal at all; he had passed into the

region of realities; and in so passing had become intensely

interesting. To Lucia, with the blood of ten generations of scholars

in her veins, the question of a man's talent was supremely important;

the man himself might not matter, but his talent mattered very much;

to discuss it with him was entirely natural and proper. So she never

once stopped to ask herself why she was standing on Harcombe Hill,

holding this really very intimate conversation with Mr. Rickman.

"The things," he continued, "the things I've written prove it. I can

say so without the smallest conceit, because I haven't it now, and

never shall have it again. I feel as if it had belonged to somebody

else."

Mr. Rickman was losing all likeness to his former self. He spoke no

longer impulsively, but in the steady deliberate tones of unalterable

conviction. And Lucia no longer heard the Cockney accent in this voice

that came to her out of a suffering so lucid and so profound. She

forgot that it came from the other side of the social gulf. If at any

point in that conversation she had thought of dismissing him, she

could not have dismissed him now. There was very little use in having

saved his neck if she abandoned him to his misery.

Instead of abandoning him she sat down on a rough seat by the roadside

to consider Mr. Rickman's case in all its bearings. In doing so she

found herself for the first time contemplating his personal appearance

as such; and that not altogether with disapproval. Though it was not

in the least what she would have expected, he showed to advantage in

the open air. She began to perceive the secret of his extravagant and

preposterous charm. There was something about him--something that he

had no right to have about him, being born a dweller in cities, which

none the less he undeniably and inevitably had, something that made

him one with this moorland setting, untamed and beautiful and shy. The

great natural features of the landscape did him no wrong; for he was

natural too.

Well, she had found his sonnet for him; but could she help him to

recover what he had lost now?

"I hope you won't mind my asking, but don't you know any one who can

help you?"

"Not any one who can help me out of this."

"I believe it must have been you Sir Joseph Harden used to talk about.

I think he saw you once when you were a boy. I know if he were alive

he would have been glad to help you."

"He did help me. I owe my education to the advice he gave my father."

"Is that the case? I am very glad."

She paused, exultant; she felt that she was now upon the right track.

"You said you had written other things. What have you written?"

"A lyrical drama for one thing. That sonnet was meant for a sort of

motto to it."

A lyrical drama? She was right, then; he was Horace Jewdwine's great

"find." If so, the subject was fenced around with difficulty. She must

on no account give Horace away. Mr. Rickman had seemed annoyed because

she had read his sonnet (which was printed); he would be still more

annoyed if he knew that she had read his lyrical drama in manuscript.

He was inclined to be reticent about his writings.

Lucia was wrong. Mr. Rickman had never been less inclined to

reticence in his life. He wished she had read his drama instead of his

sonnet. His spring-time was there; the swift unreturning spring-time

of his youth. If she had read his drama she would have believed in his

pursuit of the intangible perfection. As it was, she never would

believe.

"I wonder," she said, feeling her ground carefully, "if my cousin

Horace Jewdwine would be any good to you?"

"Mr. Jewdwine?"

"Do you know him?"

"Yes, slightly. That is--he knows--he knows what I can do. I mean what

I've done."

"Really?" The chain of evidence was now complete. "Well, what does he

say?"

Rickman laughed as he recalled his last conversation with the critic.

"He says I'm one-seventh part a poet.

"Does he? Then you may be very sure you are a great deal more. My

cousin is most terribly exacting. I should be glad if I succeeded in

satisfying him; but I don't think I should be seriously unhappy if--if

I failed. Did he say anything to discourage, to depress you?"

"Not he. I don't think I should have minded if he had. I felt strong

enough for anything then. It was this morning. I was sitting out here,

looking at all this beautiful inspiring scenery, when it came to me,

that notion that I should never do anything again."

"Is it--" her hesitations were delightful to him--"is it the want of

recognition that disheartens you?"

He laughed again, a healthy honest laugh. "Oh, dear me, no! I don't

worry about recognition. That would be all right if I could go on. But

I can't go on."

"Have you ever felt like this before?"

"N--no. No, never. And for the life of me I can't think why I should

now."

"And yet you've been making catalogues for years, haven't you?"

Lucia had said to herself, "It's that catalogue _raisonné_, I know."

"Do you like making catalogues?"

"Well, under ordinary circumstances it isn't exactly what you'd call

exciting. But I'm afraid that hasn't got anything to do with it this

time."

"It may have everything to do with it--such a dreadful kind of work."

"No. It isn't the work that's dreadful."

"Then perhaps it's the worry? And I'm afraid I'm responsible for

that."

He started, shaken out of his admirable self-possession by that

glaring personality. "How could you be?"

"By insisting on engaging you as I did. From what you told me it's

very evident that you had something on your mind, and that the work

has been very dreadful, very difficult."

"I _have_ something on my mind and--it _has_ been difficult--all the

same--"

"I wouldn't have pressed you if I had really known. I'm very sorry. Is

it too late? Would it be any good if I released you now?"

If she released him!

"Miss Harden, you are most awfully good to me."

"_Would_ that help you?"

He looked at her. Over her face there ran again that little ripple of

thought and sympathy, like shadow and flame. One fear was removed from

him. Whatever happened Miss Harden would never misunderstand him. At

the same time he realized that any prospect, however calamitous, would

be more endurable than the course she now proposed.

"It wouldn't help me. The best thing I can do is to stay where I am

and finish."

"Is that the truth?"

"Nothing but the truth."

("But not the whole truth," thought Lucia.)

"Well," she said, rising, "whatever you do, don't lose heart."

He smiled drearily. It was all very well to say that, when his heart

was lost already.

"Wait--wait till next spring comes."

He could put what meaning he liked into that graceful little

commonplace. But it dismissed at the same time that it reassured him.

The very ease and delicacy with which it was done left him no doubt on

that point.

He was not going to accept his dismissal then and there. A bold

thought leapt in his brain. Could he--might he--? She had read his

sonnet; would it do to ask her to read his drama also? To be sure the

sonnet had but fourteen lines, while the drama had twice as many

hundred. But the drama, the drama, his beautiful _Helen in Leuce_, was

his ultimate achievement, the highest, completest expression of his

soul. And what he required of Lucia Harden was not her praise, but

fuller, more perfect comprehension. He stood in a cruel and false

position, and he longed for her to know the finest and the best of

him, before she knew (as she must know) the worst.

She was turning away; but there was a closed gate between her and the

hill-path that led down into the valley.

"Miss Harden--"

"Yes?"

She turned. His heart beat violently. He was afraid to look up lest

his face should betray his emotion; it must seem so disproportioned to

its cause. And yet he was going to ask her for leave to put his drama,

the fine offspring of his soul, into her hands.

"May I send you the drama I spoke of? I would like you to see it."

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure."

He tried to stammer out some words of thanks; but they died before

utterance.

"You know your way now, don't you?" said she.

"Yes, thanks."

Her hand was on the gate; he opened it to let her pass. He also made a

movement as though he would have held out his hand, but thought better

of it, raising his hat instead.

He stood uncovered until she had passed.

He walked up and down the road, giving her time to get well out of

sight. Then he returned to the place where he had suffered, and stood

a long while looking over the valley.

He knew now the meaning of his great misery; and it was misery no

longer. The veil was lifted from the face of Nature; and it was a

face that he had never yet seen. It had lost that look of mysterious,

indefinable reproach. It was as if the beauty of the land, seeking

after the heart that should love it, was appeased and reconciled. He

could hear the lyric soul of things most clearly and unmistakably, and

it was singing a new song. A strange, double-burdened contradictory

song. There was sorrow in it, such sorrow as her children drink from

the breast of the tragic earth; and through it all and over it the

laughter as of some yet virgin and imperishable joy.

For Nature sings to every poet the song of his own soul.

He spent the last of that Easter Sunday in his shabby little bedroom

in the Marine Hotel, where with windows open to the wind and sea he

sat writing long past midnight. And hope rose again in him as he

surveyed the first rough draft--that wild battlefield and

slaughter-ground of lines, lines shooting and flying in all

directions, lines broken and scattered and routed by other lines,

over-ridden and trampled down by word upon triumphing word. Above the

hideous confusion at least two verses shone luminous and clear; they

had come swinging into the pure ether, full-formed and golden from

their birth. And over the whole he wrote in legible characters, "_On

Harcombe Hill_."

His doubt had died there; and on Easter Monday he awoke exulting in

another blessed day.

CHAPTER XXII

Lucia had yielded recklessly to her pleasure-giving instinct, and was

only half contented. She had given pleasure to her father by writing

him a long letter; she was in a fair way of giving pleasure to Horace

Jewdwine by undertaking this monstrous labour of the catalogue; and

she had given pleasure to herself in giving pleasure to them. But

there was one person to whom she had not given pleasure; and that

person was Horace Jewdwine's friend. On the contrary, she had robbed

the poor man of the one solitary pleasure he had anticipated in his

three days' holiday; with what disastrous results she had just

witnessed.

It was impossible for Lucia to do anybody a wrong, however innocently,

without making up for it. On that Sunday evening she conceived a great

idea. She had deprived Mr. Rickman of a small opportunity; she would

give him a large one. Restitution was to be on a noble scale. Lucia

had a small sum left to her by her grandfather, and even when Mr.

Rickman was paid for his four weeks' work on the catalogue that sum

would only be reduced to £285. On the strength of it she now proposed

to offer Mr. Rickman the post of secretary to herself, for one year,

at a salary of a hundred, the remainder to be devoted to his

travelling and household expenses. As secretary he would assist her in

editing Sir Joseph's unpublished works, while she secured him abundant

leisure for his own.

For one year he would be free from all sordid demands on his time and

energy. He would be free, for one year, from the shop and the

Quarterly Catalogue. He would enrich his mind, and improve his

manners, with travel, for one year. At the end of that year he would

know if there was anything in him.

In other words she would give the little man his chance.

The plan had the further advantage that it would have given her

grandfather pleasure if he could have known it. It was also to be

presumed that it would give pleasure to Horace Jewdwine, since it was

the very thing he himself had said he wished to do for Rickman. Of all

conceivable ways of spending Sir Joseph's money it was the fittest and

most beautiful. In its lesser way it was in line with the best

traditions of the family; for the Hardens had been known for

generations as the patrons of poor scholars and struggling men of

letters. And as Lucia inherited the intellect of her forefathers in a

more graceful, capricious and spontaneous form, so what in them had

been heavy patronage, appeared in her as the pleasure-giving instinct.

If she had inherited a large fortune along with it she would have been

a lady of lavish and indiscreet munificence.

By way of discretion she slept on her programme before finally

committing herself to it. In the morning discretion suggested that she

had better wait a week. She decided to act on that suggestion; at the

same time she stifled the inner voice which kept telling her that the

thing she was doing "to please Horace" would not really please him at

all.

She had already ignored the advice he had given her on one point; for

Horace had long ago told her plainly that there was no use in editing

their grandfather's posthumous works; that on any subject other than

textual criticism, Sir Joseph was absurd.

Meanwhile, by sympathy perhaps, Rickman also had become discreet. He

entered on his new week a new man. As if he had divined that he was on

his trial, he redoubled his prodigious efforts, he applied himself to

his hideous task with silent and concentrated frenzy. He seemed to

live and move and have his being in the catalogue _raisonné_. Whenever

Lucia had occasion to look up at him he was assiduous, rapid,

absorbed, He never stopped to talk about Æschylus and Euripides. Now

and then they exchanged a necessary word, but not more than once or

twice in the morning. If Lucia by any chance gave him an opening he

ignored it. He maintained a silence that was almost stern.

Mr. Rickman was undergoing a process of regeneration.

He would not have called it by so fine a name. In fact, in its earlier

stages he seemed to himself to be merely pushing to the point of mania

a strong predilection for personal cleanliness. He was first of all

possessed, recklessly, ruinously, by a passion for immaculate shirts.

He had telegraphed to Spinks to send down all of his linen that he

could lay his hands on; meanwhile he had supplied deficiencies at the

local haberdashers. At Mrs. Downey's there was a low standard for the

more slender particulars of the toilette, and Mr. Rickman had compared

favourably with his fellow-boarders. Now he looked back with

incredulity and horror to his former self. Since his person had been

brought into daily contact with Miss Harden he had begun to bestow on

it a solemn, almost religious care. In the matter of the pocket

handkerchief he practised an extreme ritual, permitting himself none

but the finest lawn, which he changed after the first trivial

crumpling. The pocket-handkerchief being thus glorified and exalted in

the hierarchy of dress, one source of painful misgiving was removed.

For the first few days he had been merely formal in this cult of the

person. Piety was appeased with external rites and symbols, with

changes of vestment, excessive lustrations, and the like. Now he had

grown earnest, uncompromising, in his religion; and consistency

entailed a further step. Clearly his person, the object of such

superstitious veneration, must be guarded from all unbecoming and

ridiculous accidents; such an accident, for instance, as getting

drunk. If you came to think of it, few things could be more

compromising to the person than that (Heavens! if Miss Harden had seen

it last Wednesday night!). And since any friendship with ladies of

doubtful character might be considered equally derogatory from its

dignity, he further resolved to eliminate (absolutely) Miss Poppy

Grace. He took no credit for these acts of renunciation. They seemed

to him no more morally meritorious than the removal of dust from his

coat sleeves, or of ink-stains from his hands.

But though he exterminated the devil in him with so light a touch, it

was gravely, tragically almost, that he turned to the expulsion of the

Cockney. Intoxication was an unlucky casualty; so, if you came to

think of it, was a violent infatuation for Miss Poppy Grace;

infinitely more disastrous, more humiliating, were the fatal habits of

his speech. Take the occasional but terrific destruction of the aitch.

It was worse than drink; it wrecked a man more certainly, more utterly

beyond redemption and excuse. It was anxiety on this point that partly

accounted for his reserve. He simply dared not talk about Æschylus or

Euripides, because such topics were exciting, and excitement was apt

to induce this lapse.

But most of all he dreaded the supreme agitation of love. For he knew

now perfectly well what had happened to him; though he had never known

it happen to him in this manner before. It was love as his heart had

imagined it in the days before he became the thrall of Miss Poppy

Grace. He had known the feeling, but until now he had not known the

woman who could inspire it. It was as if his heart had renewed its

primal virginity in preparation for some divine experience.

The night of Sunday beheld the withdrawal of Mr. Rickman into the

immensity of his preposterous dream. From this blessed state he

emerged on Monday morning, enlightened as to the whole comedy and

tragedy of his passion. To approach Lucia Harden required nothing less

than a change of spirit; and Mr. Rickman doubted whether he could

manage that. He could only change his shirts. And at this point there

arose the hideous fear lest love itself might work to hinder and

betray him.

As it turned out, love proved his ally, not his enemy. So far from

exciting him, it produced a depression that rendered him disinclined

for continuous utterance. In this it did him good service. It

prevented him from obtruding his presence unduly on Miss Harden. In

his seat at the opposite table he had achieved something of her

profound detachment, her consummate calm. And Lucia said to herself,

"Good. He can keep quiet for a whole day at a time, which is what I

doubted."

Six days had passed in this manner, and he had not yet attempted to

penetrate the mystery and seclusion of the Aldine Plato, the

Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. He

turned away his eyes from that corner of the bookcase where he had

good reason to suppose them to be. He would have to look at them some

time, meanwhile he shrank from approaching them as from some gross

impiety. His father had written to him several times, making special

inquiries after the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace, and the

_Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. He replied with generalities in a

guarded manner. He was kept very busy, and was as yet unable to send

him any more detailed information. He had begun to feel it strange

that these questions should be put, to marvel at the assumption that

they could in any way concern him. Rickman's had ceased altogether to

exist for him.

He was beginning to lose all sense of strangeness in his position. The

six days might have been six years and Court House the home of his

infancy, Lucia's presence filled it with so warm an atmosphere of

kindness and of love. The very servants had learnt something of her

gentle, considerate ways. He was at home there as he had never been at

home before. He knew every aspect of the library, through all the

changes of the light, from the first waking of its blues and crimsons

in the early morning to the broad and golden sweep of noonday through

the south window; from the quick rushing flame of the sunset to its

premature death among the rafters. Then the lamps; a little light in

the centre where they sat, and the thick enclosing darkness round

about them.

Each of those six days was like a Sunday, and Sunday to Rickman was

always a day of beatitude, being the day of dreams. And she, in her

sweet unfamiliar beauty, only half real, though so piercingly present

to him, was an incarnate dream. She always sat with her back to the

south window, so that her head and shoulders appeared somewhat

indistinct against the outer world, a background of flower-beds and

green grass and sky, covered with the criss-cross of the leaded

lozenge panes and the watery shimmer of the glass. The outline of her

head was indicated by a little line of light that threaded her hair

and tipped the curve of her small ears. He knew every change of her

face, from its serene, faint-tinted morning look, to its flower-like

pallor in the dusk. He knew only too well its look under the

lamp-light after a hard day's work; the look that came with a slight

blurring of its soft contours, and a drooping of tired eyelids over

pathetic eyes. He saw what Jewdwine had failed to see, that Lucia was

not strong.

Six days, and three days before that, nine days in all; and it was as

if he had known that face all his life; he could not conceive a time

when he had not known it. As for the things he had known, horrible,

curious and incredible things, such as Rickman's, Mrs. Downey's, St.

Pancras Church, and the editor of _The Museion_ (whose last letter he

had left unanswered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and

unimaginable past. It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing

that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden. He was never

very far from her. The east window looked across the courtyard to the

window of her drawing-room; he could see her there, sitting in the

lamp-light; he could hear the music that she made. Her bedroom was

above the library; it was pleasant to him to know that when she left

him it was to sleep there overhead. The deep quiet of his passion had

drawn him again into his dream.

And then all of a sudden, he woke up and broke the silence. It was ten

o'clock on Saturday evening. Lucia had shifted the shade of the lamp.

From where he sat her face was in twilight and her body in darkness.

He had got up to put a book into its place, when he saw her leaning

back and covering her eyes with her hand.

The sight was too much for him. He came up and stood beside her.

"Miss Harden, I don't like this. I--I can't stand it any longer."

She looked up. She had been unaware of Mr. Rickman for the last hour,

and certainly did not expect to find him there.

"What is it that you can't stand?"

"To see you working from morning to night. It--it isn't right, you

know. You're paying me for this, and doing the half of it yourself."

"I'm not doing a quarter of it. You forget that you're working three

times as fast as I can."

"And you forget that you're working three times as hard."

"No. I'm leaving the hard work to you."

"I wish you'd leave it all to me."

"In that case we should never have finished," said the lady.

He smiled. "Perhaps not. At any rate you've worked so hard that I can

finish it now by myself."

She looked round the room. Undisguised fatigue was in the look. What

they had done was nothing to what they had yet to do.

"You can't," she said.

"I can. Easily. I miscalculated the time it would take."

She said nothing, for she knew that he had lied. His miscalculation

was all the other way. She bent again over her work. It was all that

he could do not to lift her arms gently but firmly from the table, to

take away her pen and ink, and put out her lamp. He would have liked

to have done some violence to the catalogue.

"I say, you know, you'll make yourself ill. You're burning the candle

at both ends. May I suggest that the game isn't worth the candle?"

"Have you very much more to do?"

"About two hours' work. Would it be impertinent to say that I could do

it better by myself?"

She looked at her watch and ignored his last question. "You can't do

two hours' work. It's twenty minutes past your time already."

Past his time, indeed! As if he hadn't been working past his time

every night since he came. She had grown mighty particular all of a

sudden!

"The presence of these engaging little Elzevirs is a terrible

temptation to a second-hand bookseller, still I believe you can trust

me with them alone."

From the expression of her face he gathered that this remark was even

more impertinent than the other. He had meant it to be.

"I really think," said the lady, "that you had better go."

"Just as you please; I shall only have to sit up two hours later

to-morrow night."

He walked to his place with his head thrown farther back and his chin

thrust farther forward than ever. He began to sort and arrange his

papers preparatory to his departure. It took him five minutes. At the

end of the five minutes he was aware that Lucia had risen and was

bidding him Good-night.

"You were quite right," she was saying. "I _am_ tired, and I had

better leave off. If you had rather stay and finish, please stay."

At those words Mr. Rickman was filled with a monstrous and amazing

courage. He made for the door, crossing without a tremor the whole

length of the library. He reached the door before Miss Harden, and

opened it. He returned her good-night with a hope that she would be

rested in the morning. And as he went back to his solitary labour he

smiled softly to himself, a smile of self-congratulation.

He had meant her to go--and she had gone.

Upstairs in her room overhead Lucia communed with her own face in the

glass.

"My private secretary?"

The face in the glass looked dubious.

"Of course I would rather have a gentleman for my private secretary.

Some people would say he isn't a gentleman." (She had said it herself

the other day.)

The face in the glass smiled dimly, between two parted veils of hair.

"What _is_ a gentleman?"

The face in the glass suggested that this was indeed a subtle and a

difficult question.

"It was not his business if I chose to tire myself. Would it have been

his business if he'd been a gentleman?"

The face in the glass offered no opinion.

"I think I like him best when he's impertinent. He is so _very_ funny,

poor dear, when he tries to be polite."

The face in the glass, framed by two white arms raising a column of

hair, was suffused with rosy mirth.

"I wonder what Horace really thinks of him?"

The face, triumphantly crowned with its dark coil, looked grave.

"He _is_ a gentleman. At least, he lied like one."

By this time Lucia was in bed, and there was no face in the glass to

dispute or corroborate that statement.

CHAPTER XXIII

The next morning he gave into her hands the manuscript of _Helen in

Leuce_. It had arrived two or three days ago, packed by Spinks between

his new shirts. She had expected to feel a little guilty as she

received the familiar sheets; but as she glanced over them she saw

that they were anything but familiar; what she had to deal with was a

clean new draft.

She had a fairly clear recollection of the outline of the play.

In Act I Helen lands in the enchanted island of Leuce, and is found

watching the ship that brought her sailing away with the dead

Menelaus, for he, being altogether mortal, may not follow her there.

The Chorus tells the story of Helen, her rape by Theseus, her marriage

with Menelaus, her flight with Paris, the tragedy of Troy and her

return to Argos. It tells how through all her adventures the godhead

in her remained pure, untouched, holding itself apart.

In Act II Helen is asleep, for the soul of Leda still troubles her

divinity, and her mortality is heavy upon her. Helen rises out of her

sleep; her divinity is seen struggling with her mortality, burning

through the beauty of her body. Desire wakens in Achilles, and in

Helen terror and anguish, as of one about to enter again into the pain

of mortal life. But he may not touch her till he, too, has put on

immortality. Helen prays for deliverance from the power of Aphrodite.

She rouses in Achilles a great anger against Aphrodite by reminding

him of the death of Patroclus; so that he calls down upon the goddess

the curses of all the generations of men.

It was this Act that lived in Lucia's memory. Act III she had not yet

read, but she had gathered from the argument that Pallas Athene was

there to appear to Achilles and divest him of his mortality; that she

was to lead him to Helen, whose apotheosis was supposed to be

complete; the Act concluding with two choruses, an epithalamium

celebrating the wedding of Helen and Achilles, and a Hymn in praise of

Athene.

She remembered how when Horace had first told her of the subject,

Helen in Leuce, she had looked it up in Lemprière, found a reference

in Homer and another in Euripides, had shaken her head and said, "What

can he make of that?"

Now for the first time she saw what he had made of it. Rickman's Helen

was to the Helena of Euripides what Shelley's Prometheus is to the

Prometheus of Æschylus. Rickman had done what seemed good in his own

eyes. He had made his own metres, his own myth and his own drama. A

drama of flesh and blood, a drama of spirit, a drama of dreams. Only a

very young poet could have had the courage to charge it with such a

weight of symbolism; but he had contrived to breathe into his symbols

the breath of life; the phantoms of his brain, a shadowy Helen and

Achilles, turned into flesh and blood under his hands. It was as if

their bodies, warm, throbbing, full-formed, instinct with irresistible

and violent life, had come crashing through the delicate fabric of his

dream.

As she read Lucia's mind was troubled, shaken out of its critical

serenity. She heard a new music; she felt herself in the grasp of a

new power, a new spirit. It was not the classic spirit. There was too

much tumult in its harmonies, as if the music of a whole orchestra had

been torn from its instruments and flung broadcast, riding

triumphantly on the wings of a great wind. There were passages

(notably the Hymn to Aphrodite in the second Act) that brought the

things of sense and the terrible mysteries of flesh and blood so near

to her that she flinched. Rickman had made her share the thrilling

triumph, the flushed passion of his youth. And when she was most hurt

and bruised under the confusion of it, he lifted her up and carried

her away into the regions of spiritual beauty and eternal strength.

It was all over; the tumult of the flesh and the agony of the spirit;

over, too, the heaven-piercing singing, the rapture of spirit and of

flesh made one. Rickman had ended his amazing drama with the broad

majestic music of his Hymn to Athene. Lucia had borne up under the

parting of Helen and Menelaus; but she was young, and at that touch of

superb and ultimate beauty, two tears, the large and heavy tears of

youth, fell upon Rickman's immaculate manuscript, where their marks

remain to this day. The sight of them had the happy effect of making

her laugh, and then, and not till then, she thought of Rickman--Mr.

Rickman. She thought of him living a dreadful life among dreadful

people; she thought of him sitting in his father's shop, making

catalogues _raisonnés_; she thought of him sitting in the library

making one at that very moment. And this was the man she had had the

impertinence to pity; whom Horace would say she now proposed to

patronize. As she stood contemplating the pile of manuscript before

her, Miss Lucia Harden felt (for a great lady) quite absurdly small.

In that humble mood she was found by Miss Palliser.

"What's up?" said Kitty.

"Kitty, that little man in there--he's written the most beautiful

play. It's so terribly sad."

"What, the play?"

"No, the little man. It's a classic, Kitty--it'll live."

"Then I'm sure you needn't pity him. Let's have a look at the thing."

Miss Palliser dipped into the manuscript, and was lost.

"By Jove," she said, "it does look ripping. Where does the sadness

come in?"

"He thinks he'll never write another."

"Well, perhaps he won't."

"He will--think of it--he's a genius, the real thing, this time.

Only--he has to stand behind a counter and make catalogues."

Miss Palliser meditated. "Does he--does he by any chance drop his

aitches?"

"Kitty, he _does_."

"Then Lucy, dear child, beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his

floating hair--"

"Don't. That little man is on my mind."

"I shouldn't let him stop there too long, if I were you. He might

refuse to get on."

"I must do something for him, and I must do it now. What _can_ I do?"

"Not much, I imagine."

"I--I think I'll ask him to dinner."

"I wouldn't. You said he drops his aitches. Weave," said Miss

Palliser, "a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy

dread, but whatever you do, don't ask him to dinner."

"Why not?"

"Because ten to one it would make him most horribly uncomfortable. Not

that that matters so much. But wouldn't the faithful Robert think it a

little odd?"

"Robert is too faithful to think anything at all."

"I'm not so sure of that. Personally, I wish you _would_ ask him to

dinner--I seem to foresee a certain amount of amusing incident."

"Well, I don't think I will ask him--to dinner. Perhaps he wouldn't

enjoy it. But as I've got to talk over his play with him, I should

like to ask him to something."

"Ask him to coffee afterwards."

"Coffee hardly seems enough."

"It depends. Serve it festively--on a table, and pour it out yourself.

Offer him strange and bewitching forms of food. Comfort him with--with

angel cake--and savoury sandwiches and bread and butter."

"I see--a sort of compromise?"

"Exactly. Society, my child, is based on compromise."

"Very well, then, I'll write him a note."

She wrote it, and sent Robert with it to the library.

"I suppose," said she, "it's about time to dress for dinner?"

"Don't make yourself too pretty, dear."

Lucia looked back through the doorway.

"I shall make myself as pretty as ever I can. He has had nothing but

ugly things to look at all his life."

Miss Palliser apostrophized the departing figure of her friend.

"Oh Lucy, Lucy, what an angelic little fool you _are_!"

CHAPTER XXIV

Half-past six, and Miss Harden had not yet appeared in the library. It

was the first time that Rickman had passed a whole day without seeing

her. He began to be uneasy, to wonder whether she were really ill. At

seven he was leaving the house as usual for his hotel when Robert

brought him a little three-cornered note.

"Dear Mr. Rickman," it said (Dear Mr. Rickman!) "you see I have

taken your advice, and given myself a holiday. I have spent it

very pleasantly--reading _Helen in Leuce_. It would give me much

pleasure if you would come in for coffee this evening, about

eight o'clock. We can then talk it over.

"Very truly yours,

"LUCIA HARDEN.

"You need only send a verbal answer."

A verbal answer? No. That would never do. He could not trust himself

with speech, but in writing he knew he was impeccable.

"Dear Miss Harden. How very kind of you! But I am sorry that you

did not give yourself a complete rest. I should be sorrier, if I

were not so grateful for the trouble you have taken. It will give

me great pleasure to come in this evening at the time you name.

"With many thanks, yours very truly,

"S.K. RICKMAN."

He was not pleased with it; it erred on the side of redundancy; he had

not attained the perfect utterance, the supreme simplicity. But he was

obliged to let it go. Two hours later Robert announced that coffee was

served in the drawing-room.

It seemed that to reach the drawing-room you had to cross the whole

length of the house from west to east. In this passage he realized

(what his mind had not greatly dwelt upon), the antiquity of the

Hardens, and the march of their splendid generations. Going from the

Tudor Library into the grim stone hall of the Court House, he took a

cold plunge backward into time. Thence his progress was

straightforward, bringing him into the Jacobean picture gallery that

cut the house from north to south. Here he paused, perceiving that the

double line of portraits began with a Vandyck and a Lely. Robert stood

with his hand on the brass rose knob of an oak door; in his eternal

attitude of affection, mingled with immobile respect, he waited for

the moment when Mr. Rickman should elect to tear himself from the Lely

and the Vandyck. The moment came, and Mr. Rickman heard himself

announced in a clear high voice as he passed over the threshold.

He found himself in a long oak-panelled room; that room whose west

window looked out across the courtyard to the east window of the

library. It was almost dark except for a small fire-lit, lamp-lit,

square at the far end. Lucia was sitting in a low chair by the

fireplace, under the tall shaded lamp, where the light fell full on

her shoulders. She was not alone. On a settee by the other side of the

open hearth sat the young lady who had intruded on his solitude in the

library. The presence of the young lady filled him with anxiety and

dismay.

He had to cross a vast, dim space before he reached that lighted

region. With what seemed to him a reeling and uncertain gait, he

approached over the perilously slippery parquet. Miss Harden rose and

came forward, mercifully cutting short that frightful passage from the

threshold to her chair.

Lucia had not carried out the intention she had announced to Kitty.

She had dressed in haste; but in Rickman's eyes the effect was that

which Kitty had seen fit to deprecate. She had made herself very

pretty indeed. He could not have given a very clear account of it,

could not have said whether the thing she wore, that floating,

sweeping, curling, trailing, folding and caressing garment were made

of grey gossamer in white or white in grey, but he was aware that it

showed how divinely her slender body carried its flower, her head;

showed that her arms, her throat, and the first sweep and swell of her

shoulders, were of one tone with the luminous pallor of her face.

Something in the dress, in her bearing and manner of approach, gave

her the assured charm of womanhood for the unfinished loveliness of

youth.

She introduced him to her friend Miss Palliser, whose green eyes

smiled in recognition. He bowed with the stiffness of a back

unaccustomed to that form of salutation. He hardly knew what happened

after that, till he found himself backing, nervously, ridiculously

backing into a lonely seat in the middle of the room.

The three were now grouped in a neat geometrical figure, Mr. Rickman,

on the chair of his choice, forming the apex of a prolonged triangle,

having the hearthrug for its base. He was aware that Miss Harden and

Miss Palliser were saying something; but he had no idea of what they

said. He sat there wondering whether he ought to be seated at all,

whether he ought not rather to be hovering about that little table,

ready to wait upon Miss Palliser. He was still wondering when Miss

Palliser got up with the evident intention of waiting upon him.

That, he knew, was all wrong; it was not to be permitted for a moment.

Inspired by a strange, unnatural courage, he advanced and took his

coffee from her hand, retreating with it to his remote and solitary

position.

He sat silent, moodily looking at his coffee, stirring it from time to

time and wondering whether he would ever be brave enough to drink it.

He waited for an opportunity of dispatching it unperceived. The

presence of Miss Palliser paralysed him. He wondered whether he ought

to say anything to her or to Miss Harden, or to neither or to both; he

tried to think of something suitable to say.

Meanwhile Miss Palliser talked for all three. It seemed that she had

dined with her friend on her way to an "at home" in Harmouth.

"Bread and butter?" said she judicially "N--no, I think not, thanks.

I've got to eat jellies and sandwiches and things for two hours

straight on end. It sounds horrible, but I shall be driven to it. At

the Flossers," she explained for her friend's benefit, "you must

either eat or talk; and if you can't talk scandal you're not expected

to talk at all." And still talking Miss Palliser slowly bore down upon

Mr. Rickman with a plate of bread and butter.

Mr. Rickman's earnest and chivalrous endeavour to forestall her caused

a rug to slide under his feet. It slid, and Mr. Rickman with it, for

quite a considerable distance; and though Mr. Rickman, indeed,

preserved the erect attitude by a series of complicated movements (a

superb triumph of muscular ingenuity, but somewhat curious and

fantastic as a spectacle), his coffee cup flung itself violently on

its side, and poured out its contents at the lady's feet.

He looked at Miss Harden. She was smiling; for who wouldn't have

smiled? But her smile became almost tender in her perception of his

distress.

Miss Palliser continued to talk.

"Ah," said Miss Palliser, "I was waiting for that to happen. I've been

wondering which of us would do it first. I rather thought it would be

me; but for pure, delightful unexpectedness, give me a parquet floor.

I wouldn't mop it up with my pocket handkerchief, if I were you."

"No--please--it doesn't matter. It happens every day."

"And it puts a visitor on an agreeable footing at once. You _can't_

keep up any stiffness or formality, when what you took for a

drawing-room turns itself into a skating rink."

"Quite so," said Rickman, "and if you fall, it breaks the ice." He was

entering shyly into her humour. "I'm afraid my be-h-haviour wasn't

quite so h-happy and spontaneous as it might have been."

"I assure you it was extremely naïve and natural, as far as it went,"

said Kitty, laughing.

"I think you were very clever to keep your balance," said Lucia.

"Too clever by half. If you'd been a really genial person, Mr.

Rickman, you'd have lost it."

Thus lightly did they cover his confusion, thus adroitly turn the

malignant hand of circumstance.

"Kitty," said Lucia, "I don't want to hurry you, but it's past nine,

and you'll _have_ to hurry if you don't want to be late."

"But I do want to be late. I mean to be late. I can't eat sandwiches

for more than two hours."

And Kitty flung herself on her settee again in crosslegged,

unpremeditated ease, and there she conversed with Mr. Rickman as if

she had known him all her life. Kitty was amused at last.

So was Mr. Rickman. He found himself answering with appropriate

light-heartedness; he heard himself laughing in the manner of one

infinitely at ease. It was impossible to be anything else in Kitty

Palliser's society. He was, in fact, surprised. Though it was only by

immense expenditure of thought and effort that he managed to secure

the elusive aspirate, still he secured it. Never for a moment did he

allow himself to be cheated into the monstrous belief that its absence

was, or could be unperceived.

But though he was grateful to Miss Palliser, he wished all the time

that she would go. At last she rose and drew her fur-collared cloak

about her with a slow, reluctant air.

"Well, I suppose I must be off. I shall be back before eleven, Lucy.

Good-night, Mr. Rickman, if I don't see you again."

He was alone with Lucia Harden.

It was one thing to be alone with Lucia Harden in the library or on

Harcombe Moor, and quite another thing to be left with her in that

lamp-lit, fire-lit room. The library belonged to her race and to their

historic past; the moor to nature and to all time; this room to her

and to the burning present. There was no sign or suggestion of another

presence.

A kindly room (barring that parquet floor!); a beautiful room; full of

warm lights, and broad and pleasing shadows; furnished with an extreme

simplicity, such bareness as musicians love. He was struck by that

absence of all trivial decoration, all disturbing and irrelevant

detail. In such a room, the divinity of the human form was not dwarfed

or obscured by excess of furniture. Such a room, he reflected, was

also eminently disadvantageous to any figure that was not entirely

sure of its divinity. But for two persons who desired to know each

other better there couldn't be a better place. It left them so

securely, so intimately alone.

For the first time, then, he was alone with Lucia Harden.

She had risen and had unlocked a drawer in the writing-table near her,

and taken out the thick pile of manuscript. He noticed that she

detached from it some loose pencilled sheets and put them back into

the drawer. She seated herself in her old place and signed to him to

take the low chair beside her.

He approached her (for the first time) without nervousness or

embarrassment; for he saw his _Helen_ lying on her knees and knew that

she held his dreams in her soul. He had made her acquainted with the

best and highest in him, and she would judge him by that alone. In her

sight his genius would stand apart from all in him that was jarring

and obscure. It at least was untouched by the accident of his birth,

the baseness of his false position.

"I sent for you," said she, "because I wanted to talk to you about

this, while it is all fresh in my mind. I thought we could talk better

here."

"Thanks. I want awfully to know what you have to say."

"I can't have anything to say that you don't know already."

"I--I know nothing." (What a hypocrite he felt as he said it!)

"Nor I. As far as knowledge goes I haven't any right to speak.

Only--the other evening, you expressed such absolute disbelief in

yourself--"

"I was perfectly sincere."

"I know you were. That's what made me believe in you."

(Well then, if _that_ was what made her believe in him he would

continue to express disbelief in himself.)

She paused. "It's the little men, isn't it, the men of talent, that

are always so self-conscious and so sure? I don't know much about it,

but it seems to me that genius isn't bound to be like that. It might

be so different from your ordinary self that you couldn't be aware of

it in the ordinary way. There would always be a sort of divine

uncertainty about it."

"I'm afraid I don't agree with you. All the great geniuses have been

not only aware of themselves, but most uncommonly certain."

"Still, their genius may have been the part of themselves they

understood least. If they had tried to understand it, they would have

doubted too."

"There's something in that. You mean genius understands

everything--except itself?

"I think that's what I meant."

"Yes; but whether genius understands itself or not, whatever it does,

you see, it doesn't doubt."

"Doesn't it? Have you read Keats' letters? _He_ doubted."

"Only when he was in love with Fanny Brawne."

He paused abruptly. He was seized by an idea, a rushing irresistible

idea that lifted him off his feet and whirled him suddenly into a

region of light, tumultuous and profound. Keats was in love when he

doubted. Could that be the explanation of his own misgiving?

"That," he said hastily, "that's another thing altogether. Any way, if

you don't believe in yourself, you'll have some difficulty in making

other people believe in you."

"And if other people _do_ believe in you, before you believe in

yourself?"

"Before? It might be done before, but not after. You may make a man

conceited, but you can't give him back the conceit he had on Saturday,

if he's lost it all by Monday."

"That means that you know you've written a beautiful thing and you

only think you'll never write another."

"Perhaps it does." (He had to keep it up for the pleasure of hearing

her say she believed in him.)

"Well, I don't suppose you will write another _Helen in Leuce_."

"I'm afraid not." He went on to tell her that the wonder was how he

wrote the thing at all. It had been done anyhow, anywhere, in

successive bursts or spasms of creative energy; the circumstances of

his life (he referred to them with some diffidence) not being exactly

favourable to sustained effort. "How did _you_ feel about it?" he

inquired.

"I can hardly tell you. I think I felt as you feel about anything

beautiful that comes to you for the first time. I don't know what it

is you've done. It's as if something had been done to me, as if I'd

been given a new sense. It's like hearing Beethoven or Wagner for the

first time." As she spoke she saw the swift blood grow hot in his

face, she saw the slight trembling of the hand that propped his chin

and she thought, "Poor fellow, so much emotion for a little praise?"

"What did you mean by it?" she said.

He considered a moment--as who should say "What the dickens did I mean

by it?"

Lucia leaned back now, for the first time, in the breathing space he

gave her, attentively watching the man she proposed to make her

secretary; and as she watched him she found herself defending him

against her own criticism. If he dropped his aitches it was not

grossly as the illiterate do; she wouldn't go so far as to say he

_dropped_ them; he slipped them, slided them; it was no more than a

subtle slur, a delicate elision. And that only in the commoner words,

the current coin of his world. He was as right as possible, she

noticed, in all words whose acquaintance he had made on his own

account. And his voice--his voice pleaded against her prejudice with

all its lyric modulations. Much may be forgiven to such voices. And

there were other points in his favour.

Kitty was right. He was nice to look at. She was beginning to know the

changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features

became suddenly subtle and serious and straight. At the moment his

eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under

the shadow of the eye-bone. But when he grew excited (as he frequently

did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at

you, then light, then fire. That was what they were doing now; for now

he let himself go.

His Helen, he said, was the eternal Beauty, the eternal Dream. Beauty

perpetually desirous of incarnation, perpetually unfaithful to flesh

and blood; the Dream that longs for the embrace of reality, that

wanders never satisfied till it finds a reality as immortal as itself.

Helen couldn't stay in the house of Theseus, or the house of Menelaus

or the house of Priam. Theseus was a fool if he thought he would take

her by force, and Paris was a fool if he thought he could keep her for

pleasure; and Menelaus was the biggest fool of all if he expected her

to bear him children and to mind his house. They all do violence to

the divinity in her, and she vindicates it by eluding them. Her

vengeance is the vengeance of an immortal made victim to mortality.

Helen of Argos and Troy is the Dream divorced from reality.

"Yes--yes. I see." She leaned back in her chair, fascinated, while the

wonderful voice went on, covering its own offences with exquisite

resonances and overtones.

"This divorce is the cause of all the evil that can happen to men and

women. Because of it Helen becomes an instrument in the hands of

Aphrodite--Venus Genetrix--do you see? She's the marriage-breaker, the

destroyer of men. She brings war and pestilence and death. She is the

supreme illusion. But _Helen in Leuce_ is the true Helen. In Leuce,

you know, she appears as she is, in her divine form, freed from the

tyranny of perpetual incarnation. I can't explain it, but that's the

idea. Don't you see how the chorus in praise of Aphrodite breaks off

into a prayer for deliverance from her? And at the end I make Athene

bring Helen to Achilles, who was her enemy in Troy.--That's part of

the idea, too."

"And Achilles?"

"Achilles is strength, virility, indestructible _will_."

It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling

purified his speech, and as he pronounced these words every accent was

irreproachable. A lyric exaltation seemed to have seized him as it had

seized him in the reading of Sophocles.

"The idea is reconciliation, the wedding of the Dream to reality. I

haven't made up my mind whether the last chorus will be the

Epithalamium or the Hymn to Pallas Athene."

He paused for reflection, and in reflection the lyric rapture died.

He added pensively. "The 'Ymn, I think."

Lucia averted her ardent gaze before the horror in his young blue

eyes. They were the eyes of some wild winged creature dashed down from

its soaring and frenzied by the fall. Lucia could have wept for him.

"Then this," said she, feigning an uninterrupted absorption in the

manuscript, "this is not what my cousin saw?"

"No, h--he only saw the first draft of the two first Acts. It was

horribly stiff and cold. He said it was classical; I don't know what

he'd say it is now. I began it that way, and it finished itself this

way, and then I re-wrote the beginning."

"I see. I see. Something happened to you." As she spoke she still kept

her eyes fixed on the manuscript, as if she were only reading what was

written there. "You woke up--in the middle of the second Act, wasn't

it?--and came to life. You heard the world--the real world--calling to

you, and Helen and Achilles and all the rest of them turned to flesh

and blood on your hands."

"Yes," he said, "they were only symbols and I'd no notion what they

meant till they left off meaning it."

She looked from the manuscript to him. "You know in your heart you

_must_ be certain of yourself. And yet--I suspect the trouble with you

is that _your_ dream is divorced from reality."

He stared in amazement at the young girl who thus interpreted him to

herself. At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination. There

were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but

she had seized on the essential. It had been as she had said. That

first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer of

classic form, the dreamer who found in his dreams escape from the

grossness of his own lower nature and from the brutalities of the

world he lived in. A great neo-classic drama was to be his protest

against modernity and actuality. Then came an interval of a year in

which he learnt many things that are not to be found in books, or

adequately expressed through neo-classic drama; and the thing was

finished and re-written at a time when, as she had said, something

had happened to him; when that same gross actual world was making its

claims felt through all his senses. And he was suffering now the deep

melancholy of perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams but

aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality. That was

so; but how on earth did she know it?

"It's hardly a divorce," he said, laughing. "I think it's separation

by mutual consent."

"That's a pity," said she, "life is so lovable."

"I don't always find it either lovable or loving. But then it's life

in a fifth-rate boarding-house in Bloomsbury--if you know what that

is."

She did not know what that was, and her silence suggested that she

conceived it to be something too unpleasant to discuss with him.

"I work eight hours a day in my father's shop--"

"And when your work is done?"

"I go back to the boarding-house and dine."

"And after dinner?"

Mr. Rickman became visibly embarrassed. "Oh, after dinner, there are

the streets, and the theatres, and--and things."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing. Except a club I belong to."

"That's something, isn't it? You make friends."

"I don't know anybody in it, except Mr. Jewdwine; and I don't really

know him. It's the shop, you know. You forget the shop."

"No I don't forget it; but I wish you would. If only you could get

away from it, away from everything. If you could get away from London

altogether for a while."

"If--if? I shall never get away."

"Why not? I've been thinking it over. I wonder whether things could

not be made a little easier for you? You ought to make your peace with

the world, you know. Supposing you could go and live where the world

happens to be beautiful, in Rome or Florence or Venice, wouldn't that

reconcile you to reality?"

"It might. But I don't see how I'm to go and live there. You see

there's the shop. There always is the shop."

"Would it be impossible to leave it for a little while?"

"Not impossible, perhaps; but"--he smiled, "well--highly imprudent."

"But if something else were open to you?"

"Nothing else is, at present. Most doors seem closed pretty tight

except the one marked Tradesmen's Entrance."

"You can't 'arrive' by that."

"Not, I admit, with any dignity. My idea was to walk up the

steps--there are a great many steps, I know--to the big front door and

keep on knocking at it till they let me in."

"I'm afraid the front door isn't always open very early in the day.

But there may be side doors."

"I don't know where to find them. And if I did, they would be bolted,

too."

"Not the one I am thinking of. Would you like to go abroad, to Italy?"

"There are a great many things I should like to do, and not the

remotest chance of doing them."

"Supposing that you got the chance, some way--even if it wasn't quite

the best way--would you take it?"

"The chance? I wish I saw one!"

"I think I told you I was going abroad to join my father. We shall be

in Italy for some time. When we are settled, in Rome, for the winter,

I shall want a secretary. I'm thinking of editing my grandfather's

unpublished writings, and I can't do this without a scholar's help. It

struck me that if you want to go abroad, and nothing better turns up,

you might care to take this work for a year. For the sake of seeing

Italy."

Seeing Italy? Italy that he had once desired with all his heart to

see. And now it was nothing to him that he would see Italy; the point

was that he would see her. Talk of open doors! It was dawning on him

that the door of heaven was being opened to him. He could say nothing.

He leaned forward staring at his own loosely clasped hands.

She mistook his silence for hesitation, and it was her turn to become

diffident and shy. "The salary would not be very large, I'm afraid--"

The salary? He smiled. She had opened the door of heaven for him and

she actually proposed to pay him for walking in!

"But there would be no expenses, and you would have space and time. I

should not want your help for more than three or four hours in the

morning. After that you would be absolutely free."

And still he said nothing. But the fine long nervous hands tortured

each other in their clasp. So this was what came of keeping up the

farce?

"Of course," she said, "you must think it over."

"Miss Harden, I don't know how to thank you. I don't know what to

say."

"Don't say anything. Think."

"I don't know what to think."

But he was thinking hard; trying to realize where he was and what was

being proposed to him. To have entertained the possibility of such a

proposal in the middle of last week would have argued that he was

drunk. And here he was indubitably, conspicuously sober. Sober? Well,

not exactly. He ought never to have taken that little cup of black

coffee! Was there any difference between drinking champagne with Miss

Poppy Grace and drinking coffee with Lucia Harden, when the effect was

so indistinguishably the same? Or rather, for completeness and

splendour of hallucination there was no comparison. He was drunk,

drunk as he had never been drunk before, most luminously, most

divinely intoxicated with that little cup of black coffee.

And yet her scheme was entirely in keeping with that ideal and

fantastic world he lived in; a world which in the last six days had

yet, for him, the illusion of reality. He was aware that it _was_

illusion. An illusion which she blindly shared.

He was overcome by the appalling extent of his knowledge and her

ignorance. She thought she was rich; he knew that she was in all

probability poor. She thought a hundred a year (or thereabouts) an

insignificant sum; he knew that before long she might have less than

that to live on. She thought herself at the present moment a wise and

understanding woman. He knew that she was a child. A child playing

with its own beautiful imagination.

He wondered how much of him she understood. Should he tell her that

she did not understand him at all; that she was engaging as her

private secretary a young man who drank, who was quite shockingly

drunk no longer ago than the middle of last week; a young man who was

an intimate friend of a lady whom it was impossible to describe

accurately in her presence? Or did she understand him better than he

understood himself? Had she, with her child's innocence, the divine

lucidity of a child? Did she fail to realize his baser possibilities

because they were the least real part of him? Or was she, in this,

ideal and fantastic too?

Whichever it was, her fascination was so persuasive that he found

himself yielding to her proposal as if it were the most natural thing

in the world. He accepted it as humbly, as gratefully, as gravely, as

if it were a thing actually in her power to bestow. If he could have

suspected her of any intention to patronize him, he could not have

resented it, knowing as he did its pathetic impotence.

"I know it isn't the best way," she said, "but it _is_ a way.

"It's a glorious way."

"I don't know about the glory. But you will see Florence and Venice

and Rome, and they are glorious."

Yes, he would see them, if she said so. Why not? In this ideal and

fantastic world, could any prospect be more ideal and fantastic than

another?

"And you will have plenty of time to yourself. You will be a great

deal alone. Too much alone perhaps. You must think of that. It might

really be better for you to stay in London where you are beginning to

make friends."

Was she trying to break it to him as gently, as delicately as possible

that there would be no intimacy between him and her? That as her

private secretary his privacy would be painfully unbroken?

She saw it and corrected herself. "Friends, I mean, who may be able to

help you more. You must choose between the two advantages. It will be

a complete break with your old life."

"That would be the best thing that could happen to me."

This time she did not see. "Well--don't be in a hurry. There isn't any

hurry. Remember, it means a whole year out of your life."

A whole year out of his life? Was that the way she looked at it?

Yes. She was giving him his chance; but she did not conceive herself

to be giving him anything more. She understood him sufficiently to

trust him; her insight went so far and no farther. She actually

believed that there could be a choice for him between seeing her every

day for a whole year and never seeing her again. Evidently she had not

the remotest conception of his state of mind. He doubted whether it

could have occurred to her to allow for the possibility of her private

secretary falling in love with her in the innermost privacy of his

secretaryship. He saw that hers was not the order of mind that

entertains such possibilities on an intimate footing. She was

generous, large-sighted; he understood that she would let herself be

carried away on the superb sweep of the impersonal, reckless of

contingencies. He also understood that with this particular private

secretary she would consider herself safe. The social difference was

as much her protection as some preposterous incompatibility of age.

And as if that were not enough, in their thoughts they were so akin

that she might feel herself guarded from him by some law of spiritual

consanguinity.

"Oh, my life--" he said with a queer short laugh that sounded like a

sob,--"well, I must be getting back to my work."

"You are _not_ going to work again to-night?"

"I must." Yet he did not get up to go. He seemed to be waiting to say

something. "I--I haven't thanked you. I don't know how to."

"Don't try. I've done nothing. There is little that one person can do

for another."

"There's something that you might do for me--some day--if I might

ask--if you would."

"What is that?"

She followed his gaze as it travelled into the depth of the room

beyond the circle of the lamp-light, where the grand piano stood. Its

keyboard shone in an even band of white, its massive body merged in

the gleaming darkness.

"If you would play to me--some day."

"I will play to you with pleasure." Her voice sounded as if she were

breathing more freely; perhaps she had wondered what on earth he was

going to say. "Now, if you like."

Why not? If she had enjoyed his music, had he not a right to enjoy

hers? Why should she not give him that little pleasure, he who had so

few?

"What shall I play?"

"I should like to hear that thing you were playing the other night."

"Let me think. Oh, the Sonata Appassionata."

"Yes, if it isn't too late." The moment he had said it he reflected

that that was a scruple that might have been better left to the lady.

He watched her grey-white figure departing into the dusk of the room.

He longed to follow, but some fear restrained him. He remained where

he was, leaning back in the deep chair under the lamp while she sat

down there in the dusk, playing to him the Sonata Appassionata.

The space around the lamp grew dim to him; she had gathered into

herself all the whiteness of the flame; the music was a part of her

radiance, it was the singing of her pulses, the rhythm of her breath.

When she had stopped playing he rose and held out his hand to say

good-night.

"Thank you. I don't think so badly of my life now. You've given me one

perfect moment."

"Are you so fond of music?"

She was about to ring when he prevented her.

"Please don't ring. I can find my way. I'd rather."

She judged that he desired to keep the perfection of his moment

unimpaired. She understood his feeling about it, for the Sonata

Appassionata is a most glorious and moving composition, and she had

played it well.

It was true that he desired to be alone; and he took advantage of his

solitude to linger in the picture gallery. He went down the double

row of portraits that began with Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals,

and ended with Sir Frederick, the father of Lucia. He paused at each,

searching for Lucia's likeness in the likeness of those dead and gone

gentlemen and ladies; gentlemen with grave and intellectual faces,

some peevish, others proud (rather like Jewdwine), ladies with faces

joyous, dreamy, sad, voluptuous, tender and insipid, faces alike only

in their indestructible racial distinction. Lucia had taken nothing

from them but what was beautiful and fine; hers was the deep-drawn

unconscious beauty of the race; beauty of flesh and blood purified,

spiritualized in its passage through the generations, beauty that

gives the illusion of eternity, being both younger and older than the

soul. It was as if Nature had become Art in the making of Lucia,

forming her by the subtlest processes of selection and rejection.

Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern

portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room. Sir

Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously,

incredibly like his daughter's (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue

eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference). His eyebrows had a

far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth

and eyes. And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross

and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested

Lucia's with its long-drawn subtle curve.

He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door.

Lucia stood beside him. She had a lamp in her hand which she raised

for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait. Her own

face appeared as if illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of

love.

"That is my father," she said simply, and passed on.

He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the

frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no

affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.

"There are some things," he said to himself, "that she could never

see."

CHAPTER XXV

If Lucia was not, as her father had pronounced her, the worst educated

young woman in Europe, there was a sense (not intended by Sir

Frederick) in which her education might be called incomplete. She had

learnt the things that she liked, and she had left unlearnt the things

that she did not like. It was the method of discreet skipping; and it

answered so well in the world of books that she had applied it to the

world of men and women. She knew the people she liked, and she left

unknown those whom she did not like. Here in Harmouth her peculiar art

or instinct of selection earned for her, as Kitty Palliser had lately

told her, the character of exclusiveness. This, by the way was family

tradition again. From time immemorial there had been a certain

well-recognized distance between Court House and the little Georgian

town. And when Harmouth was discovered by a stock-broker and became a

watering-place, and people began to talk about Harmouth society, Court

House remained innocently unaware that anything of the sort existed.

Lucia selected her friends elsewhere with such supreme fastidiousness

that she could count them on the fingers of one hand, her instinct,

like all great natural gifts, being entirely spontaneous and

unconscious.

And now it seemed she had added Mr. Savage Keith Rickman to the list.

She owned quite frankly that in spite of everything she liked him.

But Rickman was right. Lucia with all her insight had not the remotest

conception of his state of mind. The acquaintance had arisen quite

naturally out of her desire to please Horace, and if on this there

supervened a desire to please Mr. Rickman, there was not a particle

of vanity in it. She had no thought of being Mr. Rickman's

inspiration; her attitude to his genius was humbly reverent, her

attitude to his manhood profoundly unconscious. She had preserved a

most formidable innocence. There had been nothing in Horace Jewdwine's

slow and well-regulated courtship to stir her senses, or give her the

smallest inkling of her own power that way. Kitty's suggestion seemed

to her preposterous; it was only the Kittishness of Kitty, and could

have no possible application to herself.

All this was not humility on her part--nothing of the sort. So far

from being humble, Miss Lucia Harden held the superb conviction that

any course she adopted was consecrated by her adoption. It was as if

she had been aware that her nature was rich, and that she could afford

to do what other women couldn't; "there were ways," she would say, "of

doing them."

And in Mr. Savage Keith Rickman she had divined a nature no less

generously gifted. He could afford to take what she could afford to

offer; better still, he would take just so much and no more. With some

people certain possibilities were moral miracles; and her instinct

told her that this man's mind was incapable of vulgar misconception.

She was safe with him. These things she pondered during that brief

time when Rickman lingered in the portrait gallery.

He saw her again that night for yet another moment. Lucia was called

back into the picture gallery by the voice of Kitty Palliser, whose

return coincided with his departure. Kitty, from the safe threshold of

the drawing-room, looked back after his retreating figure.

"Poor darling, he has dressed himself with care."

"He always does. He has broken every literary convention."

Lucia drew Kitty into the room and shut the door.

"Has he been trying any more experiments in diminished friction on

polished surfaces?"

"No; there was a good deal more repose about him after you left. The

friction was decidedly diminished. What do you think of him?"

"Oh, I rather like the way he drops his aitches. It gives a pathetic

piquancy to his conversation."

"Don't Kitty."

"I won't. But, after all, how do we know that this young man is not a

fraud?"

"How do we know anything?"

"Oh, if you're going to be metaphysical, _I_'m off to my little bed."

"Not yet, Kitty. Sit down and toast your toes. I want to talk to you."

"All right, fire away."

But Lucia hesitated; Kitty was in an unpropitious mood.

"What do you think I've done?" she said.

Kitty's green eyes danced merrily; but in spite of their mockery Lucia

told her tale.

"It was the best I could do," said she.

Kitty's eyes had left off dancing.

"Lucia, you _can't_. It's impossible. You must _not_ go on being so

kind to people. Remember, dear, if he is a heaven-born genius, he's

not--he really _is_ not a gentleman."

"I know. I've thought of that. But if he isn't a gentleman, he isn't

the other thing. He's something by himself.

"I admit he's a genius, but--he drops his aitches."

"He doesn't drop half as many as he did. He only does it when he's

flustered. And I won't let him be flustered. I shall be very kind to

him."

"Oh," groaned Kitty, "there's no possible doubt about that."

"On the whole I think I'm rather glad he isn't a gentleman. He would

be much more likely to get in my way if he were. I don't believe this

little man would get in my way. He's got eyes at the back of his head,

and nerves all over him; he'd see in a minute when I didn't want him.

He'd see it before I did, and be off."

"You don't know. You might have to be very unpleasant to him before

you said good-bye."

"No, I should never have to be unpleasant to him; because he would

know that would be very unpleasant for me."

"All this might mean that he was a gentleman; but I'm afraid it only

means that he's a genius."

"Genius of that sort," said Lucia, "comes to very much the same

thing." And Kitty reluctantly admitted that it did. She sat silent for

some minutes gazing into the fire.

"Lucia, does it never occur to you that in your passion for giving

pleasure you may be giving a great deal of pain?"

"It doesn't occur to me that I'm giving either in this case; and it

will not occur to him. He knows I'm only giving him his chance. I owe

it him. Kitty--when you only think what I've done. I've taken this

wonderful, beautiful, delicate thing and set it down to the most

abominable drudgery for three weeks. No wonder he was depressed. And I

took his Easter from him--Kitty--think--his one happy breathing-time

in the whole hateful year."

"Whitsuntide and Christmas yet remain."

"They're not at all the same thing."

"That's you, Lucy, all over; you bagged his Bank Holiday, and you

think you've got to give him a year in Italy to make up."

"Not altogether to make up."

"Well, I don't know what to say. There's no doubt you can do a great

many things other women can't; still, it certainly seems a risky thing

to do."

"How risky?"

"I don't want to be coarse, but--I'm not humbugging this

time--supposing, merely supposing--he falls in love with you, what

then?"

"But he won't."

"How do you know?"

"Because he's in love already, in love with perfection."

"But as he'll be sure to identify perfection with you--"

"He will see very little of me."

"Then he's all the more likely to."

"Kitty, _am_ I the sort of woman who allows that sort of thing to

happen--with that sort of man?"

"My dear, you're the sort of woman who treats men as if they were

disembodied spirits, and that's the most dangerous sort I know. If

I'm not mistaken Mr. Savage Keith Rickman's spirit is very much

embodied."

"What _is_ the good of trying to make me uncomfortable when it's all

settled? I can't go back on my word."

"No, I suppose you've got to stick to it. Unless, of course, your

father interferes."

"Father never interferes. Did you ever know him in his life refuse me

anything I wanted?"

"I can't say I ever did." Kitty's tone intimated that perhaps it would

have been better if he sometimes had. "Still, Sir Frederick objects

strongly to people who interfere with him, and he may not care to have

the young Savage poet, or poet Savage, hanging about."

"Father? He won't mind a bit. He says he's going to take part of the

Palazzo Barberini for six months. It's big enough to hold fifty

poets."

"Not big enough to hold one like Mr. Savage Keith Rickman." Kitty rose

to her feet; she stood majestic, for the spirit of prophecy was upon

her; she gathered herself together for the deliverance of her soul.

"You say he won't be in the way. He will. He'll be most horribly in

the way. He'll go sliding and falling all over the place, and dashing

cups of coffee on the marble floor of the Palazzo; he'll wind his feet

in the tails of your best gowns, not out of any malice, but in sheer

nervous panic; he'll do unutterable things with soup--I can see him

doing them."

"I can't."

"No. I know you can't. I don't say you've no imagination; but I _do_

say you're deficient in a certain kind of profane fancy."

CHAPTER XXVI

It was extraordinary; if he had given himself time to reflect on it he

might even have considered it uncanny, the peace that had settled on

him with regard to the Harden Library.

It remained absolutely unshaken by the growing agitation of his

father's letters. Isaac wrote reproachfully, irritably, frantically,

and received only the briefest, most unsatisfactory replies. "I can't

tell you anything more than I have. But I wouldn't be in a hurry to

make any arrangements with Pilkington, if I were you." Not the

smallest reference to the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace or the

_Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde.

Why indeed should he trouble himself? He couldn't understand his

father's state of mind. He had now a positive intuition that Sir

Frederick would recover in the manner of a gentleman whose motto was

_Invictus_; an infinite assurance was conveyed by that tilted

faun-like smile. He even found himself believing in his own delightful

future as Miss Harden's private secretary, so entirely had he

submitted to the empire of divine possibility.

Meanwhile he redoubled his attentions to the catalogue. (Could there

be anything more unreasonable than that catalogue _raisonné_?) He had

frequently got up and worked at it for an hour or two before

breakfast, lifted out of bed by the bounding of his heart. But whereas

he had been in the habit of leaving it at any time between nine

o'clock and midnight, he now sat up with it till the small hours of

the morning. This extreme devotion was necessary if he was to finish

it by the twenty-seventh. It was now the fifteenth.

He had told Miss Harden that he could work better by himself, and

apparently she had taken him at his word; she had left him to finish

the catalogue alone. As it happened he didn't work a bit better by

himself. What with speculating on the chance of her appearing,

listening for her voice and her footsteps on the stairs, or the

distant sound of her playing, to say nothing of his desperate efforts

not to stare out of the windows when he knew her to be in the garden,

Lucia absent was even more disturbing than Lucia on the spot. He tried

to console himself with the reflection that she was no longer

overworking herself; and herein appeared the great purity and

self-abnegation of Mr. Rickman's love. Rather than see her making

herself ill, he was actually manoeuvring so as not to see her at all.

He kept his vigils secret, having a suspicion that if she heard of

them she would insist on returning to her hideous task.

To this end he devised an ingenious system of deceit. He left off work

for an hour every afternoon, alleging his need of air and exercise. He

then asked permission to sit up a little later than usual by way of

making good the time thus lost. He knew that by eleven the lights

would be out, and Lucia and the servants all in bed. He demanded black

coffee to keep him awake and the key of the side door to let himself

out. All on the understanding that he would leave the house by

half-past eleven or twelve at the latest. He could thus put in a good

five hours extra without any one being any the wiser; and four o'clock

would find Mr. Rickman stealing back to his hotel over the grey and

dewy grass.

For three days and three nights love's miraculous energy sustained

him. On the fourth night he was overcome by a slight fatigue, and at

one o'clock he lay down on the hearth rug to sleep, registering in his

brain his intention to wake punctually at two.

And for three days and three nights Lucia hardly gave a thought to Mr.

Rickman. She was busy with preparations for her departure, trying to

see as much of Kitty Palliser as possible, and thinking a great deal

of that adorable father whom she would meet on the twenty-seventh.

Lucia's room, as Mr. Rickman knew, was in the west wing, over the

south-west end of the library, and from her window she could see the

pale yellow green shaft of light that Mr. Rickman's lamp flung across

the lawn. The clock on the stable belfry struck the hours one by one,

and Lucia, fast asleep, never knew that the shaft of light lay there

until the dawn.

On the fourth night, the night of Thursday, the fifteenth, Lucia did

not sleep so well. She dreamed, but her dreams were too light and

transparent to veil the reality that lay on the waking side of them.

Three times that night she started on her journey to Cannes, three

times she missed her train, and three times she said to herself, "It's

only a dream, so of course it doesn't matter." When, after prodigious

efforts extending over interminable time, she found herself on

Harmouth platform, shuddering in her nightgown before a whole train

full of people, she was not in the least disconcerted, because of her

perception of that reality behind her dream; no, not even when Mr.

Rickman appeared just as she was saying to herself, "It doesn't

matter. This is only the fifteenth and I don't really start till the

twenty-sixth." His presence was so transparent, so insubstantial, that

it didn't seem to matter either. He said, "Miss 'Arden, you've made a

miscalculation. You must start this minute if you're to be there in

time." His statement seemed to her to be founded on some solid

reality; but when she asked him what he was doing there, he spoilt it

all by saying that as private secretary he was in charge of the

expedition. By that, and by something unnatural and absurd in his

appearance, she knew that she was dreaming. Then, for more time than

she could measure, she lay watching herself dream, with a curious

sense of being able to foretell and control the fantastic procession

of events.

And now she was aware of something that moved with their movement, a

trouble or a terror that hovered out there, not on the waking border

but in the region of reality that lay on the other side. Almost

discernible behind the transparent insubstantial walls of sleep, it

waited to break through them and invade her dream. For refuge from it

she plunged deeper into her dream. She came out walking on a terrace

of grey grass set with strange clusters of swords, sharp-pointed and

double-edged. Tall grey trees shot up into a grey white sky; they

were coated with sharp scales, grey and toothed like the scales of a

shark's skin; and some bore yet more swords for branches, slender and

waving swords; and some, branchless, were topped with heads of curled

scimitars, the blades pointing downwards. All these scaly, spiky,

two-edged things stood out piercing and distinct against the grey; and

she knew that they were aloes and palm-trees, and that she had come to

the end of her journey and was walking in the garden of the Villa des

Palmes. And the thing she dreaded was still waiting a little way

beyond the garden, beyond the insubstantial walls; it was looking for

her, crying after her, it stretched out its arms to draw her from her

sleep.

A little twilight wind came creeping over the grey grass, it covered

her feet like water, it rose higher and higher above the sword points

of the aloes, and she sank in it and floated, floated and sank. And

now it tossed and rolled and shook the palm-trees till all their

blades rattled like steel; and beyond the wind she heard the calling

of the thing she feared, the thing that had hunted her from dream to

dream. She feared it no longer; she too was looking and crying; all

her desire was to find what she had feared; to answer it, to see it

face to face. Her body was clasped tight by the arms of the wind; yet

her yearning was so strong that she struggled with them and flung them

from her, breaking through the bonds and barriers of sleep.

Lucia was awake and accounting for her dream. The weather had changed

in the night, and a cold wind was rushing through the open window on

to her bed. She had been lying with her feet uncovered, and the

bed-clothes heaped on to her chest. She had been waked by the rattling

of a loosened lattice in the room below. She got out of bed and looked

out of the window. There was a vast movement in the sky, as if the

darkness were being visibly upheaved and rolled away westwards by the

wind. Over the garden was the dense grey blackness of an obliterated

dawn. The trees, not yet detached from the ground of night, showed

like monstrous skeletons of the whole immense body of gloom, while the

violent rocking of their branches made them one with that dark and

wandering tumult of cloud and wind.

The shaft of light no longer lay upon the lawn; Mr. Rickman's lamp

was out; therefore, she argued, Mr. Rickman had gone; having, in the

recklessness of his genius, forgotten to close the library windows.

One of the west windows creaked and crashed by turns as it swung

heavily in its leaded frame. Lucia put on her dressing gown and

slippers, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went down to

fasten the lattice. A small swinging lamp gave light to the hall and

staircase. A gleam followed her into the library; it lay in a pool

behind her, its thin stream lost in the blackness of the floor. She

could distinguish nothing in the room but the three dim white busts on

their dusky pedestals. Behind the latticework the window panes were

like chequered sheets of liquid twilight let down over the face of the

night.

The wind held the open lattice backwards, and she had some difficulty

in reaching the hasp. A shallow gust ran over the floor, chilling her

half-naked feet. As she leaned out on the sill a great fear came over

her, the fear that had always possessed her in childhood at the coming

and passing of the night. As she struggled with the lattice, she had a

sense of pulling it against some detaining hand. It swung slowly round

and the figure of a man slid with it side-long, and stood behind it

looking in. The figure seemed to lean forward out of the darkness; its

face, pressed close against the panes, was vivid, as if seen in a

strong daylight. She saw the flame of its red moustache and hair, the

flicker of its faun-like tilted smile. Its eyes were fixed piercingly

on hers.

It stood so for the space of six heart-beats. The window slipped from

her hand and swung back on its hinges. The cloud was heaved from the

edges of the world, and face and figure were wiped out by the great

grey sweep of the dawn. Lucia (strangely as it seemed to her

afterwards) was not startled by the apparition, but by the aspect of

the world it had appeared in. She stood motionless, as if afraid of

waking her own fear; she caught the lattice, drew it towards her and

deliberately secured it by the hasp. She turned with relief from the

terrible twilight of the windows to the darkness of the room. She

crossed it with slow soft footsteps, lest she should give her terror

the signal to pursue.

There was a slight stir on the hearth as a mound of ashes sank and

broke asunder, opening its dull red heart.

Lucia turned in the direction of the sound, came forward and saw that

she was not alone.

Stretched on the rug in front of the fireplace with his feet towards

her lay Mr. Rickman.

Her first feeling was of relief, protection, deliverance. She stood

looking at him, finding comfort in the sheer corporeality of his

presence. But as she looked at him that emotion merged in concern for

Mr. Rickman himself. He lay on his back in a deep sleep; one arm was

flung above his head, the hand brushing back his damp hair; his

forehead was beaded with the thick sweat of exhaustion. He must have

been lying so for hours, having dropped off to sleep when the night

was still warm. He had thrown back his coat and loosened his

shirt-collar, and lay undefended from the draught that raked the

floor. The window at this end of the room had been left open too, and

the fire was almost dead.

Lucia looked doubtfully at the window. She knew its ways; it sagged on

its hinges and was not to be shut without the grating shriek of iron

upon stone. She looked, still more doubtfully, at Mr. Rickman. His

face in the strange light showed white and sharp and pathetically

refined.

And as she looked her heart was filled with compassion for the

helpless sleeper. She moved very softly to the fireplace, where an oak

chest stood open stored with wood; she gathered the embers together

and laid on them a few light logs. The first log dropped through the

ashes to the hearth, and Mr. Rickman heaved a deep sigh and turned on

his side.

Lucia knelt there motionless, till his breathing assured her that he

still slept. With swift noiseless movements she went on building up

the dying fire. The wood crackled; a little flame leapt up, and Mr.

Rickman opened his eyes. For a moment he kept them open, fixed in

sleepy wonder on the woman who knelt beside him by the hearth. He was

obscurely aware that it was Lucia Harden, but his wonder was free from

the more vivid and disturbing element of surprise; for he had been

dreaming about her and was still under the enchantment of his dream.

Never had she seemed more beautiful to him.

Her head was bowed, her face turned from him and shaded by her hair;

and with her hands she tended a dying flame. Her shawl had slipped

from her shoulders, and he saw the delicate curve of her body as she

knelt; it was overlaid by her hair that fell to her hips in a loose

flat braid. He closed his eyes again, feigning abysmal sleep. He kept

guard over his breath, over his eyelids, lest a tremor should startle

her into shame-faced flight. Yet he knew that she had risen and that

her face was set towards him; that she turned from him and then paused

in her going; that she looked at the fire again to make sure of its

burning, and at him to make sure of his sleep (so intently that she

never noticed the white thing which had slipped from her shoulders as

she stood upright); that she stooped to draw his coat more closely

over him. He heard the flowing of her gown, and saw without seeing her

feet shining as she went from him.

And his desire went after her, and the mere bodiless idea of her

became a torment to his body as it had been a joy to his soul.

He took up her shawl which lay there by the hearth and looked at it;

he stroked it, unfolded it, spread it out and looked at it again; he

held it to his face; its whiteness and its tender texture were as

flame to his sight and touch, the scarcely perceptible scent of it

pierced him like a delicate pain. He gathered it up again in a heap

and covered it with kisses. Then, because it made his longing for her

insupportable, he flung it back, that innocent little white shawl, as

if shaking off her touch and her presence.

He rose to his feet and ramped up and down the room savagely, like a

wild animal in a cage. With every thought of Lucia his torment

returned upon him. He tried to think of the whiteness and the beauty

of her soul, and he could think of nothing but the whiteness of her

face and the beauty of her bending body.

He sat down, stretched his arms on the table and laid his miserable

head upon them, all among the pages of the catalogue _raisonné_. He

had passed from his agony of desire to an agony of contrition. He felt

that the very vehemence of his longing was an affront to her white

unconsciousness Up till now he had not admitted that he was "in love"

with Lucia; he was indeed hardly aware of it. He imagined his feeling

for her to be something altogether immaterial and incorruptible. It

now seemed to him that in the last few minutes he had lowered it

almost to the level of the emotion inspired by Miss Poppy Grace. It

was not, and it never could be, what it had been three weeks ago. Why,

he could not even recall his sensations of Easter Sunday, that strange

renewal of his heart's virginity his first vague imperfect vision of

the dawn of love, his joy when he discerned its tender and mysterious

approach. He knew that it held no rights, or held them only on the

most subtle and uncertain tenure, that his soul touched the soul of

Lucia Harden by the extreme tips of its wings stretched to the utmost.

Still his passion for her had been, so far, satisfied by that

difficult and immaterial relationship. He was bound to her by an

immaterial, intangible link.

But he had put an end to that relationship; he had broken the

immaterial, intangible link. It was as if he had given a body to some

delicate and spiritual dream, and destroyed it in a furious embrace.

And in destroying it he had destroyed everything.

Then he reflected that though this deed seemed to belong wholly to the

present moment, it had in reality been done a long time before, when

he first became the slave of that absurd and execrable passion for

Miss Poppy Grace. Rickman the poet had believed in Love, the immortal

and invincible, the highest of high divinities, and as such had

celebrated him in song. But he had been unfortunate in his first

actual experience of him. He had found him, not "pacing Heaven's

golden floor," but staggering across Miss Grace's drawing-room, a most

offensive, fifth-rate, disreputable little god. Of course he knew it

wasn't the same thing, it wasn't the same thing at all. But he was

bound by his past. He had forged a chain of infamous but irresistible

association that degraded love in his eyes, that in his thoughts

degraded _her_. Every hour that he had spent in the little dancer's

society had its kindred with this hour. In his passion for Lucia

Harden there leapt up the passion of that night--that night three

weeks ago. It was then--then--that he had sinned against her.

He had not meant--he had not meant to love her--like that. And yet he

perceived how all along, unremittently, imperceptibly, this passion

had waylaid him and misled him and found him out. It was it that had

drawn him every morning across the fields to Court House, that upheld

him on his giddy perch on the library steps, that chained him to his

chair at the library table and kept him sweating over that abominable

catalogue till four o'clock in the morning. It had looked at him with

so pure and spiritual a face that he had not recognized it. But how

otherwise could he have stayed here for three weeks, fooling with that

unlucky conscience of his; persuading it one minute that he had

nothing to do with Miss Harden, and that her father's affairs were no

business of his, the next that they were so much his business that he

was bound not to betray them; while as for Miss Harden, he had so much

to do with her that it was his duty to stay where he was and protect

her? He had had absolutely no duty in the matter except to tell her

the truth and clear out.

Telling the truth--it ought to have been easy for him who was so

truthful, so passionately sincere. And yet almost anything would have

been easier, for the next step to telling the truth was going away. Of

course he had suffered in staying, but he would have suffered anything

rather than go.

It had been so insidious. His feet had been caught in a net so fine

that he had thought it woven of the hairs split by an exceedingly

acute and subtle conscience. He should have stood still and snapt them

one by one; but he had struggled, until he was so entangled that he

could not get out. And now he perceived that the net which seemed so

fine was the strong net woven by desire. All his subtle reasonings,

his chivalry, his delicacy, his sincerity itself, could be reduced to

this simple and contemptible element. Positively, his whole character,

as he now contemplated it seemed to slip away from him and dissolve in

the irresistible stream, primeval, monstrous, indestructible.

The horror of his position returned upon him, the burden of his

knowledge and her ignorance. If only she knew, if only he could go to

her and tell her everything, all that he knew and all that he guessed!

He was still firm in his conviction that he had no moral right to his

knowledge; it was a thing he almost seemed to have come by

dishonestly. If Miss Harden knew nothing of her father's affairs, it

was to be presumed that they had been purposely kept from her to save

her pain. He had no right to tell her.

No matter, he would tell her, he would tell her this morning, and

having told her, he would go away.

He got up and paced to and fro again. He stood before the open window

till he had chilled himself through; then he came back and cowered

over the fire. A white thing lay by the hearth at his feet, it was

Lucia Harden's shawl, lying crumpled where he had thrown it. It was

the sign and symbol of her presence there. It was also the proof of

it.

How would she feel if she knew that he had been aware of it all the

time? The fact remained that she had risked his waking; there was

comfort for him in that. She had always been kind to him, and he had

never had even a momentary illusion as to the source and the nature of

her kindness. He had taken it, as he had taken her extreme courtesy,

for the measure of the distance that divided them. It showed her

secure in her detachment, her freedom from any intimate thought of

him, from any thought of him at all. But in this last act of kindness

it could hardly be that she had not taken him into consideration. She

could hardly have been pleased if she knew he had been awake, yet she

had risked his waking. Before she risked it she must have credited him

with something of her own simplicity of soul.

And this was how he had repaid her.

He saw her as she had knelt by him, mending the dying fire, as she had

stood looking at him, as she had stooped over him to cover him, and as

she had turned away; and he saw himself, sinning as he had sinned

against her in his heart.

He knew perfectly well that the average man would have felt no

compunction whatever upon this head. To the average man his

imagination (if he has any) is an unreal thing; to Rickman it was the

most real thing about him. It was so young, and in its youth so

ungovernably creative, that it flung out its ideas, as it were, alive

and kicking. It was only partially true of him that his dream was

divorced from reality. For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to

the average man are merely phantoms), projected themselves with a

bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and

authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality

denied to facts. His imagination was in this so far spiritual that it

perceived desire to be the eternal soul of the deed, and the deed to

be but the perishing body of desire. From this point of view, conduct

may figure as comparatively unimportant; therefore this point of view

is very properly avoided by the average man.

Rickman, now reduced to the last degree of humility and contrition,

picked up Lucia's shawl very gently and reverently, and folded it with

care, smoothing out the horrid creases he had made in it. He took it

to the other end of the room and laid it over the back of her chair,

so that it might look to Robert as if his mistress had left it there.

Would he see her again that morning? That depended on the amount of

work that remained for her to do. He looked over her table; her tray

was empty, the slips were pinned together in bundles in the way he had

taught her, Section XII, Poetry, was complete. There was nothing now

to keep her in the library. And he had only ten days' work to do. He

might see her once or twice perhaps on those days; but she would not

sit with him, nor work with him, and when the ten days were over she

would go away and he would never see her again.

Then he remembered that he had got to tell her and go away himself, at

once, this very morning.

Meanwhile he sat down and worked till it was time to go back to his

hotel. He worked mechanically, miserably, oppressed alike by his sense

of his own villainy and of the futility of his task. He did not know

how, when it was ended, he was to take up this kind of work again. He

had only been kept up by his joy in her presence, and in her absence

by the hope of her return. But he could not bear to look into a future

in which she had no part.

CHAPTER XXVII

He found a letter from Dicky Pilkington waiting for him at the hotel.

Dicky's subtlety seemed to have divined his scruples, for he gave him

the information he most wanted in terms whose terseness left very

little room for uncertainty. "Look sharp," wrote Dicky, "and let me

know if you've made up your great mind about that library. If Freddy

Harden doesn't pay up I shall have to put my men in on the

twenty-seventh. Between you and me there isn't the ghost of a chance

for Freddy. I hear the unlucky devil's just cleaned himself out at

Monte Carlo."

The twenty-seventh? It was the day when Miss Harden was to join her

father at Cannes. The coincidence of dates was significant; it

amounted to proof. It meant that Sir Frederick must have long

anticipated the catastrophe, and that he had the decency to spare her

the last painful details. She would not have to witness the invasion

of the Vandals, the overturning of the household gods, and the

defilement of their sacred places.

Well, he thought bitterly, they couldn't be much more defiled than

they were already. He saw himself as an abominable object, a thing

with a double face and an unclean and aitchless tongue, sitting there

from morning to night, spying, calculating, appraising, with a view to

fraud. At least that was how she would think of him when she knew; and

he had got to tell her.

He was on the rack again; and the wonder was how he had ever left it.

It seemed to him that he could never have been long released at any

time. He had had moments of comparative ease, when he could lie on it

at one end of the room and see Lucia sitting at the other, and the

sight of her must have soothed his agony. He had had moments of

forgetfulness, of illusion, when he had gone to sleep on the rack, and

had dreamed the most delicious dreams, moments even of deliverance,

when his conscience, exhausted with the sheer effort of winding, had

dropped to sleep too. And then had come the reckless moments, when he

had yielded himself wholly to the delight of her presence; and that

supreme instant when his love for Lucia seemed to have set him free.

And now it was love itself, furiously accusing, that flung him back

upon the torture, and stretched him out further than he had been

stretched before.

But Dicky's letter had to be answered at once. He settled Dicky for

the present by reminding him that nothing could be done by either of

them till the twenty-seventh. But he thought that if Sir Frederick or

any of his family were unable to pay up, there ought to be no

difficulty in arranging with his father.

To his father he sent a word of warning. "For Goodness' sake don't

commit yourself with Pilkington until you see me. I shall probably be

back in town to-morrow afternoon!"

Having settled Dicky, he breakfasted, bathed, was a little long over

his dressing, taking care that nothing in his appearance should

suggest the dishevelled person of the dawn. Thus he was rather later

than usual in presenting himself at the library. He found Miss Harden

there at his end of the table, with his note-book, busy over his pile

and engaged in finishing his Section--Philosophy. Her clear and candid

eyes greeted him without a shadow of remembrance. She had always this

air of accepting him provisionally, for the moment only, as if her

kindness had no springs in the past and could promise nothing for the

future. He had always found this manner a little distressing, and it

baffled him completely now. Still, in another minute he would have to

tell her, whatever her manner or her mood.

"Miss Harden," he began, "you've been so awfully good to me, there's

something that I want most awfully to say to you."

"Well, say it." But there was that in her tone which warned him not to

be too long about it.

"It's something I ought to have said--to have confessed--ages ago--"

"Oh no, really Mr. Rickman, if it's a confession, you mustn't do it

now. We shall never finish at this rate."

"When may I?"

"Some time in the afternoon, perhaps." Her smile, which was

exceedingly subtle, disconcerted him inexpressibly. She turned at once

to the business of the day. The question was whether he would begin on

a new section, or finish this one with her, writing at her dictation?

He too was calm, business-like, detached. He strangled a happy smile

which suggested that her question was absurd. To start a new section

was to work gloomily by himself, at some distant quarter of the room;

to write to her dictation was to be near her, soothed by her voice and

made forgetful by her eyes. Hypocritically he feigned a minute's

reflection, as if it were a matter for hesitation and for choice.

"Wouldn't you find it less tiring if I read and you wrote?"

"No, I had better read. You can write faster than I can."

So he wrote his fastest, while Lucia Harden read out titles to him in

the sonorous Latin tongue. She was standing ankle-deep in Gnostics and

Neo-Platonists; as for Mr. Rickman, he was, as he observed, out of his

depth there altogether.

"Iamblichus, _De Mysteriis Egyptiorum_. Do you know him?"

Mr. Rickman smiled as he admitted that his acquaintance with

Iamblichus was of the slightest; Lucia laughed as she confessed an

ignorance extending to the very name. He noticed that she always

seemed pleased when she had any ignorance to own up to; had she found

out that this gave pleasure to other people?

"Is he Philosophy, or is he Religion?" She invariably deferred to

Rickman on a question of classification. She handed the book to him.

"Can you tell?"

"I really don't know; he seems to be both. I'd better have a look at

him." He turned over the pages, glancing at the text. "I say, listen

to this."

He hit on a passage at random, and read out the Greek, translating

fluently.

"'If then the presence of the divine fire and the unspeakable form of

the divine light descend upon a man, wholly filling and dominating

him, and encompassing him on every side, so that he can in no way

carry on his own affairs, what sense or understanding or perception of

ordinary matters should he have who has received the divine fire?' Can

he be referring to the business capacity of poets?"

Lucia listened amused. And all the time he was thinking, "If I don't

tell her now I shall never tell her. She'll sneak off with Miss

Palliser somewhere in the afternoon." Neither noticed that Robert had

come in and was standing by with a telegram. Robert gazed at Mr.

Rickman with admiration, while he respectfully waited for the end of

the paragraph; that, he judged, being the proper moment for attracting

his mistress' attention.

Never in all his life would Rickman forget that passage in the _De

Mysteriis_ which he had not been thinking about. As Lucia took the

telegram she was still looking at Rickman and the smile of amusement

was still on her face. Robert respectfully withdrew. Lucia opened the

envelope and Rickman looked down, apparently absorbed in Iamblichus.

He was now considering in what form of words he would tell her.

Then, without looking up, he knew that something had happened. His

first feeling was that it had happened to himself. He could not say

how or why or what was the precise moment of its happening; he only

knew that she had been talking to him, listening to him, smiling at

him, and that then something had swept him on one side and carried her

away, he did not know where, except that it was beyond his reach.

He looked up, startled by a sudden change in her breathing. She was

standing opposite him; she seemed to be keeping herself upright by her

hands pressed palms downwards on the table. The telegram was spread

open there before her; and she was not looking at it; she was looking

straight at him, but without seeing him. Her mouth was so tightly

closed that it might have been the pressure of her lips that drove

the blood from them; she breathed heavily through her nostrils, her

small thin breast heaving without a sob. In her face there was neither

sorrow nor terror, and he could see that there was no thought in her

brain, and that all the life in her body was gathered into her

swollen, labouring heart. And as he looked at her he was pierced with

a great pang of pity.

She stood there so, supporting herself by her hands for about a

minute. He was certain that no sense of his presence reached her

across the gulf of her unknown and immeasurable anguish.

At last she drew her hands from the table, first one, then the other,

slowly, as if she were dragging a weight; her body swayed, and he

sprang to his feet with an inarticulate murmur, and held out one arm

to steady her. At his touch her perishing will revived and her

faintness passed from her. She put him gently aside and went slowly

out of the room.

As he turned to the table the five words of her telegram stared him in

the face: "Your father died this morning."

It would have been horrible if he had told her.

His first thought was for her; and he thanked Heaven that had tied his

tongue. Then, try as he would to realize her suffering, it eluded him;

he could only feel that a moment ago she had been with him, standing

there and smiling, and that now he was alone. He could still feel her

hand pushing against his outstretched arm. There had been nothing to

wound him in that gesture of repulse; it was as if she had accepted

rather than refused his touch, as if her numbed body took from it the

impetus it craved.

There was a sound of hurry and confusion in the house; servants went

up and downstairs, or stood about whispering in the passages. He heard

footsteps in that room above him which he knew to be her room. A bell

rang once; he could feel the vibration of the wire down the wall of

the library. It was her bell and he wondered if she were ill.

Robert rushed in with a wild white face, shaken out of his respectful

calm. He was asking Rickman if he had seen this month's Bradshaw. They

joined in a frenzied search for it.

She was not ill; she was going away.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of wheels grating on the gravel

drive, of the front door being flung open, of her voice, her sweet

quiet voice, then the grating of the wheels again, and she was gone.

That, of course, ended it.

Now for the first time he realized what Sir Frederick's death meant

for himself. In thus snatching her from him in the very crisis of

confession it had taken away his chance of redeeming his dishonour.

If he had only told her!

CHAPTER XXVIII

He did not go back to town on the seventh, after all. He stayed to

finish roughly, brutally almost, with the utmost possible dispatch,

the disastrous catalogue, which would now be required, whatever

happened. Until every book in the library had passed through his hands

he was hardly in a position to give a just estimate of its value. His

father had written again in some perturbation. It seemed that the old

song for which he might obtain the Harden library went to the tune of

one thousand pounds; but Pilkington was asking one thousand two

hundred. "It's a large sum," wrote Isaac, "and without more precise

information than you've given me yet, I can't tell whether we should

be justified in paying it."

That confirmed his worst misgivings. He answered it very precisely

indeed. "We shouldn't be morally justified in paying less than four

thousand for such a collection; and we should make a pretty big profit

at that. But if we can't afford the price we must simply withdraw. In

fact I consider that we ought to hold back in any case until we see

whether Miss Harden or any of her people are going to come forward.

It's only fair to give them the chance. You can expect me on the

twentieth."

Beside writing to his father, he had done the only honest and

straightforward thing that was left for him to do. He had written to

Horace Jewdwine. That was indeed what he ought to have done at the

very first. He could see it now, the simple, obvious duty that had

been staring him in the face all the time. He hardly cared to think

what subtle but atrocious egoism of passion had prevented him from

disclosing to Jewdwine the fact of his presence at Court House; even

now he said nothing about the two weeks that he had spent working with

Jewdwine's cousin. The catalogue _raisonné_ was so bound up with the

history of his passion that the thing had become a catalogue

_raisonné_ of its vicissitudes. Some instinct, not wholly selfish,

told him that the least said about that the better. He wrote on the

assumption that Jewdwine knew (as he might very well have done) the

truth about the Harden library, briefly informing him that they,

Rickman's, had been or rather would be in treaty with Mr. Pilkington

for the purchase; but that he, Savage Keith Rickman, considered it was

only fair to suggest that Mr. Jewdwine or some other member of Sir

Frederick Harden's family should have the option of buying it,

provided it could be so arranged with Mr. Pilkington. As Jewdwine was

probably aware, the library represented security for one thousand

pounds; whereas Rickman estimated its market value at four or even

five times as much. But as Mr. Pilkington was not inclined to let it

go for less than one thousand two hundred, Jewdwine had better be

prepared to offer a little more than that sum. If Jewdwine felt

inclined to act on this suggestion Rickman would be glad if he would

let him know within the next ten days; as otherwise his father would

be obliged to close with Mr. Pilkington in due form after the

twenty-seventh. Would he kindly wire an acknowledgement of the letter?

Jewdwine had wired from London, "Thanks. Letter received; will write."

That was on the seventeenth, and it was now the twenty-seventh and

Jewdwine had not written. Rickman should have been back in London long

before that time; he had allowed himself four days to finish his

horrible work; and he had finished it. But as it happened the end of

twelve days found him still in Harmouth. Seven of them passed without

his being very vividly aware of them, though up till now he had kept a

strict account of time. Two weeks once struck off the reckoning, he

had come down to calculating by days, by hours, by half hours, to

measuring minutes as if they had been drops of some precious liquid

slowly evaporating. And now he had let a whole week go by without

comment, while he lay in bed in his room at the Marine Hotel, doing

nothing, not even sleeping. For seven days Mr. Rickman had been ill.

The broad term nervous fever was considered to have sufficiently

covered all his symptoms.

They were not improved by the discovery that Jewdwine had failed to

give any sign; while the only reply sent by Rickman's was a brief note

from his father to the effect that Keith's letter should have his very

best consideration, and that by the time he saw him he would no doubt

be in a better position to answer it. There was a postcard written on

the twenty-first, inquiring the cause of his non-appearance on the

twentieth. This had been answered by the doctor. It had been followed

by a letter of purely parental solicitude, in which all mention of

business was avoided. Avoided; and it was now the twenty-seventh.

Rickman literally flung from his sick-bed a feverish and illegible

note to Horace Jewdwine. "For God's sake, wire me what you mean to

do," an effort which sent his temperature up considerably. He passed

these days of convalescence in an anxious watching for the post. To

the chambermaid, to the head waiter, to the landlord and landlady of

the Marine Hotel, to the friendly commercial gentleman, who put his

head twice a day round the door to inquire "'ow he was gettin' on,"

Mr. Rickman had during his seven days' illness put the same unvarying

question. These persons had adopted a policy of silence, shaking their

heads or twisting their mouths into the suggestion of a "No," by way

of escape from the poignancy of the situation. But on the afternoon of

the twenty-ninth, Mr. Rickman being for the first time up and dressed,

Tom, the waiter, replied to the accustomed query with a cheerful "No

sir, no letters; but a lady was inquiring for you this morning, sir."

In Tom's mind a lady and a letter amounted to very much the same

thing.

"Do you know who it was?"

"Yes sir, Miss Palliser."

"Miss Parry? I don't know any Miss Parry," said Rickman wearily.

"I didn't say Miss Parry, sir I said Miss Palliser, sir. Wanted to

know 'ow you was; I said you was a trifle better, sir."

"I? I'm all right. I think I shall go out and take a walk." The

violent excitement of his veins and nerves gave him the illusion of

recovered strength.

His walk extended from the hotel door to a seat on the seafront

opposite. He repeated it the next morning with less difficulty, and

even succeeded in reaching a further seat beyond the range of the

hotel windows. There he sat looking at the sea, and watching without

interest the loiterers on the esplanade. At last, by sheer repetition,

three figures forced themselves on his attention; two ladies, one

young, the other middle-aged, and a clergyman, who walked incessantly

up and down. They were talking as they passed him; he caught the man's

steep-pitched organ monotone, "Yes, I shall certainly go up to the

house and see her," and the girl's voice that answered in a hard

bright trill, "You won't see her. She hasn't seen any body but Kitty

Palliser."

The blood boiled in his brain. She? She? Was it possible that they

were talking about her? He sat there debating this question for ten

minutes, when he was aware that he himself had become an object of

intense interest to the three. The two ladies were, in fact, staring

rather hard. The stare of the younger was so wide that it merely

included him as an unregarded detail in the panorama of sea and sky;

but the stare of the elder, a stout lady in a florid gown, was

concentrated, almost passionate; it came straight at him through a

double eye-glass elevated on a tortoiseshell stem. The clergyman

endeavoured to suggest by his attitude that he took no part in the

staring or the talk; he smiled out to sea with an air of beatific

union with Nature.

Harmouth beach is a safe place for scandal; for even a steep-pitched

organ monotone with a brilliant feminine flourish on the top of it are

lost in the accompaniment of the sea. So happily for him no word of

the dialogue reached Rickman. All the same, to have a pair of blank

blue eyes, and a tortoiseshell binocular levelled at him in that

fashion is a little disturbing to a young man just recovering from a

nervous fever; and Rickman got up and dragged himself to the other end

of the esplanade out of the reach of the enemy's fire. Therefore he

did not see that Miss Palliser, who had been watching the scene from a

balcony on the front, had come down and joined the group; neither did

he hear her cheerful replies to a volley of inquiries.

"Yes; I've seen her. Nice day isn't it? What? No, I wouldn't if I

were you. I say, what a swagger eye-glass! Jolly, those long stems,

aren't they? You can stare for ever without pinching your nose or

gouging your next door neighbour's eye out with your elbow--Oh yes,

rather; he's a friend of Horace Jewdwine's. Do observe Tubs bathing;

his figure is not adapted--Did you say a gentleman? Yes, no, yes; ask

somebody else. It entirely depends on the point of view. He's an

awfully good sort. _Really_, Tubs ought to be made to bathe before

breakfast, when there's nobody about. Yes, of course she did. She gave

him the work to please Mr. Jewdwine, I suppose. He's been ill, poor

little beggar; I must go and speak to him."

After having thus first harried, then effectually baffled the enemy,

Miss Palliser started with a swinging stride in pursuit of Mr.

Rickman. He sat alone in an attitude of extreme dejection, on the

stones of an unfinished and forsaken jetty that marked the farthest

western limit of the esplanade. Having turned his back on that public

rendezvous, he was unaware of Miss Palliser's approach until she stood

beside him.

"Glad to see you out again," said she.

He sprang to his feet and raised his hat. At the first sight of his

face Miss Palliser had a shrewd idea of the cause and nature of his

illness.

"Thank you so much for your kind messages. I'm all right again, as you

see."

"I see nothing of the sort, as yet." She had meant to tell him that it

was Lucia who had sent her to inquire; but she thought better of it.

"Oh, well, I ought to get round in this bracing air."

"Harmouth air," said Kitty, "is not particularly bracing. In fact it's

very relaxing. It probably helped you to break down."

"Well, I shall be out of it soon, anyway." He sighed. "Miss Palliser,

can you tell me if Miss Harden has come back?"

"She came back the day before yesterday."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes, I've seen her."

There was a long pause, filled by the insistent clamour of the sea.

His next question was less audible to the outer than to the inner ear.

"How is she?"

Miss Palliser was seldom at a loss for a word; but this time she

hesitated. "She--she is very plucky."

There was another and a longer pause in which neither had the courage

to look at the other.

"Can I--Would it be possible for me to see her?"

Miss Palliser did not answer.

"I wouldn't dream of asking her, except that I've got something on my

mind."

"And she--my dear man, she's got everything on her mind."

"I know. I--I want to see her on business."

Miss Palliser's lithe figure grew rigid. She turned on him a look of

indignation and contempt. "Everybody wants to see her on business. But

some of them have had the grace to wait."

He smiled in the faint tolerant manner of a man so steeped in the

bitterness of the situation that no comment on it can add a further

sting.

"I can't wait. My business hasn't much to do with me; but it has a

great deal to do with Miss Harden."

She looked at him as he spoke. Something in his face and in his voice

too made her feel that her judgement of him had been unspeakably,

unpardonably coarse.

"I beg your pardon," she said gently.

"Oh don't. I'm not surprised that you thought that of me."

"I didn't think it. I don't quite know what I'm saying. I've spent the

last two days trying to keep fools from worrying her. I hate the

people who want to go to her; I hate the people who keep away; I hate

them all. But I'm sorry I spoke like that to you. You look horribly

ill."

"I'm not ill. But I'm nearly out of my mind about this business."

"What is it? Tell me, has it anything to do with the library?

"Yes."

"Well; the library's going to be sold."

"I know. That's what I want to speak to her about."

"There's not a bit of good in speaking to her. There are at this

moment," said Kitty incisively, "two persons in the house who call

themselves the men in possession."

"The brutes--"

"You may as well sit down. You can't turn them out, they're two to

one, and their position is, I believe, legally sound."

"I must go to her at once--I knew this would happen--Miss Palliser, is

any one with her?"

"I am with her. I'm going back to her in a minute; but I want to talk

to you first. Everybody's looking at us, but that can't be helped. Did

you say you _knew_ this would happen?"

"Yes--Miss Palliser, I'm in the most intolerable position with regard

to Miss Harden."

"You knew they were making these arrangements?"

"Oh yes, I knew it all the time I was working for her. What's more,

I'm supposed to be the agent for the sale."

"Well--if it's got to be sold, why not?"

"Well, you see, my father's only an ordinary dealer. I'm about the

only person concerned who knows the real value and I know that it's

been undervalued. Of course, without the smallest dishonesty on Mr.

Pilkington's part."

"Mr. who?" Kitty had not yet heard of Mr. Pilkington.

"Pilkington."

"What's his address?"

He gave it her.

Kitty made a note of the name and address.

"Unfortunately Mr. Pilkington has an absolute right to sell it, and my

father has an absolute right to buy it."

"Well, somebody's got to buy it, I suppose?"

"Yes, but it seems to me we oughtn't to do anything till we know

whether any of Miss Harden's people will come forward."

"She is the last of her people."

"How about Mr. Jewdwine? He's her cousin."

"On her mother's side."

"Still he's her cousin. I wrote to him ten days ago; and I haven't got

any answer as yet."

"What did you say to him?"

"I invited him to step in and buy the library over our heads."

"And how much would he have had to pay for it?"

"Probably more than one thousand two hundred."

"Well--if you think that Mr. Jewdwine is the man to deal so lightly

with two hundred pounds, let alone the thousand! Really, that's the

quaintest thing you've done yet. May I ask if this is the way you

generally do business?"

"No, I can't say that it is."

"Well, well, you were very safe."

"Safe? I don't want to be safe. Don't you see how horrible it is for

me? I'd give anything if he or anyone else would come in now and walk

over us."

"Still, I don't wonder that you got no answer to your very remarkable

proposal."

"It seemed to me a very simple and obvious proposal."

"I don't know much about business," said Kitty, "but I can think of a

much more simple and obvious one. Why can't your people buy in the

library and sell it again for Miss Harden on commission?"

"Do you suppose I haven't thought of that? It would be very simple and

obvious if it rested with me, but I'm afraid my father mightn't see it

in the same light. You see, the thing doesn't lie between Miss Harden

and me, but between my father and Mr. Pilkington."

"I don't understand."

"It's this way. My father won't be buying the library from Miss

Harden, but from Mr. Pilkington. And--my father is a man of business."

"And you most certainly are not."

"So he isn't likely to give any more for it than he can help."

"Of course not."

"Well, but--do you know what the library was valued at?"

Kitty did, and she would have blurted it out had not an inner voice

told her to be discreet for once. He took her silence for a confession

of ignorance.

"Would you think a thousand pounds an absurdly high valuation?"

"I don't know."

Kitty tried to banish all expression from her face. She really knew

very little about business and was as yet unaware of the necessary

publicity of bills of sale. The suspicion crossed her mind that

Rickman, in his father's interests, might be trying to pump her as to

the smallest sum that need be offered.

"Because," he added, "it isn't. Miss Harden stands to lose something

like three thousand pounds by it."

Kitty's evil surmises vanished utterly. "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed,

"how do you make that out?"

"It's only the difference between what the library ought to fetch and

what will be given for it. Of course no dealer could give the _full_

value; still, between one thousand and four thousand there's a

considerable difference."

"And who pockets it?"

"My fa--the dealer, if he succeeds in selling again to the best

advantage. He might not, and my father, as it happens, considers that

he's taking a great risk. But I know more about it than he does, and I

don't agree with him. That's why I don't want him to get hold of those

books if I can help it."

Kitty was thoughtful.

"You see," he continued, "I know he'd like to do what he thinks

generous under the circumstances, but he isn't interested in Miss

Harden, and he _is_ interested in the Harden library. It's a chance

that a dealer like him only gets once in a lifetime and I'm afraid it

isn't in human nature to let it go."

"But," said Kitty wildly, "he _must_ let it go. You must make him. Do

you mean to say you're going to sit and look on calmly while Miss

Harden loses three thousand pounds?"

"I'm not looking on calmly. On the contrary, I've lost my head."

"What's the good of losing your head, if Miss Harden loses her money?

What do you propose to do _besides_ losing your head? Lose time I

suppose? As if you hadn't lost enough already."

"I wrote to Mr. Jewdwine as soon as I heard of Sir Frederick Harden's

death. Still, you're right, I did lose time; and time was everything.

You can't reproach me more than I reproach myself."

"My dear man, I'm not reproaching you. I only want to know what you're

going to _do_?"

"Do? Is there anything left for me to do?"

"Not much, that I can see."

"If I'd only spoken straight out in the beginning--"

"Do you mean to her?"

"To her." He whispered the pronoun so softly that it sounded like a

sigh.

"Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I? I can see it was the one honest thing to do. But I

thought I'd no business to know about her father's affairs if she

didn't; and certainly no business to talk about them."

"No. I don't see how you could have done it."

"All the same I'd made up my mind to do it that morning--when the

telegram came. That stopped me."

"You were well out of it. You don't know what an awful thing it would

have been to do. She worshipped her father. Is this what you've been

making yourself ill about?"

"I suppose so. You know how adorably kind she was to me?"

"I can guess. She is adorably kind to every one," said Kitty, gentle

but astute.

"And, you see, I've behaved dishonourably to her."

"No. I don't see that."

"Don't you? Don't you? Why, my father sent me partly as his agent, and

all the time she believed I was only working for her."

"Did you behave as your father's agent?"

"No. But I let her slave from morning till night over that catalogue."

"Which she would have done in any case."

"Don't you see that I ought to have backed out of it altogether, in

the very beginning?"

"Ah yes--if everybody did what they ought."

"I tried twice, but it was no good. I suppose I didn't try hard

enough."

"What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?"

"That's how I argued. But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn't go

away. Of course, it was an abominable position, but I assure you it

felt like heaven when it didn't feel like 'ell."

His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of

his lapse. And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the

smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.

It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable

confession. But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was

his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered,

made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.

She wondered how it came that, when her mind was as full as it could

be of Lucia and her affairs, it could give such concentrated attention

to him and his. If he had been what the tortoiseshell eye-glass took

him for, a common man, it ought to have been easy and natural to

dismiss him. But she could not dismiss him. There was some force in

him, not consciously exerted, which held her there on that conspicuous

seat beside him under the gaze of the tortoiseshell eye-glass. Kitty

was by no means deficient in what she had called "profane fancy," and

she felt to her finger tips that she was making a spectacle of herself

at the end of the esplanade. Their backs at this moment she knew must

be standing out very clear and bold against the sky-line. But she

herself was losing the keen sense she had once had of his

inappropriateness to the scenes he moved in. Wherever he was he was

natural; he was (she had it in one word) sincere, as few people are

sincere nowadays. He was not a common man. That was it. All along it

had been the justification of their strange proceedings, this fact

that he was not common, that he was indeed unique. On that ground

Lucia had always met him, and she had ignored the rest. Kitty was

trying to sympathize with Lucia.

"But," he went on, simply, "I can't tell her that."

"No, you can't tell her that, but you can tell her everything else.

Look here, supposing that instead of sitting here tearing your

nervous system to tatters you go straight away and do it."

"What will she think of me?"

"Think of you? If she thinks of you at all, she'll bless you for

having spared her father's memory up to the last possible minute."

"Has it occurred to you that my motives are open to the worst

construction?"

"Well, frankly, it has. But it won't occur to Miss Harden. Go to her

and tell her everything."

"After all, what am I to tell her?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter much what you tell her now."

"It matters a great deal to me. I don't want her to think me more

dishonourable than I am."

"Oh, she won't do that."

"Perhaps she can't?"

"Well, you see, I don't know how dishonourable you've been. I only

know if I'd done a dishonourable thing--if I'd done--oh, the most

disgraceful thing I can imagine, a thing I couldn't _possibly_ tell to

anybody else, I wouldn't mind telling Lucia Harden. I should _have_ to

tell her. It wouldn't matter. She's so perfectly good, that your own

little amateur efforts in that line simply aren't in it; so when it

comes to telling her things, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a

lamb. And wait a minute; you're not likely to make a lamb of your

sheep; but don't go to the other extreme, and make a full-grown sheep

of your lamb."

"I shall not deceive her."

"You couldn't. She's not only a good woman, but a very clever one,

though she doesn't let you see it. Mind you, you won't find her clever

about stupid things. I doubt if you'll be able to make her understand

all this library affair. But she'll understand _your_ business."

They rose, and walked together, forgetful of the eagerly observant

group.

"Could she see me to-day--this evening? I'm going to-morrow."

"Yes, I'll tell her you're coming. When you _do_ see her, don't be

afraid--speak out."

"I'm not afraid of speaking to her--I'm afraid--"

"Of what?"

"Simply of _seeing_ her."

"You mean you are afraid of seeing her changed?" She understood him;

for it was what she herself had been afraid of.

"Horribly afraid."

"My dear Mr. Rickman, people in great trouble don't change to other

people. They only change to themselves."

He raised his hat and turned from her without speaking.

Kitty felt remorseful as she looked after him, for she had not

scrupled to sacrifice him to her idea. Kitty's idea was to get as high

a price as possible out of Rickman Senior, and Rickman Junior was the

only man who could get it. If the object was to shunt Rickman Senior

altogether, Rickman Junior could be depended on for that, too. She

could see that under the influence of his unhappy passion he had

absolutely detached himself from his father's interests and his own.

Kitty was profoundly sorry for him, and if she had yielded to her

impulses of mercy and pity she would have kept him from Lucia as she

would have kept a poor insane moth from the candle. It might be

necessary to turn the moth out of doors in order to save it,

and--well, she would have turned him out of doors, too, in sheer mercy

and pity. But Kitty had a practical mind, and that practical mind

perceived the services that might be rendered by a person so

suicidally inspired. If she had read him aright, fire and water were

nothing to what Mr. Rickman was prepared to go through for Lucia.

Therefore she sent him to Lucia.

But it was on his own account, for his healing and his consolation,

that she advised him to make a clean breast of it.

CHAPTER XXIX

Lucia was in the library and alone. Everything was as she had left it

that morning two weeks ago; she saw the same solid floor and ceiling,

the same faded Persian rugs, the same yellow pale busts on their tall

pedestals, the same bookshelves, wing after wing and row upon row. The

south lattice still showed through its leaded lozenge panes the bright

green lawn, the beech tree and the blue sky; the west lattice held the

valley and the hills, with the river, a sinuous band of silver between

the emerald and the amethyst. These things were so woven with the

tissue of her mind that the sense of them had remained with her during

the terrible seven days at Cannes. But now they appeared to her

stripped of their air of permanence and familiarity. They were blurred

and insubstantial, like things remembered rather than actually seen.

All that subdued and tender loveliness belonged only to her young

past, and she had been torn from it so violently, it had been flung so

far behind her, that it seemed to her at the moment incredible and

impossible. Life, that had hitherto dealt with her so gently and so

graciously, had in the last two weeks turned hideous and brutal.

She had no very clear idea of how she had got to Cannes. The going was

wiped out. She had been driven through the garden of the Villa des

Palmes and had recognized it as the garden of her dream. She had

passed (through the doors of the Villa) into a state of stupor in

which she had recognized nothing, and thence into a sequence of states

which she could now too well recall. There had been a state of waking,

in which she had found herself in a little gilt and velvet salon.

There was another woman in it, a vast woman in a thin black dress

twinkling all over with little black eyes. She had a great white

powdered face, and they called her Madame. Then followed a state of

hallucination, in which she believed Madame to be an innocent person,

the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked

at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of

imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details

of her father's death as presented brokenly by Madame. Last had come a

state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame. After

that something had appeared to her in vivid violent illumination.

So vivid and so violent that it seemed to her even now that she was

still sitting in the gilt and velvet salon in the Villa des Palmes;

she still saw the thin green light that came slanting through the

half-closed shutters; warm southern smells floated in, they mixed with

the thick stifling scent of patchouli and orris root wafted from

Madame as she went to and fro, and with some other odour, bitter and

sickly, that came from the room beyond.

She had made out certain familiar objects in this unfamiliar scene.

Her father's travelling rug lay folded on the red velvet sofa; his cap

and gloves were there, just as he had flung them down; his violin,

dumb in its black coffin-like case, stood propped up against the wall.

Everywhere else (only gradually discerned) were things belonging to

Madame, evidence of her supreme and intimate occupation of the room.

And outside was the garden of sharp aloes and palms, where, as she

believed, her father's spirit had gone looking for her, and had not

found her. His body lay in the inner room behind the closed door.

That horrible little gilt and velvet salon! Whenever she thought of it

she saw Madame; she saw Madame's little dry eyes blinking in her great

white powdered face; she saw the vast heaving of Madame's bust where

the little jet sequins shivered and shook; she heard her voice cooing

and purring voluptuous condolence; and she felt again her own passion

of disgust and fear as she wrenched herself free from the warm scented

body, quivering in its thin black sheath.

Then she saw the inner room behind the closed door. Nothing was

obscure and secret there. The slats of the shutter let in great shafts

of daylight; the coffin stood in the middle of the room, raised on

trestles, and covered with a white sheet. A crucifix stood at the head

of the coffin, propped against a chest of drawers. Three candles,

flickering in their sockets, were set on the table at its foot. On

each knob of the two top-drawers hung a wreath of yellow immortelles.

That long coffin, raised high on its trestles, seemed to fill the

little room. Lucia saw it now, she saw the face in it turned up to the

ceiling, sharp and yellow, the limp red moustache hanging like a

curtain over the half-open mouth. No trace of the tilted faun-like

smile.

She would never get away from that terrible room. The pattern of its

walls (garlands of pink rosebuds between blue stripes) was stamped

upon her brain. There too, as in the salon, abode the inextinguishable

odour shaken from Madame's dress, it mixed with the hot reek of

carbolic and the bitter stabbing odour of the coffin.

On the floor by the trestles lay a glove, a long enormous glove,

Madame's glove; it was greyish white, and wrinkled like the cast skin

of a snake. The finger of its fellow hung from the chest of drawers

beside the crucifix. It pointed downwards at the dead man.

Within the gay garlanded walls, surrounded by those symbols and

souvenirs of Madame, he lay with his face turned up to the ceiling,

and his mouth half open, as if it still gasped piteously for breath.

One more breath to beg for forgiveness, to defend himself, explain;

while bit by bit the place he had lived in gave up his secret.

She could not tell whether she forgave him or not. When she stood by

him there she could have implored _his_ forgiveness for having thus

come upon him unawares, for having found what he had taken such pains

to hide from her. It seemed somehow cruel and unfair. She did not tax

him with hypocrisy, because he had so long contrived to keep himself

clean in her sight; she was grateful to him for having spared her this

knowledge. But whether she forgave him or not--no, looking back on it

at this moment she could not tell. Lucia was too young for the great

forgiveness that comes of understanding.

She walked up and down the library, staring at the books, at the

tables piled with papers; she stood at each window in turn and looked

out on the garden, the valley and the hills, Harmouth Gap, and the

long brown rampart line of Muttersmoor. It was simply impossible for

her to realize their once intimate relation to her life.

She was unaware that her mood was chiefly the result of physical and

mental exhaustion. It seemed to her rather that she had acquired

strange powers of insight, that she had pierced to the back of the

illusion. Never had she possessed so luminous a sense of the unreality

of things. She found this view consoling, for it is the desire of

unhappy youth that there shall be no permanence where there is pain.

On this unreal and insubstantial background faces came and went all

day long, faces solemn and obsequious, faces glazed and feverish with

emotion; Robert's face with red-rimmed eyes hiding Robert's

unutterable sympathy under a thin mask of fright; Kitty's face with an

entirely new expression on it; and her own face met them with an

incomprehensible and tearless calm. For she was not even sure of that,

not even sure of her own sorrow. She had had to do with sorrow once

before, when her grandfather died, and she thought she would be sure

to know it when it came to her again; but she had no name for this new

feeling, and at times it seemed to her that it was not sorrow at all.

Whatever it was, she had determined to bear it as far as possible

alone. She was almost sorry that she had not refused Kitty's offer to

stay with her; she suffered so from Kitty's inability to conceal the

truth. Not that Kitty said anything; it was her unnatural silence that

was so terrible. With that extraordinary acuteness that had come upon

her now Lucia saw, in the involuntary hardening and flushing of

Kitty's face, that in Kitty's mind her father was not only suspected,

but condemned. She was afraid lest she herself should in some moments

of weakness betray him; and Kitty's strange unusual tenderness

inspired her with terror. She shrank even from old Mrs. Palliser,

Kitty's mother, with her soft trembling face and clinging hands. Their

sympathy was poignant and unnerving, and she needed all her strength

for the things she had to do.

She did them, too. While one half of her brain had slackened its grip

of the world, the other half retained the most perfect grasp of

certain necessary details. She spent the morning with her father's

solicitor, while he explained to her the first principles of finance,

and the inner meaning of mortgages and bills of sale. She understood

clearly that the things which would naturally have come to her on her

father's death belonged in a certain sense to Mr. Richard Pilkington

of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr. Schofield, poor man, had approached this

branch of his subject gently and gingerly, with every delicacy of

phrasing that his fancy could suggest. He leaned back in his chair and

looked at her through half-closed eyes, respectfully veiling the

shrewdness of his gaze. Lucia had at first displayed so little

interest and intelligence that he felt himself compelled to a broader

and simpler statement of the facts. With the exception of her own

personal possessions, nothing in Court House remained to her, nothing,

not a book, not a solitary piece of drawing-room furniture. Mr.

Pilkington's bill of sale was, he grieved to say, inclusive of

everything, from the Harden library and the great gallery of

portraits, to the glass and china in the pantry, and the blankets on

the beds. "Not even," he had said, "that little paper weight that you

have in your hand, Miss Harden." And Lucia had examined the paper

weight as if she saw it for the first time; she put it down and

smiled. It struck her as incomprehensible, ludicrous almost that any

one could spend so much passion and solemnity on things so

unimportant, so irrelevant; she was not in the least surprised to hear

that they did not belong to her; the inconceivable thing was that they

ever had belonged to her.

And as the solicitor looked at her the corners of his mouth twitched

with a little spasm of pity; his eyes lost their veiled shrewdness,

and when she smiled they stared in frankest fright. For a moment he

supposed that the shock of his announcement had turned her brain. It

never occurred to that astute intelligence that she was smiling at

his own simplicity.

When he had left she returned to the writing-table; she sorted and

arranged a disordered heap of business letters, letters of condolence

and tradesmen's bills. She pushed aside the letters of condolence--Kitty

would answer those. She unlocked a drawer and took from it two open

envelopes scored with many postmarks and addressed to Harmouth, to

Cannes and to Harmouth again; these she scrutinized anxiously, as if

they disclosed some secret guarded by their contents. Then she read

the letters carefully all over again.

One was from her cousin Edith Jewdwine. Edith's sympathy covered two

sheets; it flowed from her pen, facile and fluent. Edith had had the

influenza, otherwise Edith would have come to Lucia at once. Could not

Lucia come to her instead? Edith could not bear to think of Lucia

alone there in her trouble, in that great big house. She was glad that

Kitty Palliser was with her. If only she had not been so unfortunate

as to catch influenza, and so on!

Lucia was sorry that Edith had influenza, but she was not sorry that

she had not come. She did not want Edith with her.

The other letter was from Horace. Horace had refined his expressions

of condolence into one faultless phrase. The rest of his letter

consisted of apologies and offers of service. These his close cramped

handwriting confined to the centre of the sheet, leaving a broad and

decent margin to suggest the inexpressible. He had heard of his

uncle's death indirectly; why had she not sent for him? If she had

wired to him at once he could have made arrangements to meet and take

her to Cannes, or he could have joined her there and brought her home.

At present he was overwhelmed with business; but he hoped to run down

to Harmouth at the end of the week, and travel up to town with her. He

understood that she was going to stay with Edith. Busy as he was, he

would come now, at any minute, if he could be of any immediate use.

She had only to wire if she wanted him.

She laid down that letter, pushed it aside, took it up again, and

read it a second time, as if to satisfy herself as to the writer's

meaning. She was not sure as to what Horace was or was not willing to

do, but there could be no doubt that he was deeply sorry for her. Why

had she not sent for him? Why indeed? Her first instinct had been to

send for him. She had only to let him know that she was in trouble,

and he would have come to her at any inconvenience to himself. And

that, of course, was why she had not sent. It would have been so

impossible for him to refuse.

And now she was thankful that she had spared him, and that he had not

followed her to those terrible rooms in the Villa des Palmes, that he

knew nothing of those seven days. She would have endured any

suffering, paid any price to obliterate the memory of them. It was

horrible to think how nearly Horace had been there. Horace of all

people--the fastidious, the immaculate, the merciless. If she had

found it hard to judge her dead father tenderly, she knew what

Horace's judgement would have been.

She had "only to wire if she wanted him." Oh no; he was the last

person that she wanted now.

Those two letters she answered without more delay. To Horace she wrote

in a reassuring manner, so as to absolve him from any sense of

obligation he might happen to feel. She would rather he came down a

little later than he proposed. Meanwhile he was not to be anxious, for

Mr. Schofield was managing her affairs extremely well. She admitted

that when those wonderful affairs were settled her income would be but

small (she considered that this was a thing Horace ought to be told

before--before he wrote any more letters). She added that the library,

the pictures and the furniture would have to be sold. And Court House,

too, she was afraid. (That also was a fact that must not be concealed

from him for a moment. It seemed to concern Horace so much more than

it did her.) These things, which it was her duty to tell him, she told

simply and plainly. But she omitted to mention that two men in

possession were sitting in the housekeeper's room, in attitudes of

more or less constraint. She ended by assuring Horace of her

gratitude, with a fervency which suggested that he had some cause to

doubt it. And indeed, at the moment, she could hardly tell whether

she were more grateful to him for offering to come to her or for

having stopped away.

All this necessary business Lucia transacted with one half of her

mind; while the other stood far off, possessed by its sense of

unreality, of illusion.

Next she went through the tradesmen's bills. There were a great many

people to be paid, and unless Court House were sold there would be

nothing to pay them with. It was at this point that Robert came in

with the announcement that Mr. Rickman had called and wished to see

her.

At first (the active intelligence being busy with accounts), her only

idea was that she owed Mr. Rickman fifteen pounds and that when all

debts were paid fifteen pounds would represent a very solid portion of

her income. Then her dreaming self awoke to the memory of something

unachieved, an obligation rashly incurred, a promise that could never

be fulfilled.

Yes. She would see Mr. Rickman.

CHAPTER XXX

Lucia had risen and was standing in the embrasure of the south window.

She had her back to the door, so that she could not see him as he came

in.

He wondered how on earth he was going to get over the space between

the window and the door. A sudden wave of weakness went through his

body; he had horrible sensations of sinking at the middle and of

giving way altogether at the knees. He had been afraid of seeing her

suffer; now he knew that what he was really afraid of was her fear of

seeing him. He expected to see her face set in abhorrence of his

sympathy, her body shrink in anticipation of a touch on her pain.

Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had

divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she

held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had

happened.

His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his

breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.

"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me--"

"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not

come. Sit down, please."

She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.

He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the

table. She turned so as to face him.

She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest

on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she _was_ changed, too. Her

girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But

the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from

the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms

the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it

lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin,

and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of

exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the

quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.

"You have been ill?" she said.

And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the

first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.

She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him

well at the hotel.

Decidedly she had grown older and her manner had grown older too. It

suggested that it was she who was the protector; that she wished, as

far as possible, to spare him in an interview which must necessarily

be painful. It was as if she remembered that he at any rate was young,

and that these gloomy circumstances must be highly distasteful to his

youth. In that she was the same as ever; every nerve in her shrank

from the pain of giving pain.

At least that was his first impression. And then (no consoling view

being really open to him) he told himself he was a fool to suppose

that in the circumstances she could think of him at all. He had

nothing tangible to go upon. He could see through it. He could see

perfectly through the smile, the self-possession, even the air of

polite and leisurely interest in his illness. She dwelt on him because

he was of all themes the one most indifferent to her. She was simply

holding herself in, according to the indestructible instincts of her

race.

He need not have been afraid of seeing her suffer; that, at any rate,

he would not see. To let him see it would have been to her an extreme

personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class.

This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood

between them, waving him away. It opened up again the impassable gulf.

He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from

her beyond all possibility of approach. She had not changed. She had

simply reverted to her type.

Her eyes waited for him to speak. But they were not the eyes he knew,

the eyes that had drawn him to confession. It was borne in upon him

that this (though it might be his last moment with her) was not the

moment to confess. There was a positive grossness in the idea of

unburdening himself in the presence of this incommunicable grief. It

was like putting in a claim for consideration as an equal sufferer. He

had no right to obtrude himself upon her at all. In her calm-eyed

attention there was a hint--a very delicate and gentle one--that he

would do well to be impersonal, business-like, and, above all, brief.

"It was about the library that I wanted to see you, Miss Harden."

"Was it? I was just going to ask you not to do anything more to the

catalogue if you have not finished it."

"I finished it ten days ago--before the twenty-seventh."

She smiled faintly. "Then you kept your promise. It doesn't matter.

What I most wanted to speak to you about was the secretaryship I

offered you. I'm afraid we must give it up."

"Oh--Miss Harden--" his tone expressed that he had always given it up,

that it was not to be thought of for an instant. But evidently she was

possessed with the idea that he had a claim upon her.

"I'm very sorry, but as things have turned out I shan't be able to

keep a secretary. In fact, as you may have heard, I'm not able to keep

anything hardly--not even my promises."

"Please--please don't think of it--"

"There is no use thinking of it. Still, I wanted you to know that I

really meant it--I believed it could be done. Of course I don't know

how much you really wanted it."

"Wanted it? I'd 'ave given half my life for a year of it."

Lucia's hand, laid lightly on the table's edge, felt a strong

vibration communicated to it from Mr. Rickman's arm. She looked up, in

time to see his white face quiver before he hid it with his hand.

"I'm so sorry. Did it mean so much to you?"

He smiled through his agony at the cause assigned to it. "I'm not

thinking of that. What it means to me--what it always will mean is

your goodness--in thinking of it. In thinking of it now."

It was his nearest approach to a sympathetic allusion.

She did not wince (perceptibly), but she ignored the allusion.

"Oh, that's nothing. You would have been of great use to me. If I

thought of helping you at all, my idea was simply--how shall I put

it?--to make up in some way for the harm I've done you."

"What harm have you ever done me?"

For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous

passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she

explained.

"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was

responsible for your illness."

He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well

have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not

know that."

"I knew it, though."

"You knew it? How did you know it?"

"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him

the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to

you about."

He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss

Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater

difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done,

point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a

statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.

"If," she said, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's

your father who is going to buy it."

He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father)

that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.

It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged

from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.

Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view. Her

practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human,

and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to

nothing less than a moral miracle. But Miss Harden would have a

higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate

he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than

his own, and if _he_ considered that his father was morally bound to

withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his

remaining in it. Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father

might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure

of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.

"Why shouldn't he buy it?" she asked.

"Because, I'm afraid, selling it in--in that way, you won't make much

money over it."

"Well--it's not a question of making money, it's a question of paying

a debt."

"How much you make--or lose--of course, depends on the amount of the

debt--what it was valued at."

Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet. She had the

required fact at her fingers' ends and instantly produced it. "It was

valued at exactly one thousand pounds."

"And it should have been valued at four. My father can't give anything

like that. We ought to be able to find somebody who can. But it might

take a considerable time."

"And there is no time. What do you advise me to do then?"

"Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that

would be all right. If we can't, I advise you to buy it back, or a

part of it, yourself. Buy back the books that make it valuable. You've

got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_

printed by Wynken de Worde." (He positively blushed as he consummated

this final act of treachery to Rickman's.) "And heaps of others

equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so. You can buy

them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand. If

Pilkington collars the rest he'll still be paid, and there may be

something over."

She considered a moment. "Has Mr. Pilkington any idea of the value of

those books?"

"I'm certain he hasn't. Only an expert could have."

"Would it be perfectly fair to him?"

"To _him_? Perfectly fair. You buy them at his own valuation."

"I see. I should like to do that--if--if it can be managed."

"I think it can be managed. My father isn't likely to settle with Mr.

Pilkington without consulting me. If he _has_ settled we must try and

get him to withdraw."

"Oh, surely there would be no difficulty about that?"

He said nothing. It was really terrible the way she took integrity for

granted. To be sure his father had a reputation with the family. He

remembered how Sir Joseph used to praise him to his face as the only

honest dealer in London. But Sir Joseph was in the habit of buying

books, not selling them.

He rose and turned away, evading her innocent eyes.

"I hope not. I'll see Mr. Pilkington about it. By the way, here _is_

Mr. Pilkington. Did you expect him?"

"No, I--" Her voice died away, extinguished in her horror.

CHAPTER XXXI

There could be no mistake about it.

Mr. Pilkington was coming by the private way, stepping softly over a

fair green lawn. The low golden light before sunset flooded the lawn

so that Mr. Pilkington walking in it was strangely and gloriously

illuminated. Everything about him shone, from his high silk hat to the

tips of his varnished boots. His frock coat and trousers of grey

summer suiting clung to his figure like a warm and sunny skin. All

over Mr. Pilkington and round about him there hung the atmosphere of

the City. Not of the actual murky labyrinth, roofed with fog, but of

the City as she stands transfigured before the eyes of the young

speculator, in her orient golden mood.

Lucia had seen him. The light died out of her face, her lips

straightened. She stood motionless, superb, intent. With such a look

and in such an attitude a Roman maiden might have listened to the feet

of the Vandal at the gate.

He was coming very swiftly, was Dicky, as if borne by an impetus of

conquest. As he caught sight of Miss Harden through the open window,

though he kept his head rigidly averted, his eyes slewed round towards

her, and at the same moment his fingers rose instinctively to his

little fair moustache. It was the gesture of the irresistible male.

"_Must_ I see him?" she asked helplessly. She had realized everything

in that moment.

"Not unless you like. Shall I deal with him?"

"If you would be so good. But no--it doesn't matter. I shall have to

see him later."

She sat down again and waited. The silence was so tense that it seemed

to bear the impact of her pulses; it throbbed and quivered with pain.

Outside, the sound of the pebbles, crunched under Pilkington's

footsteps, became a concert of shrieks.

Rickman did not offer to go as Mr. Pilkington advanced; for, Heaven

knew how, in some obscure and subtle way she had managed to convey to

him that his presence was a protection.

Mr. Pilkington entered the room with the air of a man completely

assured as to his reception. He bowed to Miss Harden; an extraordinary

bow. No words could have conveyed the exquisite intimations of Mr.

Pilkington's spine. It was as if he had said to her, "Madam, you

needn't be afraid; in your presence I am all deference and chivalry

and restraint." But no sooner had Dicky achieved this admirable effect

of refinement than he spoilt it all by the glance he levelled at young

Rickman. _That_ expressed nothing but the crude emotion of the

insolent male, baulked of his desire to find himself alone on the

field. It insulted her as brutally as any words by its unblushing

assumption of the attitude of sex.

"I must introduce myself, Miss 'Arden," he said, ignoring Rickman. "I

think I have _not_ had the pleasure--" His large mouth closed

reluctantly on the unfinished phrase.

He seated himself with circumstance, parting the tails of his coat

very carefully. He had chosen a seat opposite the window. As if

conscious of the glory of his appearance, he offered himself liberally

to the light. He let it play over his figure, a figure that youth

subdued to sleekness that would one day be corpulence; it drew out all

the yellow in his moustache and hair; it blazed in his gold-rimmed

eye-glass; thence it alighted, a pale watery splendour, on the bridge

of his nose. It was a bridge where two nationalities met and contended

for mastery. Mr. Pilkington's nose had started with a distinctly

Semitic intention, frustrated by the Anglo-Saxon in him, its downward

course being docked to the proportion of a snub. Nobody knew better

than Mr. Pilkington that it was that snub that saved him. He was proud

of it as a proof of his descent from the dominant race. Assisted by

his reluctantly closing mouth and double eye-glass it inspired

confidence, giving to Mr. Pilkington's face an expression of extreme

openness and candour. He was proud of his eye-glass too. He

considered that it made him look like a man of science or of letters.

But it didn't. It did much better for him than that. It took all the

subtlety out of his face and endowed it with an earnest and enormous

stare. And as that large mouth couldn't and wouldn't close properly,

his sentences had a way of dying off in a faint gasp, leaving a great

deal to the imagination. All these natural characteristics were

invaluable for business purposes.

But if you had asked Mr. Pilkington for the secret of his success, he

would have told you that he owed it to his possession of two

qualities, "bounce" and "tact." To both, mind you; for tact without

bounce will carry a man neither far nor high; while bounce without

tact will elevate him occasionally to his own perdition.

Conversationally he was furnished with tentacles sensitive to the

lightest touch of an idea; he had the very subtlest discernment of

shades within shades. He grasped with airy impact; he moved by a

delicate contact and recoil, a process he was pleased to describe as

"feelin' his way."

He did not rush brutally into business, as a man of coarser fibre

might have done. He removed his gloves, adjusted his eye-glass and

admired the view. He shrank from the suggestion that he had come to

"take possession," but clearly he could not take possession of the

view. It was a safe and soothing topic.

"You have a very glorious outlook here, Miss Harden."

Then Mr. Pilkington perceived a shade. Miss Harden's outlook was _not_

glorious.

By an almost visible recoil from his own blunder he strove to convey

an impression of excessive delicacy.

"Wot very exceptional weather we are enjoying--" Perceiving another

and a finer shade (for evidently Miss Harden was not enjoying the

weather, or indeed anything else) Mr. Pilkington again shifted his

ground. He spoke of books. He noticed with approval the arrangement of

the library. He admired the Harden taste in costly bindings, as if he

were by no means personally concerned with any of these things. And

thus by a delicate and imperceptible transition, he slid into his

theme.

"Now, as regards this--this sale, Miss Harden. I hope you

understand--"

"I understand that you are my father's chief creditor, and that the

sale is necessary."

"Quite so. But I'm most awfully sorry for the necessity As for time--I

don't want you to feel that you're pressed or hurried in any way." Mr.

Pilkington's eyes gazed up at her under their great glasses, humid and

immense. His lower lip drooped in an uncertain manner. He had a great

deal of nice feeling about him, had Dicky.

"I hope those men aren't making a nuisance of themselves They've had

strict orders to keep in the background I'm orf'ly upset," said Mr.

Pilkington in a thick emotional voice, "about this affair; and I want

to consider you, Miss Harden, in every possible way."

"You are very kind. But I would rather you didn't consider me, in any

way at all."

As she said this Mr. Rickman looked at her with a grave smile,

conveying (behind Mr. Pilkington's back) an unmistakable warning.

Mr. Pilkington smiled too, a large and fluttering smile as of one

indulgent to any little attempt at brilliance on the part of a young

lady under a cloud. Lucia swept him and his smile with her long and

steady gaze, a gaze which made Dicky exceedingly uncomfortable.

"I think if you have any arrangements to make, you had better see my

solicitor."

"I have an appointment," said Dicky, not without a certain dignity,

"with Mr. Schofield, to-morrow morning."

"Then I suppose what you want now is to look over the house?"

The question and the gaze were so direct that Dicky (who had meant to

amble delicately round that point for another quarter of an hour) lost

his head, dropped his eye-glass, and fairly let himself go.

"Well, perhaps as I _am_ here, I'd better 'ave a look round. Of

course--if--if it's in any way inconvenient--"

"Not in the least. You can look round at once."

She rang the bell. On her way to it she gathered up some books that

were lying out of sight and laid them on the table.

"These," she said to Rickman, "belong to the library. They must go

with the rest."

He looked at them. One was an Aldine Dante, he had seen her reading

it. He took Pilkington aside and said something to him in a tone which

Lucia could not hear. Her hand was on the door when Pilkington sprang

forward.

"One moment, Miss Harden. Everything must be sold in the regular way,

but if you'll tell me of any books you've a special fancy for, I'll

make a note of them and buy them in for you." He paused, awaiting the

breath of inspiration. It came. "For--for a merely nominal sum."

To do Dicky justice this delicate idea greatly commended itself to his

good nature. Business is business, but not willingly did Dicky inflict

pain, least of all upon a young and pretty woman. Besides he had an

eye to his reputation; he was disposed to do this thing handsomely.

Rickman envied him his inspiration, his "merely nominal sum."

"Thank you. The books were not mine," said Lucia in spite of another

meaning look from her ally.

"Quite so. But I should disregard that if I were you. Anyhow you can

think it over, and if you change your mind you can let me or Mr

Rickman know before the sale."

Lucia looked down at him from her height. "I shall not change my mind.

If I want to keep any of the books, I can buy them from Mr. Rickman."

She turned to Rickman in the doorway. "All the same, it was kind of

you to think of it." She said it very distinctly, so that Mr.

Pilkington could hear.

Rickman followed her out of the room and closed the door behind them.

She turned on him eyes positively luminous with trust. It was as if

she had abandoned the leading of her intellect and flung the reins on

the neck of her intuition.

"I was right, wasn't I? I would so much rather buy them back from

you."

"From my father?"

"It's the same thing, isn't it?"

He smiled sadly. "I'm afraid it isn't, quite. Why didn't you accept

his offer?"

"I couldn't." She shuddered slightly. Her face expressed her deep and

desperate repugnance. "I _can_ buy them back from you. He is really

arranging with your father, isn't he?"

"Yes." It was the third time that she had appealed from Pilkington to

him, and there was a profound humiliation in the thought that at this

precise moment the loathsome Dicky might be of more solid use to her

than he.

"Well then," she said almost triumphantly. "I shall be safe. You will

do your best for me."

It was a statement, but he met it as if it had been a question.

"I will indeed."

He saw that it was in identifying his father with him that she left it

to their honour.

CHAPTER XXXII

Dicky Pilkington did not belong to the aristocracy of finance. Indeed,

finance had not in any form claimed him at the first.

Under the grey frock-coat and gleaming shirt-front, hidden away behind

the unapparent splendours of Dicky Pilkington's attire (his undermost

garments were of woven silk), in a corner of his young barbarian heart

there lurked an obscure veneration for culture and for art. When his

day's work was done, the time that Dicky did not spend in the

promenade of the Jubilee Variety Theatre, he spent in reading Karl

Pearson and Robert Louis Stevenson, with his feet on the fender. He

knew the Greek characters. He _said_ he could tell Plato from

Aristotle by the look of the text. Dicky had begun life as a Junior

Journalist. But before that, long, long before, when he was an

innocent schoolboy, Dicky had a pair of wings, dear little cherubic

wings, that fluttered uneasily under his little jacket. The wings

moulted as Dicky grew older; they shrank (in the course of his

evolution) to mere rudimentary appendages, and poor Dicky flopped

instead of flying. Finally they dropped off and Dicky was much happier

without them. Rickman used to say that if you stripped him you saw the

marks of them still quite plainly; and Dicky was always stripping

himself and showing them. They proved to these writing fellows what he

might have been if he had only chosen. He had begun by being a poet

like the best of them, and in his heart of hearts Dicky believed that

it was as a poet he should end. His maxim upon this head was: "When

I've feathered my nest it will be time enough for me to sing."

Dicky's nest was not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun

to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon,

walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell

you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would

talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he

came to forsake literature for finance.

He had begun in a small way by financing little tradesmen, little

journalists and actresses in temporary difficulties; lending small

sums to distressed clergymen, to governesses and the mistresses of

boarding-houses. By charging a moderate interest he acquired a

character for fairness and straight-forwardness. Now and then he did

what he called a really tip-top generous thing. "Character," said

Dicky Pilkington, "is capital"; and at thirty he had managed to save

enough of it to live on without bothering about earning any more.

Then, by slow degrees, Dicky extended his business. He lent larger

sums at correspondingly higher interest. Then he let himself go. He

was caught by the glory of the thing, the poetry of finance. He soared

to all the heights and sounded all the depths of speculation. He took

risks with rapture. He fancied himself lending vast sums at giddy

interest. "That," said Dicky to his conscience, was to "cover his

risk." He hadn't forgotten that character is capital. And when it

occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he was making rather a

large hole in it, he would then achieve some colossal act of

generosity which set him on his legs again. So that Dicky Pilkington

was always happy in his conscience as in everything else.

He had been prepared to do the handsome thing by Miss Harden, only her

manner had somehow "choked him off." He could have afforded it, for he

considered this Freddy Harden business as his very largest deal. He

held a mortgage on the land, from the river to the top of Harcombe

Hill. There was any amount to be got out of the pictures and the

furniture. And the library was not altogether to be sneezed at. It had

been Fred Harden's last desperate resource, (rather poor security in

Dicky's opinion); but if the sum advanced had not been prodigious

(compared with the sums that had gone before it) the interest had

been high. So that, in returning from his tour of inspection, he felt

considerably elated.

Rickman, as he went down the High Street that evening, saw Dicky a

little way in front of him. He noticed that the financial agent was an

object of considerable interest to the people of Harmouth. Men stood

at shop doors and street corners, women (according to their social

standing) hung out of bedroom windows or hid behind parlour curtains

to look after him as he went. Here and there Rickman caught sullen and

indignant glances, derisive words and laughter. Evidently the spirit

of Harmouth was hostile to Dicky. A Harden was a Harden, and Sir

Frederick's magnificently complete disaster had moved even the

townspeople, his creditors.

The excitement caused by Dicky concentrated at the windows of the

London and Provincial Bank, where Sir Frederick had had a large

balance--overdrawn.

Harmouth High Street is a lane, wide at the top and narrow at the

bottom, which gives on to the esplanade between the Marine Hotel and

the Bank. At a certain distance these buildings cut the view into a

thin slip of grey beach and steep blue sea. The form of Dicky was now

visible in the centre of that slip, top-hatted, distinct against the

blue. He stood on the edge of the esplanade as on a railway platform,

reading the paper and smoking a cigar. From time to time, looking up

with an expression half visionary, half voluptuous, he puffed and spat

in dreamy rhythmic sequence.

"_Coelum, non animam_," said Rickman to himself, "they change their

skies, but not their habits." When he came up with him, he found the

soul of Pilkington disporting itself in its own airy element,

exchanging ideas with two young damsels who frolicked on the beach

below. Backwards and forwards flew the light-hearted banter, like

balls of sea-foam, Mr. Pilkington the inspirer and the inspired. The

after-glow of his last triumphant witticism still illuminated his

countenance when he turned again to the printed page.

Now, owing to its peculiar construction, Harmouth High Street acts as

a funnel for the off-shore breezes; they rush through it as they rush

through Windy Gap, that rift in the coast before which the wary

fisherman slackens sail. Just such an air was careering seawards when

Mr. Pilkington was about to perform the difficult feat of folding his

paper backwards. It smote one side of the broadsheet and tore it from

his grasp, making it flutter like a sail escaped from the lanyard. The

breeze dropped; it hovered; it waited like the wanton that it was; and

when Mr. Pilkington's free hand made a clutch at the flying columns,

it seized that moment to lift his hat from his head and dash it to the

ground. Then the demon of the wind entered into and possessed that

high thing; the hat rolled, it curvetted, it turned brim over crown,

it took wings and flew, low and eager like a cormorant; finally it

struck the beach, gathering a frightful impetus from the shock, and

bounded seawards, the pebbles beating from it a thin drum-like note.

Never was any created thing so tortured with indecent merriment in the

face of doom. The end seemed certain, for Dicky Pilkington, though he

joined in the hysterics of the crowd, had not compromised his dignity

by pursuit; when, just as the hat touched the foam of perdition, Molly

Trick, the fat bathing woman, interposed the bulwark of her body; she

stooped; she spread her wide skirts, and the maniac leapt into them as

into a haven.

The young men who watched this breezy incident over the blinds of the

London and Provincial Bank were immensely diverted. Even Rickman

laughed as Dicky turned to him his cheerful face buffeted by the wind.

Mr. Pilkington had put up at the same hotel as Rickman, and they found

themselves alone at the dinner-table.

"Glori-orious air this," said Mr. Pilkington. "I don't know how you

feel, young 'un, but there's a voice that tells me I shall dine."

Mr. Pilkington was not deceived by that prophetic voice. He dined with

appetite undiminished by his companion's gloom. From time to time he

rallied him on his coyness under the fascinations of beef-steak, lager

beer, apricots and Devonshire cream.

"Well, Razors," he said at last, "and wot do you think of the Harden

Library?"

Rickman was discreet. "Oh, it isn't bad for a private show. Sir

Frederick doesn't seem to have been much of a collector."

"Wasn't he, though! In his own line he was a pretty considerable

collector, quite a what d'you call 'em--virtuoso."

"Not very much virtue about him, I imagine."

"Well, whatever there may have been, in ten years that joker went

through his capital as if it had been a paper hoop. Slap through it

and out at the other side, on his feet, grinning at you."

"How did he manage it?"

"Cards--horses--women--everything you can name," said Dicky, "that's

amusing, and at the same time expensive. They're precious slow down

here in the country; but get 'em up to town, and there's nothing like

'em for going the pace, when they _do_ go it."

"His velocity must have been something tremendous, to judge by the

smash." Rickman was looking at the financial agent with an expression

which some people might have been inclined to resent, but Dicky's

gaiety was proof against criticism.

"What did he die of?" Rickman asked slowly.

"What a beastly question to ask at dinner. He died, like most people,

of his way of living. If Freddy Harden had had opportunities equal to

his talents he would have smashed up ten years ago. Talent wasn't the

word for it, it was genius--genius."

"I see. And when you come across a poor struggling devil with a gift

like that, you long to be kind to him, don't you? To bring him

forward, to remove every obstacle to his career?"

"Well, yes, I suppose I did run Harden for all he was worth. Queer

fish, Harden. He used to rave like a lunatic about his daughter; but I

don't suppose he spent a fiver on her in his life. It's pretty rough

on her, this business. But Loocher'll do. She's got cheek enough for

half a dozen." Dicky chuckled at the memory of his discomfiture. "I

like it. I like a girl with some bounce in her. Trust her to fall on

her little tootsies anywhere you drop her."

"I can't say you've made the falling very easy for her."

Dicky's bright face clouded. "Wot the devil has that got to do with

me? I've done _my_ level best. Why, I could have cleaned them out

years ago, if I'd chosen. Now, just to show you what sort of fellow

Freddy Harden was--last time I ever saw him, poor chap, he told me

that girl of his was a regular musical genius, just a little more

technique, you know, and she'd beat Paderewski into a cocked hat. She

was wonderful. That's the way he piled it on, and it may have been all

true; he could have made a fortune, fiddling, if he hadn't been as

proud as Satan and as lazy as a wombat. Well, I said, if that was so,

I'd take her up and run her as a pro.--for friendship, mind you. I

liked Freddy, and I was orf'ly sorry for him. She could pay me if she

pulled it off; if not, she could let it stand over till the day of

judgement."

Rickman flushed. "Did you know anything of Miss Harden, then?"

"Not I. Never set eyes on her. She might have been as ugly as sin for

all I knew. I risked that."

"What did Sir Frederick say to your generous proposal?"

Dicky's face became luminous at the recollection. "He said he'd see me

d--d first. But I meant it. I'd do it to-morrow if she asked me

prettily."

"Have you any notion how she'll be left after all this?"

"Yes. There's the house, and her mother's money. Freddy couldn't get

at that. When it's all settled up she can't be so badly off, I fancy.

Still it's a beastly back-hander in the face, poor girl. By Jove, she

does stand up to it in form, too. Too d----d well bred to let you know

she's hit. You wouldn't think she'd be plucky, to look at her, would

you? It's queer how the breeding comes out in a woman."

Rickman held himself in with difficulty. When pearls are cast before

swine you look for depreciation as a matter of course; you would be

infinitely more revolted if, instead of trampling them under their

feet, the animals insisted on wearing them in their snouts. So

Pilkington rootling in Miss Harden's affairs; Pilkington posing as

Miss Harden's adviser; Pilkington adorning his obscene conversation

with Miss Harden's name, was to Rickman an infinitely more abominable

beast than Pilkington behaving according to his nature. But to quarrel

with Pilkington on this head would have provoked the vulgarest of

comments, and for Miss Harden's sake he restrained himself.

Dicky remained unconscious. "I'm glad you put me up to offering some

of those books back. It goes against me to sell them, but what the

devil am I to do?"

"_I_ can't tell you."

"I shan't collar all this furniture, either. I'll buy in some of it

and return it. The decent thing would be to give her back poor

Freddy's portrait."

He passed his hand over a bunch of bananas,--he selected one, pinched

it, smelt it, put it down and took another.

"It's a pity it's a Watts, that portrait," he murmured dreamily. He

seemed to be wrestling with himself; and apparently he overcame. When

he had eaten his banana his face was flushed and almost firm.

"I'll not take it. He sticks in my throat, does Freddy."

Rickman left the table. If he had disliked Dicky when he was callous,

he loathed him when he was kind.

He threw open the window, and sat on the ledge. The breeze had died

down and the heat in the little hotel was stifling. Across the passage

glasses clinked in the bar, sounding a suitable accompaniment to the

voice of Dicky. From time to time bursts of laughter came from the

billiard-room overhead. Outside there, in the night, the sea smothered

these jarring human notes with its own majestic tumult. Rickman,

giving up his sickened senses to the night and the sea, was fortunate

enough to miss a great deal that Pilkington was saying.

For Dicky, still seated at the table, talked on. He had mingled soda

with whisky, and as he drank it, the veil of our earthly life lifted

for Dicky, and there was revealed to him the underlying verity, the

fabric of the world. In other words, Dicky had arrived at the inspired

moment of the evening, and was chanting the Hymn of Finance.

"Look," said Dicky, "at the Power it gives you. Now all you writing

chaps, you know, you're not in it, you're not in it at all. You're

simply 'opping and dodging round the outside--you 'aven't a chance of

really seeing the show. Whereas--look at _me_. I go and take my seat

plump down in the middle of the stage box. I've got my ear to the

heart of 'Umanity and my 'and on its pulse. I've got a grip of

realities. You say you want to por-tray life. Very well, por-tray it.

When all's said and done you've only got a picture. And wot's a

picture, if it's ever so lifelike? You 'aven't got a bit nearer to the

real thing. I tell you, you aren't in it with me. I'd have been a

writer myself if I'd thought it was good enough. I began that way; but

as to going back to it, you might just as well expect me to go back to

kissing a woman's photo when I can put my arm round her waist."

And Dicky, gracefully descending on the wings of his metaphor,

alighted on Miss Poppy Grace. But to Rickman the figure of Poppy, once

an obsession, was now as indistinct as the figure of Dicky seen

through a cloud of tobacco smoke. He was roused by a more direct

appeal, and what seemed to him a violent change of theme.

"Did you notice what rum eyes Miss Harden's got? They haven't taught

her how to use 'em, though. Hi, Ricky! Aren't you going to join us in

a drink?"

"No, I'm not." His tone implied that he was not going to join

Pilkington in anything.

"You seem a bit cut up on Miss Harden's account."

"If you mean that I think she's been most infernally treated, I do."

"H'm. Well, I will say the wind is not exactly tempered to that shorn

lamb. But it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Queer how

things are mixed up in this world. You wouldn't think there was much

connexion between Miss Harden and Miss Poppy Grace, would you? Well,

wot's Loocher's loss is Popsie's gain; if that's any consolation."

"I certainly don't see the connexion."

"No? I say, can't you shut the window? That d----d sea makes such a

noise I can't hear myself speak. I was going to say I'd some notion of

running Poppy on her own before long. And I think--I _think_ I can do

it out of this haul, before she signs another contract. Of course, we

expect you and your friends to back us."

Dicky's voice came slightly muffled from the depths of his long

tumbler.

Rickman turned round. "What did you say about Bacchus?" He had turned

in anger, but at the spectacle presented by Pilkington he laughed

aloud in the insolence of his youth.

"Shut that window, can't you? I say, if you can get at any of the

papers and give them the tip--"

"Well?" Rickman's hand closed fiercely over the top of a soda-water

syphon. Pilkington followed the movement with an innocent, but by no

means unobservant eye.

Only the other day they had been rivals for the favour of Miss Poppy

Grace, which seemed to be very evenly divided between them. If Rickman

had her heart, he--Pilkington--held her by the power of the purse.

Jealous he might be, but jealousy counted for little in the great mind

of Pilkington. Human passions were the stuff he worked in. Where they

raged highest it was his to ride on the whirlwind and direct the

storm. If in Poppy's case they raged too high, his position as

creditor gave him a tight grip of young Rickman. On the other hand,

Rickman was now a full-fledged Junior Journalist, and Pilkington, amid

the wreck of morals and the crash of creeds, had preserved a simple

childlike faith in the omnipotence of the press. So, if it was madness

for Rickman to irritate Pilkington, it was not altogether expedient

for Pilkington to irritate him.

"Look here, Razors," said he, "you needn't go shying any syphons

about. There's nothing behind this show but business. What I do for

Miss Grace I do for cold cash. See? Of course, I take an interest in

the girl--"

"Interest at something like a hundred and fifty per cent., I suppose?"

"That's about the figure--With your permission, I'll remove that

fizz-gig out of your way--What do you think of it--my idea, I mean?"

"I think there's a d----d lot more interest than principle in it."

"You young goat! I'm out of it. Honour bright. So if you feel inclined

to slog away and boom the lady, there's no reason why you shouldn't."

"Is there any reason why I should?" inquired Rickman with treacherous

severity. So immense was his calm that Dicky was taken in by it and

blundered.

"Well, yes," said he, "in that case, we might consider our little

account settled."

"Our little account, Dicky, will be run up on the wrong side of the

paper if you don't take care."

"Wot d'you mean?"

"I mean that when you've got a particularly filthy job on hand, it's

as well to keep away from people who are not fond of dirt. At any

rate, I advise you not to come too near me."

Dicky for the first time that evening looked uncomfortable. It

occurred to Dicky that whisky and soda was not the very best drink to

talk business on.

"I've noticed, Rickman," said he, "that since you've been living down

in the country, you don't seem able to understand a joke."

But Rickman had got his legs on the other side of the window ledge,

and as Dicky approached him he slid down on to the esplanade and

slipped into the night.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Hardly knowing how he got there he found himself on the top of

Harcombe Hill. His head was bare and the soles of his thin slippers

were cut with the flints of the hillside lane. He had walked, walked,

walked, driven by a fury in his body and a fever in his feet.

His first idea had been to get as far away as possible from his

companion. He felt that he never could be clean again after his

contact with Dicky. How had the thing happened? Yesterday London

seemed as far away from Harmouth as Babylon from Arcadia, and Rickman

was not more infinitely removed from Lucia than Lucia was from Poppy;

yet here they were, all three tangled together in Dicky's complicated

draw-net. He held them all, Lucia by her honour, Poppy by her vanity,

and him, Rickman, by the lusts and follies of his youth. This was what

it had led him to, that superb triumphal progress of the passions. In

language as plain as he could put it, he--he--had been offered a bribe

to advertise Poppy Grace for the benefit of Dicky, who kept her. To

advertise a little painted--he disposed of poor Poppy in a powerful

word which would have given her propriety a fit if it could have heard

him. That he himself should ever have been infatuated with Poppy

seemed to him now incredible, monstrous. In the last three weeks he

had not only grown sober, but mature. That youth of his which once

seemed immortal, had then ceased to be a part of him. He had cut

himself loose from it and put it behind him with all its miseries and

tumults and pollutions. But he couldn't get rid of it. Like an unclean

spirit cast out of him it seemed to have entered into Dicky as into a

convenient herd of swine. And in Dicky's detestable person it rose up

against him and pursued him. For Dicky, though sensual as any swine,

was cautious. Dicky, even with an unclean spirit in him, was not in

the least likely to rush violently down any steep place into the sea

and so perish out of his life.

That Dicky should have appeared on his last night here seemed the

vilest stroke that fate had dealt him yet. But Dicky could not follow

him up Harcombe Hill.

He looked before him. The lights of Harmouth opened out a thin line to

the esplanade, dividing the sea from the land by fire instead of foam;

strewn in the bed of the valley they revealed, as through some pure

and liquid medium, its darkness and its depth. Above them the great

flank of Muttersmoor stretched like the rampart of the night. Night

itself was twilight against that black and tragic line.

And Rickman, standing bareheaded on the hillside, was lifted up out of

his immense misery and unrest. He remembered how this land that he

loved so passionately had once refused him the inspiration that he

sought. And now it seemed to him that it could refuse him nothing,

that Nature under cover of the darkness gave up her inmost ultimate

secret. And if it be true that Nature's innermost ultimate secret is

known only to the pure, it was a sign of his own cleansing, this sense

of comfort and reconciliation, of unspoiled communion, of profound

immeasurable peace. In that moment his genius seemed to have passed

behind veils upon veils of separation, to possess that tender and

tragic beauty, to become one with the soul of the divine illimitable

night.

He was not in the least deceived as to the true source of his

inspiration. In all this, if you went back far enough, his body

counted; his body which he had made a house of shame and hunger and

desire, shaken by its own shivering nerves and leaping desperate

pulses. But what of that now? What matter, since that tumult of his

blood had set throbbing such subtle, such infinite vibrations in his

soul. _That_ was what counted. He could tell by it the quality and

immensity of his passion, by just that spiritual resonance and

response. It was the measure of Lucia's power to move him, the measure

too of his nearness to her no less than of his separation.

She could not take away what she had given; and among his sources of

inspiration, of the unique and unforgettable secret that had passed

into him with the night, on Harcombe Hill, as he looked towards

Muttersmoor, she also counted. She would be always there, a part of

it, a part of him, whether she would or no--if that was any

consolation.

CHAPTER XXXIV

He had made no empty promise when he assured her that he would do his

best; for there was something that could still be done. He built great

hopes on the result of the coming interview with his father. His idea

was to go up to town by the early morning train and talk the whole

thing over as calmly as might be. He would first of all appeal to his

father's better feelings; he would make him see this thing as he saw

it, he would rouse in him the spirit of integrity, the spirit of mercy

and pity, the spirit of justice and chivalry and honour.

But if all the arts of persuasion failed to touch him, Rickman Junior

had in reserve one powerful argument against which Rickman Senior

would hardly be able to contend. There would no doubt be inspirations,

but as to the main lines of his pleading he was already clear. He felt

entirely confident and light-hearted as he rose at five the next

morning to catch that early train.

Rickman Senior was not in the shop when Rickman Junior arrived on the

scene. He was in a great bare room on an upper floor of the

second-hand department. He looked more than ever studious and ascetic,

having exchanged his soft felt hat for a velvet skull-cup, and his

frock coat for a thin alpaca. He was attended by a charwoman with

scrubbing brush and pail, a boy with ladder and broom, and a carpenter

with foot-rule, note-book and pencil. He moved among them with his

most solemn, most visionary air, the air, not so much of a Wesleyan

minister, as of a priest engaged in some high service of dedication.

He was in fact making arrangements for the reception of no less than

fifteen thousand volumes, the collection of the late Sir Joseph

Harden, of Court House, Harmouth. And as he looked around him his face

expressed the smooth and delicately voluptuous satisfaction of the

dreamer who has touched his dream.

This look of beatitude faded perceptibly when the message came that

Mr. Keith was in the front shop and wished to see him. Mr. Keith, it

appeared, had no time to spare. Isaac had, in fact, experienced a

slight shock at the earliness of Keith's return. His first thought was

that at the last moment there had been some serious hitch with

Pilkington. He found Keith sitting before the counter in the attitude

of a rather imperious customer; but the warm pressure of his son's

hand removed this disagreeable effect of superiority. Keith's face

wore signs of worry and agitation that confirmed Isaac's original

fear.

"Well," he said a little anxiously, "I didn't expect you back as early

as this."

"I haven't come to stop. I've got to catch the twelve-thirty back

again. I came up because I wanted to talk to you."

"Come," said Isaac, "into the office."

He laid his hand on Keith's shoulder as they went. He felt very kindly

towards him at that moment. His heart was big with trust in the

brilliant, impetuous boy. When he touched Keith's hand he had felt

that intellectual virtue had gone out of it. He guessed that there was

a crisis in the affairs of the House of Rickman, and that Keith had

come with warning and with help. He knew his power of swift and

effectual action in a crisis. Yes, yes; Keith's wits might go

wool-gathering; but he was safe enough when he had gathered his wool.

"Well?" he repeated, lifting grave interrogative eyebrows. He had

seated himself; but Keith remained standing, a sign with him of

extreme perturbation.

"I thought I could explain things better if I saw you," he began.

"Quite so; quite so. I hope you haven't come to tell me there's been

any 'itch."

"Well, I told you as much when I wrote."

"I understood you advised me to withdraw, because you thought

Pilkington wanted a big price."

"I didn't know what he wanted; I knew what we ought to give."

"That was settled by looking in the register. You don't mean to say

_he_'s going to back out of it?"

Keith was so preoccupied that he failed to see the drift of his

father's questioning. "You see," he continued, following his own

thoughts, "it's not as if we had only ourselves to consider. There's

Miss Harden."

"Ah, yes, Pilkington did make some mention of a young lady."

"She was good enough to say she'd rather we bought the library than

anybody. I think we're bound to justify her confidence."

"Certainly, most certainly, we are," said Isaac with solemnity. He was

agreeably flattered by this tribute to the greatness of his house.

"I thought I did right in promising that we would do our very best for

her."

"Of course you were. But that's all settled. Mr. Pilkington knows that

I'm prepared to meet his wishes."

"His wishes?"

"He gave me to understand that he was anxious to have a sum to hand

over to the young lady. In fact, he wrote me a most touching appeal."

"What d----d impertinence! He had no business to appeal!"

"Well, per'aps it wasn't strictly business-like. But I think, under

the circumstances, 'e was morally--_morally_--justified. And I think

he will consider I've responded very handsomely."

"You've made him an offer, then?"

"I made it three days ago, provisionally, and he's accepted it," said

Isaac, with some heat. "Why, he's got the cheque."

"For how much?"

"For twelve hundred."

"My dear father, you know, really, that won't do."

"Do you think it was foolish to pay the two hundred extra?"

Isaac gazed at him over his fine gold-rimmed spectacles; and as he

gazed he kept drawing his beard slowly through one lean and meditative

hand. It was thus that he grasped his son's argument and drew it to a

point.

"Foolish? It was--Don't you see? We--we simply can't do it."

"Why, you said yourself we could go as far as four thousand five, or

four thousand at the very least."

Keith looked steadily at his father, who was too deeply and solemnly

absorbed to perceive the meaning of the look. "That was not quite what

I said. I said--if we were _not_ prepared to go so far, it was our

duty to withdraw. I thought I had made that clear to you."

"You 'aven't made it clear to me why you're objecting to that two

hundred now."

Isaac was beginning to feel that stupidity was now his refuge.

"I'm not objecting to your reckless extravagance, as you seem to

think. I'm trying to suggest that twelve hundred is a ridiculously

small offer for a collection which can't be worth less than four

thousand."

"It may be worth that to a collector. It isn't worth it to me."

"It's worth it to any dealer who knows his business."

"Pretty business, if you have to buy at fancy prices and sell at a

risk."

"I allowed for the risk in the valuation--I always do. There's one

point where you _are_ extravagant, if you like. What's the use of

paying me for advice if you won't take it?"

Isaac's stupidity increased.

"'Ow do you mean--paying you for your advice?"

"Paying a valuer, then, if you won't accept his valuation."

So unwilling was he to admit the sharpness of his father's practice

that he tried to persuade himself that they had merely disagreed on a

point of connoisseurship. "My advice, if you remember, was to withdraw

decently, or pay a decent price."

"I've paid my price, and I'm certainly not going to withdraw."

"Well, but I'm afraid, if you won't withdraw, I must. You haven't paid

_my_ price, and I can't be responsible."

Isaac caressed his beard gently, and looked at Keith with a gaze so

clear that it might have passed for pure. He was saying to himself,

as he had said once before, "There's a woman in it."

"Don't you see," Keith broke out, "the atrocious position that I'm in?

I promised Miss Harden that we'd do our best for her, and now we're

taking advantage of the situation to drive an iniquitous bargain with

her."

As Keith made this powerful statement Isaac smiled, puzzled and

indulgent, as at some play of diverting but incomprehensible humour.

In fact, he never could clearly distinguish between Keith's sense of

humour and his sense of honour; both seemed equally removed from the

safe, intelligible methods of ordinary men. He wasn't sure but what

there was something fine in it, something in keeping with the

intellectual extravagance that distinguished his son from other

people's sons. There were moments when it amused and interested him,

but he did not care to have it obtruded on him in business hours.

"I'm driving no bargain with the lady at all. The books aren't hers,

they're Pilkington's. I'm dealing with him."

"And you refuse to consider her interests?"

"How can you say so when I'm paying two hundred more than I need do,

on her account alone? You must explain that clearly to her."

"Not I. You can explain it yourself. To me, you see, the whole thing's

simply a colossal fraud. I won't have anything to do with it."

"You _'aven't_ anything to do with it. I made the bargain, and I keep

to it."

"Very well, then, you must choose between your bargain and me."

"Wot do you mean, choose between my bargain and you?"

"I mean exactly what I say. I know (if you don't) that that two

hundred ought to be three thousand, and if it isn't paid I shall have

to shunt the business. I never meant to stay in it for ever, but in

this case I shall simply clear out at once, that's all. See?"

"No. I don't see. I don't see myself paying three thousand to a man

who's willing to take two hundred."

"See my point, I mean. If the three thousand isn't paid, I go. On the

other hand, if it is paid, I stay."

This was one of those inspirations on which he had counted, and it

presented itself to him as a "clincher." At the same instant he

realized that he was selling himself into slavery for three thousand

pounds. No, not for three thousand pounds, for his honour's sake and

Lucia Harden's.

Isaac looked graver, alarmed even; it struck him that Keith's peculiar

vein of extravagance was becoming dangerous.

"You can calculate the interest at four per cent., and knock a hundred

and twenty off my salary, if you like; but I'll stay. It's pretty

clear, isn't it? I think, on the whole, it might be as well for you to

close with the offer. It seems to me that if I'm worth anything at

all, I'm worth three thousand."

"I haven't priced your services yet." Isaac's gaze shifted. He was

beginning to feel something of that profound discomfort he had

experienced before in the presence of his son. "Now, when you spoke to

Miss 'Arden, had she any notion of the value of the library?"

"None whatever, till I told her."

"Do you mean to stand there and say that you were fool enough to tell

her?"

"Certainly; I thought it only fair to her."

"And did you think it was fair to me?"

"Why not? If you're not dealing with her what difference could it

make?"

He said to himself, "I've got him there!"

Isaac was indeed staggered by the blow, and lost his admirable

composure.

"Do you know wot you've done? You've compromised me. You've

compromised the honour and the reputation of my 'Ouse. And you've done

it for a woman. You can't 'ide it; you're a perfect fool where women

are concerned."

"If anybody's compromised, I think it's me. I pledged my word."

"And wot business had you to pledge it?"

"Oh, I thought it safe. I didn't think you'd dishonour my draft on

your reputation."

"Draft indeed! That's it. You might just as well 'ave taken my

cheque-book out of the drawer there and forged my signature at the

bottom. Why, it's moral forgery--that's wot it is. I can see it all.

You thought you were acting very generous and grand with this young

lady. I say you were mean. You did it on the cheap. You'd no expense,

or risk, or responsibility at all. I know you can't see it that way,

but that's 'ow it is."

Keith did not defend himself against this view of his conduct, and

Isaac preserved his attitude of moral superiority.

"I'm not blaming you, my boy. It's my own fault. I shouldn't 'ave sent

you out like that, _with_ cart blansh, so to speak, and without it. I

should 'ave given you some responsibility."

"Oh, thanks, I couldn't very well have done with more than I had."

"Ah--you don't know the kind of responsibility I mean. You seem very

ready to play fast and loose with my business. I daresay, now, you

think since you 'aven't much to lose, you 'aven't much to gain?"

"Well, frankly, I can't see that I have--much. But I've got to catch a

train in twenty minutes, and I want to know what you're going to do?

Am I worth three thousand, or am I not?"

"You're worth a great deal more to me. You've got an education I

'aven't got; you've got brains; you've got tact, when you choose to

use it. You've got expert knowledge, and I can't carry on my business

without that. I'm not unreasonable. I can see that you can't act to

advantage if you're not made responsible, if you haven't any direct

interest in the business." He fixed his son with a glance that was

nothing if not spiritually fine. Keith found himself struggling

against an infamous, an intolerable suspicion.

"And that," said Isaac, "is wot I mean to give you. I've thought it

well over, and I believe it's worth my while." He went on, joining his

finger-tips, like a man who fits careful thought to careful thought,

suggesting the final adjustment of a plan long ago determined and

approved, for something in Keith's face made him anxious that this

offer should not appear to be born of the subject under discussion.

"It was always my intention to take you into partnership. I didn't

mean to do it quite so soon, but rather than 'ear this talk of

flinging up the business, I'm prepared to do it now."

"On the same conditions?"

Now that Rickman's should eventually become Rickman and Son was a very

natural development, and in any ordinary circumstances Isaac could

hardly have made a more innocent and suitable proposal. But it was no

longer possible for Keith to ignore its significance. It meant that

his father was ready to buy his services at any price; to bribe him

into silence.

His worst misgivings had never included such a possibility. In fact,

before going down to Devonshire he had never had any serious

misgivings at all. His position in his father's shop had hitherto

presented no difficulties to a sensitive honour. He had not been sure

that his honour was particularly sensitive, not more so, he supposed,

than other people's. Acting as part of the machinery of Rickman's, he

had sometimes made a clever bargain; he had never, so far as he knew,

driven a hard one. He was expected to make clever bargains, to buy

cheap and sell dear, to watch people's faces, lowering the price by

their anxiety to sell, raising it by their eagerness to buy. That was

his stern duty in the second-hand department. But there had been so

many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was

tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in

the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of

him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling.

And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman's, that he generally

paid for these excesses out of his own pocket, so that conscience was

satisfied both ways. Therefore there had been no moral element in his

dislike to Rickman's; he had shrunk from it with the half-fantastic

aversion of the mind, not with this sickening hatred of the soul.

After three weeks of Lucia Harden's society, he had perceived how

sordid were the beginnings from which his life had sprung. As his

boyish dreams had been wrought like a broidery of stars on the floor

of the back-shop, so honour, an unattainable ideal, had stood out in

forlorn splendour against a darker and a dirtier background. He had

felt himself obscurely tainted and involved. Now he realized, as he

had never realized before, that the foundations of Rickman's were laid

in bottomless corruption. It was a House built, not only on every vile

and vulgar art known to trade, but on many instances of such a day's

work as this. And it was into this pit of infamy that his father was

blandly inviting him to descend. He had such an abominably clear

vision of it that he writhed and shuddered with shame and disgust; he

could hardly have suffered more if he had gone down into it bodily

himself. He endured in imagination the emotions that his father should

have felt and apparently did not feel.

He came out of his shudderings and writhings unspeakably consoled and

clean; knowing that it is with such nausea and pangs that the soul of

honour is born.

Their eyes met; and it was the elder Rickman's turn for bitterness. It

had come, the moment that he had dreaded. He was afraid to meet his

son's eyes, for he knew that they had judged him. He felt that he

stood revealed in that sudden illumination of the boy's radiant soul.

An instinct of self-preservation now prompted him to belittle Keith's

character. He had found amazing comfort in the reflection that Keith

was not all that he ought to be. As far as Isaac could make out, he

was always running after the women. He was a regular young profligate,

an infidel he was. What right had he to sit in judgement?

Shrewd even in anger, he took refuge in an adroit misconstruction of

Keith's language. "I lay down _no_ conditions. I'm much too anxious

about you. I want to see you in a house of your own, settled down and

married to some good girl who'll keep you steady and respectable. It's

a simple straightforward offer, and you take it or leave it."

"I'll take it on two conditions. First, as I said before, that we

either withdraw or pay over that three thousand. Second, that in the

future no bargains are made without my knowledge--and consent. That

means giving me the entire control of my own department."

"It means reducing me to a mere cypher."

"Such bargains are questions for experts, and should be left to

experts."

"If I were to leave them to experts like you I should be bankrupt in a

fortnight."

"I'm sorry, but you must choose between your methods and mine. There's

ten minutes to do it in."

"It won't take ten minutes to see what will ruin me quickest. As I

told you before, I'm not going back on my bargain."

"Nor I on mine."

Isaac spent three minutes in reflection. He reflected first, that

Keith had been in the past "a young profligate"; secondly, that he was

at the present moment in love; thirdly, that in the future he would

infallibly be hungry. He would think very differently when he had

forgotten the lady; or if he didn't think differently he would behave

differently when his belly pinched him. Isaac was a firm believer in

the persuasive power of the primitive appetites.

"Only seven minutes," murmured Keith. "I'm sorry to hurry you, father,

but I really must catch that train."

"Wait--steady. Do you know wot you're about? You shan't do anything

rash for want of a clear understanding. Mind--as you stand there,

you're nothing but a paid shop-assistant; and if you leave the shop,

you leave it without a penny to your name."

"Quite so. My name will hardly be any the worse for that. You're sure

you've decided? You--really--do not--want--to keep me?"

After all, did he want to keep him, to be unsettled in his conscience

and ruined in his trade? What, after all, had Keith brought into the

business but three alien and terrible spirits, the spirit of

superiority, the spirit of criticism, the spirit of tempestuous youth?

He would be glad to be rid of him, to be rid of those clear young

eyes, of the whole brilliant and insurgent presence. Not that he

believed that it would really go. He had a genial vision of the hour

of Keith's humiliation and return, a vivid image of Keith crawling

back on that empty belly.

At that moment Keith smiled, a smile that had in it all the sweetness

of his youth. It softened his father's mood, though it could not

change it.

"I'm afraid I can't afford to pay your price, my boy."

He was the first to turn away.

And Keith understood too thoroughly to condemn. That was it. His

father couldn't pay his price. The question was, could he afford to

pay it himself?

As the great swinging doors closed behind him, he realized that

whatever price he had paid for it, he had redeemed his soul. And he

had bought his liberty.

CHAPTER XXXV

Really, as Miss Harden's solicitor pointed out to her in the presence

of Miss Palliser, things looked very black against the young man. It

was clear, from the letter Mr. Schofield had received from Mr.

Jewdwine that morning, that the library was worth at least three times

the amount these Rickmans had paid for it. Barring the fact that sale

by private contract was irregular and unsatisfactory, he completely

exonerated Mr. Pilkington from all blame in the matter. His valuation

had evidently been made in all good faith, if in some ignorance. But

the young man, who by Pilkington's account had been acting all along

as his father's agent, must have been perfectly aware of the nature of

the bargain he had made. There was every reason to suppose that he had

known all about the bill of sale before he came down to Harmouth; and

there could be no doubt he had made use of his very exceptional

opportunities to inform himself precisely of the value of the books he

was cataloguing. He must have known that they had been undervalued by

Mr. Pilkington, and seen his chance of buying them for a mere song.

So what does he do? He carefully conceals his knowledge from the

persons most concerned; obviously, that he and his father may keep the

market to themselves. Then at the last moment he comes and pretends to

give Miss Harden a chance of forestalling the purchase, knowing well

that before she can take a single step the purchase will be concluded.

Then he hurries up to town; and the next thing you hear is that he's

very sorry, but arrangements have unfortunately already been made with

Mr. Pilkington. No doubt, as agent of the sale, that young man would

pocket a very substantial commission. Clearly in the face of the

evidence, it was impossible to acquit him of dishonesty; but no

action could be brought against him, because the matter lay entirely

between him and Mr. Pilkington.

Lucia and Kitty had listened attentively to the masterly analysis of