dishonourable? If you were really my friend you would think more of my
honour than of your own scruples. Or is that asking too much?" He felt
that he had scored in this game of keen intelligences.
"No. But it would be wrong of me to let your honour be influenced by
our friendship."
"Don't think of our friendship, then. It's all pure business, as
brutally impersonal as you like."
"If I could only see it that way."
"I should have thought it was quite transparently and innocently
clear." He had scored again. For now he had taxed her with stupidity.
"If I could persuade you that it came from my father, you wouldn't
mind. You mind because you think it comes from me. Isn't that so?"
She was silent, and he knew.
"How can I persuade you? I can only repeat that I've absolutely
nothing to do with it." There was but little friendliness about him
now. His whole manner was full of weariness and irritation. "Why
should you imagine that I had?"
"Because it would have been so very like you."
"Then I must be lying abominably. Is that so very like me?"
"I have heard you do it before--once--twice--magnificently."
"When?"
"About this time nine years ago."
He remembered. The wonder was that she should have remembered too.
"I daresay. But what possible motive could I have for lying now?"
He had scored heavily this time. Far too heavily. There was a flame in
Lucia's face which did not come from the glow of the fire, a flame
that ran over her neck and forehead to the fine tips of her ears. For
she thought, supposing all the time he had been telling her the simple
truth? Why should she have raised that question? Why should she have
taken for granted that any personal interest should have led him to
do this thing? And in wondering she was ashamed. He saw her confusion,
and attributed it to another cause.
"I'm only asking you to keep the two things distinct, as I do--as I
must do," he said gently.
"I'll think about it, and let you know to-morrow."
"But I'm going to-night."
"Oh no, I can't let you do that. You must stay over the night. Your
room is ready for you."
He protested; she insisted; and in the end she had her way, as he
meant to have his way to-morrow.
He stayed, and all that evening they were very kind to him. Kitty
talked gaily throughout dinner; and afterwards Lucia played to him
while he rested, propped up with great cushions (she had insisted on
the cushions) in her chair. Kitty, his hostess, drew back, and seemed
to leave these things to Lucia as her right. He knew it was Lucia, and
not Kitty, who ran up to his room to see that all was comfortable and
that his fire burnt well. In everything she said and did there was a
peculiar gentleness and care. It was on the same lines as Kitty's
compassion, only more poignant and intense. It was, he thought, as if
she knew that it was for the last time, that of all these pleasant
things to-morrow would see the end. Was it kind of her to let him know
what her tenderness could be when to-morrow must end it all? For he
had no notion of the fear evoked by his appearance, the fear that was
in both their hearts. He did not know why they looked at him with
those kind glances, nor why Lucia told him that Robert was close at
hand if he should want anything in the night. He slept in the room
that had once been Lucia's, the room above the library, looking to the
western hills. He did not know that they had given it him because it
was a good room to be ill and to get well in.
Lucia and Kitty sat up late that night over the fire, and they talked
of him.
Kitty began it. "_Do_ you remember," said she, "the things we used to
say about him?"
"Oh don't, Kitty; I do."
"You needn't mind; it was only I who said them."
"Yes, you said them; but I thought them."
Then she told Kitty what had brought him there and the story that he
had told her. "And, Kitty, all the time I knew he lied."
"Probably. You must take it, Lucy, all the same."
"How can I take it, when I know it comes out of his own poor little
waistcoat pocket?"
"You would, if you cared enough about him."
"No. It's just _because_ I care that I can't."
"You do care, then?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"But not in the same way as _he_ cares, Lucy."
Kitty's words sounded like a statement rather than a question, so they
passed unanswered.
"It's all right, Kitty. It's all over, at last. He doesn't care a bit
now, not a bit."
"Oh doesn't he! How can you be so idiotic? All over? I assure you it's
only just begun."
Lucia turned her head away.
"Lucy--what are you going to do with him?"
Lucia smiled sadly. That was the question she had asked Horace ten
years ago, making him responsible. And now the responsibility had been
laid on her. "Kitty--did you notice how thin he is? He looks as if
he'd just come through some awful illness. But I can't ask him about
it."
"Rather not. You don't know whether he's had it, or whether he's going
to have it."
"I wonder if you'd mind asking him to stay a week or two? It might
help him to get strong."
"I doubt it."
"I don't. I think it's just what he wants. Oh, Kitty, could you--would
you, if I wanted it, too?"
"You needn't ask. But what earthly good can it do?"
"If he got strong here it would be so nice to think we sent him away
well. And if he's going to be ill I could look after him--"
Her use of "we" and "I" did not pass unnoticed by the observant Kitty.
"And then?"
Lucia's face, which had been overcast with care, was now radiant.
"Then I should have done something for him besides making him
miserable. Will you ask him, Kitty?"
"You're a fool, Lucy, and I'm another. But I'll ask him. To-morrow,
though; not to-day."
She waited to see what to-morrow would bring forth, for she was
certain it would bring forth something.
It brought forth glorious weather after the east wind, a warm languid
day, half spring, half summer. Lucia and Kitty seemed bent on putting
all idea of business out of their guest's head. In the morning they
drove about the country. In the afternoon they all sat out in the
south square under the windows of the morning-room, while Lucia talked
to him about his tragedies. Kitty still held her invitation in
reserve.
At last she left them to themselves. It was Lucia who first returned
to the subject of dispute. She had some sewing in her lap which gave
her the advantage of being able to talk in a calm, detached manner and
without looking up. He sat near her, watching with delight the quiet
movements of her hands.
"I've been thinking over what you said yesterday," said she. "I can't
do what you want; but I can suggest a compromise. You seem determined
on restitution. Have you forgotten that you once offered it me in
another form?"
"You refused it in that form--then."
"I wouldn't refuse it now. If you could be content with that."
"Do you remember why you refused it?"
She did not answer, but a faint flush told him that she had not
forgotten.
"The same objection--the same reason for objecting--holds good now."
"Not quite. I should not be wronging any one else."
"You mean the Beaver, who dotes upon immortal verse?"
She smiled a little sadly. "Yes; there's no Beaver in the question
now."
"You shall have the sonnets in any case. I brought them for you in
place of the _Aurea Legenda_, and the Neapolitan Horace and--"
She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, as if she could shut
out sound with sight. "Please--please. If you go on talking about it
we shall both be very tired. Don't you feel as if you'd like some
tea?" She was bringing out all her feminine reserves to conquer him.
But he was not going to be conquered this time. He could afford to
wait; for he also had reserves.
"I'm so sorry," he said humbly. "I won't bore you any more till after
tea."
And Lucia knew it was an armistice only and not peace.
At tea-time Kitty perceived that the moment was not yet propitious for
her invitation. She was not even sure that it would ever come. Nor
would it; for Rickman knew that his only chance lay in their imminent
parting, in the last hour that must be his.
He was counting on it when the steady, resistless flow of a stream of
callers cut short his calculations. It flowed between him and Lucia.
They could only exchange amused or helpless glances across it now and
then. At last he found a moment and approached her.
"I wanted to give you those things before I go."
"Very well. We'll go into the house in one minute."
He waited. She made a sign that said, "Come," and he followed her. She
avoided the morning-room that looked on the courtyard with its throng
of callers; hesitated, and opened the door into the library. He ran
upstairs to fetch the manuscript, and joined her there. But for the
empty bookshelves this room, too, was as he had left it.
Lucia was sitting in a window seat. He came to her and gave the poems
into her open hands, and she thanked him.
"Nonsense. It's good of you to take them. But that doesn't release you
from your obligations."
She laid the manuscript on the window-seat, protected by her hand. He
sat there facing her, and for a moment neither spoke.
"I haven't very much time," he said at last. "I've got to catch the
seven-forty."
"You haven't. We don't want you to go like this. Now you're here you
must stay a fortnight at the very least."
He hung his head. He did not want her to see how immense was the
temptation. He murmured some half-audible, agitated thanks, but his
refusal was made quite plain. He could not give up the advantage he
had counted on. "I'm afraid I must bore you again a little now. I've
only got an hour."
"Don't spoil it, then. See how beautiful it is."
She rose and threw open the lattice, and they stood together for a
moment looking out. It was about an hour before sunset, an April
sunset, the golden consummation of the wedding of heaven and earth. He
felt a delicate vibration in the air, the last tender resonance of the
nuptial song. This April was not the April of the streets where the
great wooing of the world goes on with violence and clangour; for the
city is earth turned to stone and yields herself struggling and
unwilling to the invasion of the sky. Here all the beautiful
deep-bosomed land lay still, breathless in her escape from the wind to
the sun. Up the western valley the earth gave all her greenness naked
to the light; but the hills were dim with the divine approaches of her
mystical union, washed by the undivided streams of blue and purple air
that flowed to the thin spiritual verge, where earth is caught up and
withdrawn behind heaven's inmost veil.
The hour was beautiful as she had said. Its beauty had clothed itself
with immortality in light; yet there was in it such mortal tenderness
as drew his heart after it and melted his will in longing. He turned
from the window and looked at her with all his trouble in his eyes.
Lucia saw that her words had saddened him, and she sat still, devising
some comfort for him in her heart.
"I don't think," he said at last, "you quite know what you are doing.
I'm going to tell you something that I didn't mean to tell you. When I
said I'd had nothing to do with all this, it wasn't altogether true."
"So I supposed," she murmured.
"There was a--a certain amount of trouble and difficulty about it--"
"And what did that mean?"
"It only meant that I had to work rather hard to put it right. I liked
it, so you needn't think anything of that. But if you persist in your
refusal all my hard work goes for nothing." He was so powerless
against her tender obstinacy that he had determined to appeal to her
tenderness alone. "There were about three years of it, the best three
years out of my life; and you are going to fling them away and make
them useless. All for a little wretched scruple. This is the only
argument that will appeal to you; or I wouldn't have mentioned it."
"The best years out of your life--why were they the best?"
"Because they were the first in which I was free."
She thought of the time nine years ago when she had taken from him
three days, the only days when he was free, and how she had tried to
make restitution and had failed. "And whatever else I refuse," she
said, "I've taken _them_? I can't get out of that?"
"No. If you want to be very cruel you can say I'd no business to lay
you under the obligation, but you can't get out of it."
She looked away. Did she want to be very cruel? Did she want to get
out of it? Might it not rather be happiness to be in it, immersed in
it? Lost in it, with all her scruples and all her pride?
His voice broke and trembled into passion. "And what is it that I'm
asking you to take? Something that isn't mine and _is_ yours;
something that it would be dishonourable of me to keep. But if it
_was_ mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to
give you and you wouldn't have."
Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of
stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had
given her, that she had not refused. His eyes followed her movements.
She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.
She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body
were sharper than ever. His face was more than ever serious and clean
cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows,
darkening their blue. He was refined almost to emaciation. And she saw
other things. As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other,
his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she
noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was
worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole. He
changed his attitude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze. She
did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she
noticed them now. Perhaps she would not have seen them but for that
attempt to hide them which revealed their significance. She said to
herself, "He is poor; and yet he has done this." And the love that had
been so long hidden, sheltered and protected by her pity, came forth,
and knew itself as love. And she forgot his greatness and remembered
only those pitiful human things in which he had need of her. So she
surrendered.
"I will take everything--on one condition. That you will give me--what
you said just now I wouldn't have." The eyes that she lifted to his
were full of tears.
For one moment he did not understand. Very slowly he realized that the
thing he had dreamed and despaired of, that he dared not ask for, was
being divinely offered to him as a free gift. There was no moment, not
even in that night of his madness, in this room nine years ago, nor in
that other night in Howland Street, when he had desired it as he
desired it now.
Her tears hung curved on the curved lashes of her eyes, and spilt
themselves, and fell one by one on to the pages of the manuscript. He
heard them fall.
Before he let himself be carried away by the sweep of her impulse and
his own passion he saw that not honour but common decency forbade him
to take advantage of a moment's inspired tenderness. He had already
made a slight appeal _ad misericordiam_; but that was for her sake not
his own. He realized most completely his impossible position. He had
no income, and he had damaged his health so seriously that it might be
long enough before he could make one; and these facts he could not
possibly mention. She suspected him of poverty; but the smallest hint
of his real state would have roused her infallible instinct of
divination. He had felt, as her eyes rested on his emaciated body,
that they could see the course of its sufferings, its starvation. He
meant that she should never know what things had happened to him in
Howland Street. His chivalry revolted against the brutality of
capturing her tender heart by such a lacerating haul on its
compassion.
All this swept through him between the falling of her ears. Last of
all came the thought of what he was giving up. Was it possible that
she cared for him?
It could not be. The illusion lasted only for an instant. Yet while it
lasted the insane longing seized him to take her at her word and risk
the consequences. For she would find out afterwards that she had never
loved him; and she would disguise her feeling and he would see through
her disguise. He would know. There could never be any disguise, any
illusion between her and him. But at least he could take her in his
arms and hold her now, while her tears fell; she would be his for this
moment that was now.
He searched her face to see if indeed there had been any illusion.
Through the tears that veiled her eyes he could not see whether it
were love or pity that still shone in them; but because of the tears
he thought it must be pity.
She went on. "You said I had taken the best years of your life--I
would like to give you all mine, instead, such as it is--if you'll
take it."
She said it quietly, so quietly that he thought that she had spoken so
only because she did not love him.
"How can I take it--now, in this way?"
(Her tears stopped falling suddenly.)
"I admit that I made a gross appeal to your pity."
"My pity?"
"Yes, your pity." His words were curt and hard because of the terrible
restraint he had to put upon himself. "I did it because it was the
best argument. Otherwise it would have been abominable of me to have
said those things."
"I wasn't thinking of anything you said, only of what you've done."
"I haven't done much. But tell me the truth. Whether would you rather
I had done it for your sake or for mere honour's sake?"
"I would rather you had done it for honour's sake." She said it out
bravely, though she knew that it was the profounder confession of her
feeling. He, however, was unable to take it that way.
"I thought so," he said. "Well, that _is_ why I did it."
"I see. I wanted to know the truth; and now I know it."
"You don't know half of it--" His passion leapt to his tongue under
the torture, but he held it down. He paused, knowing that this moment
in which he stood was one of those moments which have the spirit and
the power of eternity, and that it was his to save or to destroy it.
So admirable indeed was his control that it had taken their own
significance from his words, and she read into them another meaning.
Her face was white with terror because of the thing she had said; but
she still looked at him without flinching. She hardly realized that he
was going, that he was trying to say good-bye.
"I will take the books--if you can keep them for me a little while."
Some perfect instinct told her that this was the only way of atonement
for her error. He thanked her as if they had been speaking of a
trifling thing.
She rose, holding the manuscript loosely in her clasped hands, and he
half thought that she was going to give it back to him. He took it
from her and threw it on the window-seat, and held her hands together
for an instant in his own. He looked down at them, longing to stoop
and kiss them, but forebore, because of his great love for her, and
let them go. He went out quickly. He had sufficient self-command to
find Kitty and thank her and take his leave.
As the door closed on him Lucia heard herself calling him back, with
what intention she hardly knew, unless it were to return his poems.
"Keith," she said softly--"Keith." But even to her own senses it was
less a name than a sound that began in a sob and ended in a sigh.
Kitty found her standing in the window-place where he had left her.
"Has anything happened?" she asked.
"I asked him to marry me, Kitty, and he wouldn't. That was all."
"Are you sure you did, dear? From the look of him I should have said
it was the other way about."
CHAPTER LXXV
"I don't know what to think of it, Kitty. What do you think?"
"I think you've been playing with fire, dear. With the divine fire.
It's the most dangerous of all, and you've got your little fingers
burnt."
"Like Horace. He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire.
I'm not a critic."
"That you most certainly are not."
"Still I used to understand him; and now I can't. I can't make it out
at all."
"There's only one thing," said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came.
"You haven't seen him for more than three years, and you can't tell
what may have happened in between. He _may_ have got entangled with
another woman."
Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed
it plausible. But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention. No
other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the
invading idea of Keith Rickman.
Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the
evidence before her. The details which would have thrown light on the
situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself.
All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend's
mind with a new torment. Lucia had dreaded Rickman's coming; she had
lost all sense of security in his presence. Still she had understood
him. And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that
something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in. Was it
possible that she had never really understood?
Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that
Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had
confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort
of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not
bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like
her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest
resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always
felt--in one way--absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it
had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.
How was it that she had never felt it before? Never felt it in the
first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening
after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone? When he had
appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent
as glass, incapable of reservation or disguise? It was in those days
(he had told her) that he had not been--good. And yet her own vision
of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then. Even in
that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she
was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected
him. And in the second period of their friendship, when his character
was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof
with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt. And now there was
no end to her doubt. She could not tell which was the instinct she
should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or
now. What had become of her calm and lucid insight? Of the sympathy in
which they had once stood each transparent to the other.
For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and
that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was
beginning to keep her awake at night). She had made it impossible for
him to respect her any more. He had his ideas of what a woman should
and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like,
and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia's mood rose from misery to
anger). She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had
judged her as he judged such women. And she had brought that judgement
on herself.
In an ecstasy of shame she recalled the various episodes of their
acquaintance, from the time when she had first engaged him to work for
her (against his will), to the present intolerable moment. There rose
before her in an awful vision that night when she had found him
sleeping in the library; when she had stayed and risked the chances of
his waking. Well, he could not think any the worse of her for that;
because he had not waked. But she had risked it. The more she thought
of it the more she saw what she had risked. He would always think of
her as a woman who did risky things. Edith had said she had put
herself in his power. She remembered how she had come between him and
the woman whom he would have married but for her; how she had invited
him to sit with her when the Beaver was away. He had liked it, but he
must have had his own opinion of her all the same. That was another of
the risky things. And of course he had taken advantage of it. That was
the very worst of all. He had loved her in his way; she had been one
of a series. Flossie had come before her. And before Flossie? All that
was fine in him had turned against Flossie because of the feeling she
inspired. And it had turned against her.
For now, when he had got over it, had forgotten that he had ever had
that feeling, when all he wanted was to go his own way and let her go
hers, she had tried to force herself upon him (Lucia was unaware of
her violent distortion of the facts). He had come with his simple
honourable desire for reparation; and she had committed _the_
unpardonable blunder--she had mistaken his intentions. And for the
monument and crown of her dishonour, she, Lucia Harden, had proposed
to him and been rejected.
Her misery endured (with some merciful intermissions) for three weeks.
Then Horace Jewdwine wrote and invited himself down for the first
week-end in May.
"_Can_ he come, Kitty?" she asked wearily.
"Of course he can, dear, if you want him,"
"I don't want him; but I don't mind his coming."
Kitty said to herself, "He has an inkling; Edith has been saying
things; and it has brought him to the point." Otherwise she could not
account for such an abrupt adventure on the part of the deliberate
Horace. It was a Wednesday; and he proposed to come on Friday. He
came on Friday. Kitty's observation was on the alert; but it could
detect nothing that first evening beyond a marked improvement in
Horace Jewdwine. With Lucia he was sympathetic, deferential, charming.
He also laid himself out, a little elaborately, to be agreeable to
Kitty.
In the morning he approached Lucia with a gift, brought for her
birthday ("I thought," said Lucia, "he had forgotten that I ever had a
birthday"). It was an early copy of Rickman's tragedy _The Triumph of
Life_, just published. His keen eyes watched her handling it.
"He suspects," thought Kitty, "and he's testing her."
But Lucia's equanimity survived. "Am I to read it now?"
"As you like."
She carried the book up to her own room and did not appear till
lunch-time. In her absence Horace seemed a little uneasy; but he went
on making himself agreeable to Kitty. "He must be pretty desperate,"
thought she, "if he thinks it worth while." Apparently he did think it
worth while, though he allowed no sign of desperation to appear.
Lucia, equally discreet, avoided ostentatious privacy. They sat out
all afternoon under the beechtrees while she read, flaunting _The
Triumph of Life_ in his very eyes. He watched every movement of her
face that changed as it were to the cadence of the verse. It was
always so, he remembered, when she was strongly moved. At last she
finished and he smiled.
"You like your birthday present?"
"Very much. But Horace, he has done what you said was impossible."
"Anybody would have said it was impossible. Modern drama in blank
verse, you know--"
"Yes. It ought to have been all wrong. But because he's both a great
poet and a great dramatist, it's all right, you see. Look," she said,
pointing to a passage that she dared not read. "Those are human
voices. Could anything be simpler and more natural? But it's blank
verse because it couldn't be more perfectly expressed in prose."
"Yes, yes. I wonder how he does it."
"It would have been impossible to anybody else."
"It remains impossible. If it's ever played, it will be played because
of Rickman's stage-craft and inimitable technique, not because of his
blank verse."
She put the book down; took up her work, and said no more. Horace
seemed to have found his answer and to be satisfied. "A fool," thought
Kitty; "but he shall have his chance." So she left them alone together
that evening.
But Jewdwine was very far from being satisfied, either with Lucia or
himself. Lucia had refused to play to him yesterday because she had a
headache; she had refused to walk with him to-day because she was
tired; and to-night she would not sit up to talk to him because she
had another headache. That evening he had all but succumbed to a
terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with
Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her attitude,
that appealed to the authority on Æsthetics. He found himself
wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then
Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her
face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had
kissed her his sense of propriety would have obliged him to propose to
her and marry her.
He almost wished he had yielded to that temptation, done that
desperate deed. It would have at least settled the question once for
all.
For Jewdwine had found himself a third time at the turning of the
ways. He knew where he was; but not where he was going. It had
happened with Jewdwine as it had with Isaac Rickman; as it happens to
every man bent on serving two masters. He had forbidden his right hand
all knowledge of his left. He lived in two separate worlds. In one,
lit by the high, pure light of the idea, he stood comparatively alone,
cheered in his intellectual solitude by the enthusiasm of his
disciples. For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace
Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of
visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of
these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them
he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred
imperishable flame. Some suffered no painful disenchantment for their
pilgrimage; and when the world that knew Jewdwine imparted to them its
wisdom they smiled the mystic smile of the initiated. But many had
become shaken in their faith. One of these, having achieved a little
celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any
public assistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him
diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had assured him that
the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the
superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to
round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable
privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had
added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." And this had been
Jewdwine's own confession and defence.
But now he had gone down into Devonshire, as Rickman had once gone
before him, to find himself. He had returned to Lucia as to his own
purer soul. That night Jewdwine sat up face to face with himself and
all his doubts; his problem being far more complicated than before.
Three years ago it might have been very simply stated. Was he or was
he not going to marry his cousin Lucia? But now, while personal
inclination urged him to marry her, prudence argued that he would do
better to marry a certain cousin of Mr. Fulcher's. His own cousin had
neither money nor position. Mr. Fulcher's cousin had both. Once
married to Miss Fulcher he could buy back Court House, if the
Pallisers would give it up. The Cabinet Minister's cousin was in love
with him, whereas he was well aware that his own cousin was not.
But then he had never greatly desired her to be so.
Jewdwine had neither respect nor longing for Miss Fulcher's passionate
love. To his fragile temperament there was something infinitely more
alluring in Lucia's virginal apathy. Her indifference (which he
confused with her innocence) fascinated him; her reluctance was as a
challenge to his languid blood. He was equally fascinated by her
indifference to the income and position that were his. He admired that
immaculate purity the more because he was not himself in these ways
particularly pure. He loved money and position for their own sakes
and hated himself for loving them. He would have liked to have been
strong enough to despise these things as Lucia had always despised
them. But he did not desire that she should go on despising them, any
more than he desired that her indifference should survive the marriage
ceremony. He pictured with satisfaction her gradual yielding to the
modest luxury he had to offer her, just as he pictured the exquisite
delaying dawn of her wifely ardour.
The truth was he had lived too long with Edith. The instincts of his
nature cried out (as far as anything so well-regulated could be said
to cry out) in the most refined of accents for a wife, for children
and a home. He had his dreams of the holy faithful spouse, a spouse
with great dog-like eyes and tender breast, fit pillow for the head of
a headachy, literary man. Lucia had dog-like eyes, and of her
tenderness he had never had a doubt. He had never forgotten that hot
June day, the year before he left Oxford, when he lay in the hammock
in the green garden and Lucia ministered to him. Before that there was
a blessed Long Vacation when he had over-read himself into a nervous
breakdown, and Lucia had soothed his headaches with the touch of her
gentle hands. For the sake of that touch he would then have borne the
worst headache man ever had.
And now it seemed that it was Lucia that was always having headaches.
He had, in fact, begun to entertain the very gravest anxiety about her
health. Her face and figure had grown thin; they were becoming less
and less like the face and figure of the ideal spouse. Poor Lucia's
arms offered no reliable support for a tired man.
To his annoyance Jewdwine found that he had to breakfast alone with
his hostess, because of Lucia's headache.
"Lucia doesn't seem very strong," he said to Kitty, sternly, as if it
had been Kitty's fault. "Don't you see it?"
"I have seen it for some considerable time."
"She wants rousing."
And Jewdwine, who was himself feeling the need of exercise, roused her
by taking her for a walk up Harcombe Hill. Half-way up she turned a
white face to him, smiling sweetly, sat down on the hillside, and
bent her head upon her knees. He sat beside her and waited for her
recovery with punctilious patience. His face wore an expression of
agonized concern. But she could see that the concern was not there
altogether on her account.
"Don't be frightened, Horace, you won't have to carry me home."
He helped her to her feet, not ungently, and was very considerate in
accommodating his pace to hers, and in reassuring her when she
apologized for having spoilt his morning. And then it was that she
thought of Keith Rickman, of his gentleness and his innumerable acts
of kindness and of care; and she said to herself, "_He_ would not be
impatient with me if I were ill."
She rested in her room that afternoon and Kitty sat with her. Kitty
could not stand, she said, more than a certain amount of Horace
Jewdwine.
"Lucia," she asked suddenly, "if Horace Jewdwine had asked you to
marry him five years ago, would you have had him?"
"I don't know. I don't really know. He's a good man."
"You mean his morals are irreproachable. It's quite easy to have
irreproachable morals if you have the temperament of an iceberg that
has never broken loose from its Pole. Now I call Keith Rickman a
saint, because he could so easily have been the other thing."
Lucia did not respond; and Kitty left her.
Kitty's question had set her thinking. Would she have married Horace
if he had asked her five years ago? Why not? Between Horace and her
there was the bond of kindred and of caste. He was a scholar; he had,
or he once had, a beautiful mind full of noble thoughts of the kind
she most admired. With Horace she would have felt safe from many
things. All his ideas and feelings, all his movements could be relied
on with an absolute assurance of their propriety. Horace would never
do or say anything that could offend her feminine taste. In his love
(she had been certain) there would never be anything painful,
passionate, disturbing. She had dreamed of a love which should be a
great calm light rather than a flame. There was no sort of flame about
Horace. _Was_ Horace a good man? Yes. That is to say he was a moral
man. He would have come to her clean in body and in soul. She had
vowed she would never marry a certain kind of man. And yet that was
the kind of man Keith Rickman had been.
She had further demanded in her husband the finish of the ages. Who
was more finished than Horace? Who more consummately, irreproachably
refined? And yet her heart had grown more tender over Keith Rickman
and his solecisms. And now it beat faster at the very thought of him,
after Horace Jewdwine.
For Horace's coming had brought her understanding of Keith Rickman and
herself. She knew now what had troubled her once clear vision of him.
It was when she had loved him least that she had divined him best.
Hers was not the facile heart that believes because it desires. It
desired because it believed; and now it doubted because its belief was
set so high.
And, knowing that she loved him, she thought of that last day when he
had left her, and how he had taken her hands in his and looked at
them, and she remembered and wondered and had hope.
Then it occurred to her that Horace would be leaving early the next
morning, and that she really ought to go down to the drawing-room and
talk to him.
Again by Kitty's mercy he had been given another chance. He was
softened by a mood of valediction mingled with remorse. He was even
inclined to be a little sentimental. Lucia, because her vision was
indifferent therefore untroubled, could not but perceive the change in
him. His manner had in it something of benediction and something of
entreaty; his spirit brooded over, caressed and flattered hers. He
deplored the necessity for his departure. "_Et ego in Arcadia_"--he
quoted.
"But you'll go away to-morrow and become more--more Metropolitan than
ever."
"Ah, Lucia, can't you leave my poor rag alone? Do you really think so
badly of it?"
"Well, I was prouder of my cousin when he had _The Museion_."
"I didn't ask you what you thought of _me_. Perhaps I'm not very proud
of myself."
"I don't suppose it satisfies your ambition--I should be sorry if it
did."
"My _ambition_? What do you think it was?"
"It was, wasn't it--To be a great critic?"
"It depends on what you call great."
"Well, you came very near it once."
"When?"
"When you were editor of _The Museion_."
He smiled sadly. "The editor of _The Museion_, Lucia, was a very
little man with a very big conceit of himself. I admit he made himself
pretty conspicuous. So does every leader of a forlorn hope."
"Still he led it. What does the editor of _Metropolis_ lead?"
"Public opinion, dear. He has--although you mightn't think
it--considerable power."
Lucia was silent.
"He can make--or kill--a reputation in twenty-four hours."
"Does that satisfy your ambition?"
"Yes. It satisfies my ambition. But it doesn't satisfy me."
"I was afraid it didn't."
"You needn't be afraid, dear; for you know perfectly well what would."
"Do I know? Do you know yourself, Horace?"
"Yes, Lucia," he said gently; "after ten years. You may not be proud
of your cousin--"
"I used to be proud of him always--or nearly always."
"When were you proud of him?"
"When he was himself; when he was sincere."
"I ought to be very proud of _my_ cousin; for she is pitilessly
sincere."
"Horace--"
"It is so, dear. Never mind, you needn't be proud of me, if you'll
only care--"
"I have always cared."
"Or is it--nearly always?"
"Well--nearly always."
"You're right. I _am_ insincere, I was insincere when I said you
needn't be proud of me. I want you, I mean you to be."
"Do you mean to give up _Metropolis_, then?"
"Well, no. That's asking rather too much."
"I know it is."
"Do you hate it so much, Lucia? I wish you didn't."
"I have hated it so much, Horace, that I once wished I had been a rich
woman, that you might be"--she was going to say "an honourable man."
"What's wrong with it? It's a better paper than the old one. There are
better men on it, and its editor's a better man."
"Is he?"
"Yes. He's a simpler, humbler person, and--I should have thought--more
possible to like."
In her heart Lucia admitted that it was so. There was a charm about
this later Horace Jewdwine which was wanting in that high spirit that
had essayed to move the earth. He had come down from his chilly
altitudes to mix with men; he had shed the superstition of
omnipotence, he was aware of his own weakness and humanized by it. The
man was soiled but softened by his traffic with the world. There was
moreover an indescribable pathos in the contrast presented by the
remains of the old self, its loftiness, its lucidity, and the
vulgarity with which he had wrapped it round. Jewdwine's intellectual
splendour had never been so impressive as now when it showed thus
tarnished and obscured.
"At any rate," he went on, "he is infinitely less absurd. He knows his
limitations. Also his mistakes. He tried to turn the republic of
letters into a limited monarchy. Now he has surrendered to the
omnipotence of facts."
"You mean he has lowered his standard?"
"My dear girl, what am I to do with my standard? Look at the rabble
that are writing. I can't compare Tompkins with Shakespeare or Brown
with Sophocles. I'm lucky if I can make out that Tompkins has
surpassed Brown this year as Brown surpassed Tompkins last year; in
other words, that Tompkins has surpassed himself."
"And so you go on, looking lower and lower."
"N-n-no, Lucia. I don't look lower; I look closer, I see that there is
something to be said for Tompkins after all. I find subtler and
subtler shades of distinction between him and Brown. I become more
just, more discriminating, more humane."
"I know how fine your work is, and that's just the pity of it. You
might have been a great critic if you hadn't wasted yourself on little
things and little men."
"If a really big man came along, do you think I should look at them?
But he doesn't come. I've waited for him ten years, Lucia, and he
hasn't come."
"Oh, Horace--"
"He hasn't. Show me a big man, and I'll fall down and worship him.
Only show him me."
"That's your business, isn't it, not mine? Still, I can show you one,
not very far off, in fact very near."
"Too near for us to judge him perhaps. Who is he?"
"If I'm not mistaken, he's a sort of friend of yours."
"Keith Rickman? Oh--"
"Do you remember the day we first talked about him?"
He did indeed. He remembered how unwilling he had been to talk about
him; and he was still more unwilling now. He wanted, and Lucia knew
that he wanted, to talk about himself.
"It's ten years ago," she said. "Have you been waiting all this time
to see him?"
He coloured. "I saw him before you did, Lucia. I saw him a very long
way off. I was the first to see."
"Were you? Then--oh Horace, if you saw all those years ago why haven't
you said so?"
"I have said so, many times."
"Whom have you said it to?"
"To you for one. To every one, I think, who knows him. They'll bear me
out."
"The people who know him? What was the good of that? You should have
said it to the people who don't know him--to the world."
"You mean I should have posed as a prophet?"
"I mean that what you said you might have written."
"Ah, _litera scripta manet_. It isn't safe to prophesy. Remember, I
saw him a very long way off. Nobody had a notion there was anybody
there."
"You could have given them a notion."
"I couldn't. The world, Lucia, is not like you or me. It has no
imagination. It wouldn't have seen, and it wouldn't have believed. I
should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing
behind it. And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game. In the first
place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and
the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets
even when they're right."
"Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of
butter."
"It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things.
When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world
retaliates and offers them a stone. And that stone, I need not tell
you, has no butter on it."
"I see. You were afraid. You haven't the courage of your opinion."
"And I haven't much opinion of my courage. I own to being afraid."
"Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?"
"My first duty is to the public--_my_ public; not to my friends.
Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet--I think he is--but if
my public doesn't want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can't
insist on their hearing, can I?"
"No, Horace, after all you've told me, I don't believe you can."
"Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it."
"I'm to admire your frankness, am I? You say you're afraid. But you
said just now you had such power."
"If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the rôle of Vates I
should have lost my power. Nobody would have listened to me. I began
that way, by preaching over people's heads. The _Museion_ was a pulpit
in the air. I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary
transcendentalism. Nobody listened. When I condescended to come down
and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened.
It wouldn't have done Rickman any good if I'd pestered people with
him. But when the time comes I shall speak out."
"I daresay, when the time comes--it will come too--when he has made
his name with no thanks to you, then you'll be the first to say 'I
told you so.' It would have been a greater thing to have helped him
when he needed it."
"I did help him. He wouldn't be writing now if it wasn't for me."
"Do you see much of him?"
"Not much. It isn't my fault," he added in answer to her reproachful
eyes. "He's shut himself up with Maddox in a stuffy little house at
Ealing."
"Does that mean that he's very badly off?"
"Well, no; I shouldn't say so. He's got an editorship. But he isn't
the sort that's made for getting on. In many things he is a fool."
"I admire his folly more than some people's wisdom."
From the look in Lucia's eyes Jewdwine was aware that his cousin no
longer adored him. Did she adore Rickman?
"You're a little hard on me, I think. After all, I was the first to
help him."
"_And_ the last. Are you quite sure you helped him? How do you know
you didn't hinder him? You kept him for years turning out inferior
work for you, when he might have been giving us his best."
"He might--if he'd been alive to do it."
"I'm only thinking of what you might have done. The sort of thing
you've done for other people--Mr. Fulcher, for instance."
Jewdwine blushed as he had never blushed before. He was not given to
that form of self-betrayal.
"You said just now you could either kill a book in twenty-four hours,
or make it--did you say?--immortal."
"I might have said I could keep it alive another twenty-four hours."
"You know the reputations you have made for people."
"I do know them. I've made enough of them to know. The reputations
I've made will not last. The only kind that does last is the kind that
makes itself. Do you seriously suppose a man like Rickman needs my
help? I am a journalist, and the world that journalists are compelled
to live in is very poor and small. He's in another place altogether. I
couldn't dream of treating him as I treat, say, Rankin or Fulcher. The
best service I could do him was to leave him alone--to keep off and
give him room."
"Room to stand in?"
"No. Room to grow in, room to fight in--"
"Room to measure his length in when he falls?"
"If you like. Rickman's length will cover a considerable area."
Lucia looked at her cousin with genuine admiration. How clever, how
amazingly clever he was! She knew and he knew that he had failed in
generosity to Rickman; that he had been a more than cautious critic
and a callous friend. She had been prepared to be nice to him if they
had kept Rickman out of their conversation; but as the subject had
arisen she had meant to give Horace a terribly bad quarter of an hour;
she had meant to turn him inside out and make him feel very mean and
pitiful and small. And somehow it hadn't come off. Instead of
diminishing as he should have done, Horace had worked himself
gradually up to her height, had caught flame from her flame, and now
he was consuming her with her own fire. It was she who had taken, the
view most degrading to the man she admired; she who would have dragged
her poet down to earth and put him on a level with Rankin and Fulcher
and such people. Horace would have her believe that his own outlook
was the clearer and more heavenly; that he understood Rickman better;
that he saw that side of him that faced eternity.
His humility, too, was pathetic and disarmed her indignation. At the
same time he made it appear that this was a lifting of the veil, a
glimpse of the true Jewdwine, the soul of him in its naked simplicity
and sincerity. And she was left uncertain whether it were not so.
"Even so," she said gently; "think of all you will have missed."
"Missed, Lucia?"
"Yes, missed. I think, to have believed in any one's greatness--the
greatness of a great poet--to have been allowed to hold in your hands
the pure, priceless thing, before the world had touched it--to have
seen what nobody else saw--to feel that through your first glorious
sight of him he belonged to you as he never could belong to the world,
that he was your own--that would be something to have lived for. It
would be greatness of a kind."
He bowed his head as it were in an attitude as humble and reverent as
her own. "And yet," he said, "the world does sometimes see its poet
and believe in him."
"It does--when he works miracles."
"Someday he will work his miracle."
"And when the world runs after him you will follow."
"I shall not be very far behind."
CHAPTER LXXVI
He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As
far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by
being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly
desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of
seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired
to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended
by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself
that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of
Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.
They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would
stay with Edith in the summer.
By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It
had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet
after the publication of _The Triumph of Life_. The interesting, the
burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater
dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had
been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks.
Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more.
He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously
for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the
new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.
Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She
looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness
of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently
without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously
from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or
overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were
disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and
unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if
she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived
passionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors
she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith
Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear;
that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her,
remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that
henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the
reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were
these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long
beforehand?
She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his
study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and
called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.
"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."
"I always said he would."
"You doubted--once."
"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."
"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."
She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was
trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.
"Where is he, Horace?"
"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a
success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was
something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did
not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One
moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner
shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his
conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the
possibility of the great poet's material success.
"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining
here on the tenth."
Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his
pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted
in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality,
perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part
she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His
immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity--no. It rose up
before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her
memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in
attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach
none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that
dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the
spectacle of Horace's abasement.
Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal;
and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether
he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love
should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his
old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the
proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama."
There the author of the _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_, the apostle of the
Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He
touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and
declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what
we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he
flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call
himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been his discovery in
the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.
He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have
said."
"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed
it; but not now."
He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article,
his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the
reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him
with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no
condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself.
Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that
he was justified in his changes of attitude. If his conscience joined
with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but
that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent
in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did
not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just
this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short?
Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down
in the _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_? The _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_ was
not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in
constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not
a prison.
But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an
insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it
possible that he, the author of the _Prolegomena_, had ceased to care
about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had
never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent
as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he,
the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever
opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best
served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very
imposing figure by his philosophic attitude. In London he had found
that the same attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous.
Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when
it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware
that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of
a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage
there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner
soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid
immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by the
_Prolegomena_. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among
those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of
letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by
which he saw clearly his own damnation.
CHAPTER LXXVII
Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amusement in discussing whether
the great dramatist were Maddox's discovery or Jewdwine's. With the
readers of _Metropolis_ he passed as Jewdwine's--which was all that
Jewdwine wanted. With the earnest aspiring public, striving to admire
Keith Rickman because they had been told they ought to, he passed as
their own. The few who had known him from the first knew also that
poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover
themselves. Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the
absurd pretension. Enough that he lived, and was known to live, with
Rickman as his friend.
They shared that little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour
of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his
bride. It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the
religious passion of his half-Celtic soul.
The poet had trusted the honour and the judgement of his friend so far
as to appoint him his literary executor. Thus Maddox became possessed
of the secret of the Sonnets. And here a heavy strain was put upon his
judgement and his honour. Maddox had guessed that there was a power in
Rickman's life more terrible than Jewdwine, who after all had never
really touched him. There was, Maddox had always known, a woman
somewhere. A thousand terrors beset the devotee when he noticed that
since fame had lighted upon Rickman the divinity had again begun to
furnish his part (the holy part) of the temple in a manner
unmistakably suggestive of mortality. Maddox shuddered as he thought
of the probable destination of that upper chamber which was the
holiest of all. And now this terror had become a certainty. The woman
existed; he knew her name; she was a cousin of the detestable
Jewdwine; the Sonnets could never be given to the world as long as she
withheld her consent, and apparently she did withhold it. More than
this had not been revealed to Maddox, and it was in vain that he tried
to penetrate the mystery.
His efforts were not the most delicate imaginable. One evening,
sitting with Rickman in that upper chamber, he entered on the subject
thus--
"Seen anything of the Spinkses lately?"
"I called there last Saturday."
"How is the divine Flossie?"
"Flourishing. At least there's another baby. By the way Maddy you were
grossly wrong about her there. The Beaver is absolutely devoid of the
maternal instinct. She's decent to the baby, but she's positively
brutal to Muriel Maud. How Spinky--He protests and there are horrid
scenes; but through them all I believe the poor chap's in love with
her."
"Curious illusion."
Curious indeed. It had seemed incredible to Rickman when he had seen
the Beaver pushing her first-born from her knee.
"Good Heavens, Rickman, what a deliverance for you."
"I wonder if he's happy."
"Can't say; but possibly he holds his own. You see, Spinky's position
is essentially sound. My theory is--"
But Rickman had no desire for a theory of marriage as propounded by
Maddox. He had always considered that in these matters Maddox was a
brute.
Maddox drew his own conclusions from the disgusted protest. He
remembered how once, when he had warned Rickman of the love of little
women, Rickman had said it was the great women who were dangerous. The
lady to whom he had entrusted the immortality of his Sonnets would be
one of these. As the guardian of that immortality Maddox conceived it
was his duty to call on the lady and prevail on her to give them up.
Under all his loyalty he had the audacity of the journalist who sticks
at nothing for his own glorious end.
There was after all a certain simplicity about Maddox. He considered
himself admirably equipped by nature for this delicate mission. He
was, besides, familiar with what he called the "society woman," and he
believed that he knew how to deal with her. Maddox always had the air
of being able to push his way anywhere by the aid of his mighty
shoulders. He sent in his card without a misgiving.
Lucia knew that Maddox was a friend of Keith Rickman's, and she
received him with a courtesy that would have disarmed a man less
singularly determined. It was only when he had stated his
extraordinary purpose that her manner became such that (so he
described it afterwards) it would have "set a worm's back up." And
Maddox was no worm.
It was a little while before Lucia realized that this rather
overpowering visitor was requesting her to "give up" certain sonnets
of Keith Rickman's, written in ninety-three. "I don't quite
understand. Are you asking me to give you the manuscript or to give my
consent to its publication?"
"Well--both. I _have_ to ask you because he never would do it
himself."
"Why should he not?"
"Oh, well, you know his ridiculous notions of honour."
"I do indeed. I daresay some people would consider them ridiculous."
It was this speech, Maddox confessed, that first set his back up. He
was irritated more by the calm assumption of proprietorship in Rickman
than by the implied criticism of himself.
"Do you mind telling me," she continued, still imperturbably, "how you
came to know anything about it?"
Maddox stiffened. "I am Mr. Rickman's oldest and most intimate friend,
and he has done me the honour to make me his literary executor."
"Did he also give you leave to settle his affairs beforehand?"
Maddox shrugged his shoulders by way of a reply.
"If he did not," said Lucia, "there's nothing more to be said."
"Pardon me, there is a great deal more to be said. I don't know
whether you have any personal reason for objecting--"
She coloured and was silent.
"If it's pride, I should have thought most women would have been
prouder--" (A look from Lucia warned him that he would do well to
refrain from thinking.) "Oh, well, for all I know you might have fifty
good reasons. The question is, are you justified in sacrificing a work
of genius to any mere personal feeling?"
He had her there, and she knew it. She was silently considering the
question. Three years ago she would have had no personal feeling in
the matter beyond pride in the simple dedication. Now that personal
feeling had come in and had concentrated itself upon that work of
genius, and made it a thing so sacred and so dear to her, she shrank
with horror from the vision of publicity. Besides, it was all of Keith
Rickman that was left to her. His other works were everybody's
property; therefore she clung the more desperately to that one which,
as he had said, belonged to nobody but her. And Mr. Maddox had no
right to question her. Instead of answering him she moved her chair a
little farther from him and from the light.
Now Maddox had the coldness as well as the passion of the Celt. He was
not touched by Lucia's beauty, nor yet by the signs of illness or
fatigue manifest in her face and all her movements. Her manner
irritated him; it seemed the feminine counterpart of her cousin's
insufferable apathy. He felt helpless before her immobility. But he
meant to carry his point--by brute force if necessary.
But not yet. "I'm not asking you to give up a mere copy of verses. The
Sonnets are unique--even for Rickman; and for one solitary lady to
insist on suppressing them--well, you know, it's a large order."
This time she indeed showed some signs of animation. "How do you know
they are unique? Did he show you them?"
"No, he did not. I found them among his papers when he was in
hospital."
"In hospital?" She sat up and looked at him steadily and without
emotion.
"Yes; I had to overhaul his things--we thought he was dying--and the
Sonnets--"
"Never mind the Sonnets now, please. Tell me about his illness. What
was it?"
Again that air of imperious proprietorship! "Enteric," he said
bluntly, "and some other things."
"Where was he before they took him to the hospital?"
"He was--if you want to know--in a garret in a back street off
Tottenham Court Road."
"What was he doing there?"
"To the best of my belief, he was starving. Do you find the room too
close?"
"No, no. Go on."
Maddox went on. He was enjoying the sensation he was creating. He went
on happily, piling up the agony. Since she would have it he was not
reticent of detail. He related the story of the Rankins' dinner. He
described with diabolically graphic touches the garret in Howland
Street. "We thought he'd been drinking, you know, and all the time he
was starving."
"He was starving--" she repeated slowly to herself.
"He was not doing it because he was a poet. It seems he had to pay
some debt, or thought he had. The poor chap talked about it when he
was delirious. Oh--let _me_ open that window."
"Thank you. You say he was delirious. Were you with him then?"
Maddox leapt to his conclusion. Miss Lucia Harden had something to
conceal. He gathered it from her sudden change of attitude, from her
interrogation, from her faintness and from the throbbing terror in her
voice. _That_ was why she desired the suppression of the Sonnets.
"Were you with him?" she repeated.
"No. God forgive me!"
"Nobody was with him--before they took him to the hospital?"
"Nobody, my dear lady, whom you would call anybody. He owes his life
to the charity of a drunken prostitute."
She was woman, the eternal, predestined enemy of Rickman's genius.
Therefore he had determined not to spare her, but to smite her with
words like sledge-hammers.
And to judge by the look of her he had succeeded. She had turned away
from him to the open window. She made no sign of suffering but for the
troubled rising and falling of her breast. He saw in her a woman
mortally smitten, but smitten, he imagined, in her vanity.
"Have I persuaded you," he said quietly, "to give up those Sonnets?"
"You shall have a copy. If Mr. Rickman wants the original he must come
for it himself."
"Thanks." Maddox had ceased to be truculent, having gained his end.
His blue eyes twinkled with their old infantile devilry. "Thanks. It's
awfully nice of you. But--couldn't you make it seem a little more
spontaneous? You see, I don't want Rickman to know I had to ask you
for them." He had a dim perception of inconsistency in his judgement
of the lady; since all along he had been trusting her generosity to
shelter his indiscretion.
Lucia smiled even in her anguish. "That I can well imagine. The copy
shall be sent to him."
And Maddox considered himself dismissed. He wondered why she called
him back to ask for the number of that house in Howland Street.
That afternoon she dragged herself there, that she might torture her
eyes because they had not seen, and her heart because it had not felt.
CHAPTER LXXVIII
At Jewdwine's heart there was trouble and in his mind perfect peace.
For he knew his own mind at last, though he was still a little
indefinite as to the exact condition of his heart.
Three days after Maddox's extraordinary disclosures Lucia had become
most obviously and inconsiderately ill; and had given her cousin Edith
a great deal of trouble as well as a severe fright, till Kitty, also
frightened, had carried her off to Devonshire out of the house of the
Jewdwines. To Horace the working of events was on the whole
beneficent. Lucia's change of attitude, her illness, her abrupt
departure, though too unpleasant for his fastidious mind to dwell
upon, had committed that mind irretrievably to the path of prudence.
So prudent was he, that of his saner matrimonial project the world in
general took no note. Secure of the affections of Miss Fulcher, he had
propitiated rumour by the fiction of his engagement to Lucia. Rumour,
adding a touch of certainty to the story, had handed it on to Rickman
by way of Maddox and Miss Roots. He there upon left off beautifying
his house at Ealing, and agreed with Maddox that after Paris in
November they should go on to Italy together, and that he would winter
there for his health.
But by November there came more rumours, rumours of the breaking off
of the engagement; rumours of some mysterious illness of Lucia's as
the cause. They reached Rickman in the week before the date fixed for
the production of _The Triumph of Life_ in Paris. He was paying a
farewell call on Miss Roots, who became inscrutable at the mention of
Lucia's name. He accused her with violence of keeping the truth from
him, and implored her with pathos to tell it him at once. But Miss
Roots had no truth, no certain truth to tell; there were only rumours.
Miss Roots knew nothing but that Lucia had been lying on her back for
months; she conjectured that possibly there might be something the
matter with her spine. Her mother had been delicate, and Sir
Frederick, well, the less said about Sir Frederick the better. Rickman
retreated, followed by Miss Roots. As for an engagement, she was not
aware that there ever had been one; there was once, she admitted
half-way downstairs, an understanding, probably misunderstood. He had
better ask Horace Jewdwine straight out. "But," she assured him from
the doorstep, "it would take an earthquake to get the truth out of
_him_."
He flung himself into a hansom, and was one with the driver in
imprecation at the never-ending, ever-increasing gradient of the hill.
The delay, however, enabled him to find Jewdwine at home and alone. He
was aware that the interview presented difficulties, but none deterred
him.
Jewdwine, questioned as to his engagement, betrayed no surprise; for
with Rickman the unusual was to be expected. He might not have
condescended to answer Rickman, his obscure disciple, but he felt that
some concession must be made to the illustrious dramatist.
There had been, he admitted, an understanding between him and Miss
Harden. It hardly amounted to an engagement; and it had been cancelled
on the score of health.
"Of _her_ health?"
The compression of Jewdwine's lips intimated that the great poet had
sinned (not for the first time) against convention.
"She _is_ ill, then?"
"I said on the score of health. We're first cousins, and it is not
always considered advisable--"
"I see. Then that's all over."
"At any rate I'm not going to take any risks."
Rickman pondered that saying for a while. "Do you mean you're not
going to let her take any risks?"
Jewdwine said nothing, but endeavoured to express by his manner a
certain distaste for the conversation.
("Or does he mean," thought Rickman, "that he won't risk having a
delicate wife on his hands?")
"It's not as if I didn't know," he persisted, "I know she--she lies
on her back and can't move. Is it her spine?"
"No."
"Or her heart?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Is it something worse?"
Jewdwine was silent.
And in the silence Rickman's mind wandered free among all imaginable
horrors and forebodings. At last, out of the silence, there appeared
to him one more terrible than the rest. He saw what Jewdwine must have
meant. He gathered it, not from anything he had said, but from what he
refused to say, from the sternness of his face, from his hesitations,
his reserves. Jewdwine had created the horror for him as vividly as if
he had shaped it into words.
"You needn't tell me what it is. Do you mind telling me whether it's
curable or not?"
"My _dear_ Rickman, if I knew why you are asking all these
questions--"
"They must seem extraordinary. And my reason for asking them is more
extraordinary still."
They measured each other with their eyes. "Then, I think," said
Jewdwine quietly, "I must ask you for your reason."
"The reason is that if you're not going to marry her I am."
"That," said Jewdwine, "is by no means certain. There is not a single
member of her family living except my sister and myself. Therefore I
consider myself responsible. If I were her father or her brother I
would not give my consent to her marrying, and I don't give it now."
"Oh. And why not?"
"For many reasons. Those that applied in my own case are sufficient."
"You only said there was a risk, and that you weren't going to take
it. Now I mean to take it. You see, those fools of doctors may be
mistaken. But whether they're mistaken or not, I shall marry her just
the same."
"The risk, you see, involves her happiness; and judging by what I know
of your temperament--"
"What do you know about my temperament?"
"You know perfectly well what I know about it."
"I know. You don't approve of my morals. I don't altogether blame you,
considering that since I knew Miss Harden I very nearly married
someone else. My code is so different from yours that I should have
considered marrying that woman a lapse from virtue. So the intention
may count against me, if you like."
"Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean. Neither of us
is fit to marry Miss Harden--and _I_ have given her up." He said it
with the sublime assurance of Jewdwine, the moral man.
"Does it--does her illness--make all that difference? It makes none to
me."
"Oh, well--all right--if you think you can make her happy."
"My dear Jewdwine, I don't think, I know." He smiled that smile that
Jewdwine had seen once or twice before. "It may be arrogant to suppose
that I'll succeed where better men might fail; still--" He rose and
drew himself up to all his slender height--"in some impossible things
I have succeeded."
"They are not the same things."
"No; but in both, you see, it all depends upon the man." With that he
left him.
As Rickman's back turned on him, Jewdwine perceived his own final
error. As once before in judging the genius he had reckoned without
the man, so now, in judging the man he had reckoned without his
genius.
This horrid truth came home to him in his solitude. In the
interminable watches of the night Jewdwine acknowledged himself a
failure; and a failure for which there was no possible excuse. He had
had every conceivable advantage that a man could have. He had been
born free; free from all social disabilities; free from pecuniary
embarrassment; free from the passions that beset ordinary men. And he
had sold himself into slavery. He had opinions; he was packed full of
opinions, valuable opinions; but he had never had the courage of them.
He had always been a slave to other people's opinions. Rickman had
been born in slavery, and he had freed himself. When Rickman stood
before him, superb in his self-mastery, he had felt himself conquered
by this man, whom, as a man, he had despised. Rickman's errors had
been the errors of one who risks everything, who never deliberates or
counts the cost. And in their repeated rivalries he had won because he
had risked everything, when he, Jewdwine, had lost because he would
risk nothing.
He had lost ever since the beginning. He had meant to discover this
great genius; to befriend him; to protect him with his praise;
eventually to climb on his shoulders into fame. And he had not
discovered him; and as for climbing on his shoulders, he had been
shaken off with one shrug of them. There had been risk in passing
judgement on young Rickman, and he had not taken the risk. Therefore
he had failed as a critic. He had waited to found an incorruptible
review. It had been a risky proceeding, and he had not taken the risk.
His paper was a venal paper, sold like himself to the public he
despised. Of all that had ever appeared in it, nothing would live,
nothing but a few immortal trifles, signed S.K.R. He had failed pretty
extensively as an editor. Last of all he had wanted to marry his
cousin Lucia; but there was risk in marrying her, and he would not
take the risk, and Rickman would marry her. He had failed most
miserably as a man.
With that Jewdwine turned on his pillow, and consoled himself by
thinking of Miss Fulcher and her love.
CHAPTER LXXIX
Lucia had been lying still all the afternoon on her couch in the
drawing-room; so still that Kitty thought she had been sleeping. But
Kitty was mistaken.
"Kitty, it's past five, isn't it?"
"Yes, dear; a quarter past."
"It'll be all over by this time to-morrow. Do you think he'll be very
terrible?"
"No, dear. I think he'll be very kind and very gentle."
"Not if he thinks I'm shamming."
"He won't think that." ("I wish he could," said Kitty to herself.)
They were waiting for the visit of Sir Wilfrid Spence. The Harmouth
doctor had desired a higher light on the mysterious illness that kept
Lucia lying for ever on her back. It might have been explained, he
said, if she had suffered lately some deep mental or moral shock; but
Lucia had not confessed to either, and in the absence of any mental
cause it would be as well, said the Harmouth doctor, to look for a
physical one. The fear at the back of the Harmouth doctor's mind was
sufficiently revealed by his choice of the specialist, Sir Wilfrid
Spence.
"_Do_ you think I'm shamming, Kitty? Sometimes I think I am, and
sometimes I'm not quite sure. You know, if you think about your spine
long enough you can imagine that it's very queer. But I haven't been
thinking about my spine. It doesn't interest me. Dr. Robson would have
told me if he thought I was shamming, because I asked him to. There's
one thing makes me think it isn't fancy. I keep on wanting to do
things. I want--you don't know how I want to go to the top of Harcombe
Hill. And my ridiculous legs won't let me. And all the while, Kitty, I
want to play. It's such a long time since I made my pretty music."
A long time indeed, as Kitty was thinking sadly. Lucia had not made
her pretty music since that night six months ago when she had played
to please Keith Rickman.
"Things keep on singing in my head, and I want to play them. It stands
to reason that I would if I could. But I _can't_. Oh, how I do talk
about myself! Kitty, there must be a fine, a heavy fine, of sixpence,
every time I talk about myself."
"I shouldn't make much by it," said Kitty.
Lucia closed her eyes, and Kitty went on with the manuscript she was
copying. After a silence of twenty minutes Lucia opened her eyes
again. They rested longingly on Kitty at her work.
"Kitty," she said, "Do you know, I sometimes think it would be better
to sell those books. I can't bear to do it when he gave them to me.
But I do believe I ought to. The worst of it is I should have to ask
him to do it for me."
"Don't do anything in a hurry, dear. Wait and see," said Kitty
cheerfully.
It seemed to Lucia that there was nothing to wait for now. She
wondered why Kitty said that, and whether it meant that they thought
her worse than they liked to say and whether that was why Sir Wilfrid
Spence was coming?
"Kitty," she said again, "I want you to promise me something.
Supposing--it's very unlikely--but supposing after all I were to go
and die--"
"I won't suppose anything of the sort. People don't go and die of
nervous exhaustion. You'll probably do it fifty years hence, but that
is just the reason why I won't have you harrowing my feelings this way
now."
"I know I've had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that
it's horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too. I only meant if
I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else--you wouldn't tell
him, would you?"
"Well, dear, of course I won't mention it if you wish me not to--but
he'd be sure to see it in the papers."
"Kitty--you know what I mean. He couldn't see _that_ in the papers. He
couldn't see it anywhere unless you told him. And if you did, it might
make him very uncomfortable, you know."
Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid
Spence, was tortured by this conversation. She had half a mind to say,
"You don't seem to think how uncomfortable you're making _me_." But
she forbore. Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts
penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this
pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve.
She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in
Dresden. It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, "a pretty illness,"
and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy
had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or
word.
"I shouldn't mind anything, if only I'd been with him when _he_ was
ill. But perhaps he'd rather I hadn't been there. I think it's that,
you know, that I really cannot bear."
Kitty would have turned to comfort her, but for the timely entrance of
Robert. He brought a letter for Lucia which Kitty welcomed as an
agreeable distraction. It was from Horace Jewdwine. "Any news?" she
asked presently.
"Yes. What _do_ you think? He's going to Paris to-morrow. Then he's
going on to Italy--to Alassio, with Mr. Maddox."
"Horace Jewdwine and Mr. Maddox? What next?"
"It isn't Horace that's going." She gave the letter to Kitty because
she had shrunk lately from speaking of Keith Rickman by his name.
"That's a very different tale," said Kitty
"I'm so glad he's going. That was what he always wanted to do. Do you
remember how I asked him to be my private secretary? Now I'm his
private secretary; which is as it should be."
"You mean _I_ am."
"Yes. Do you think you could hurry up so that he'll get them before he
goes? Poor Kitty--I can't bear your having all these things to do for
me."
"Why not? You'd do them for me, if it was I, not you."
"I wish it were you. I mean I wish I were doing things for you. But
you haven't done them all, Kitty. I did some. I forget how many."
"You did three, darling."
"Only three? And there are nine and twenty. Still, he'll see that I
began them. Kitty--do you think he'll wonder and guess why I left
off?"
"Oh no, he isn't as clever as all that."
"You mustn't tell him. You're writing the letter, dear, now, aren't
you? You mustn't say a word about my illness. Only tell him I'm so
glad to hear he's going to Alassio with Mr. Maddox."
"I don't think any the better of him for that. Fancy going to Italy
with that brute of a man!"
"He wasn't really a brute. He only said those things because he cared
for him. You can't blame him for that."
"I don't blame him for that. I blame him for being a most appalling
bounder."
"Do you mind not talking about him any more?"
"No dear, I don't a bit."
Lucia lay very quiet for some time before she spoke again. "They can't
say now I sacrificed his genius to my pride. You _will_ catch the
post, won't you? What a plague I am, but if they're posted before
seven he'll get them in the morning and he'll have time to write.
Perhaps he won't be starting till the afternoon."
In the morning she again betrayed her mind's preoccupation. "He must
have got them by now. Kitty, did you hear how the wind blew in the
night? He'll have an awful crossing."
"Well then, let's hope he won't be very ill; but he isn't going by the
Bay of Biscay, dear."
The wind blew furiously all morning, and when it dropped a little
towards evening it was followed by a pelting rain.
"He's at Dover now."
"In a mackintosh," said Kitty by way of consolation. But Lucia,
uncomforted, lay still, listening to the rain. It danced like a
thousand devils on the gravel of the courtyard. Suddenly she sat up,
raising herself by her hands.
"Kitty!" she cried. "He's coming. He is really. By the terrace. Can't
you hear?"
Kitty heard nothing but the rain dancing on the courtyard. And the
terrace led into it by the other wing. It was impossible that Lucia
could have heard footsteps there.
"But I _know_, Kitty, I know. It's his walk. And he always came that
way."
She slipped her feet swiftly on to the floor, and to Kitty's amazement
sat up unsupported. Kitty in terror ran to her and put her arm round
her, but Lucia freed herself gently from her grasp. She was trembling
in all her body. Kitty herself heard footsteps in the courtyard now.
They stopped suddenly and the door-bell rang.
"Do go to him, Kitty--and tell him. And send him here to me."
Kitty went, and found Keith Rickman standing in the hall. Her instinct
told her that Lucia must be obeyed. And as she sent him in to her, she
saw through the open door that Lucia rose to her feet, and came to him
and never swayed till his arms held her.
She clung to him and he drew her closer and lifted her and carried her
to her couch, murmuring things inarticulate yet so plain that even she
could not misunderstand.
"I thought you were going to Paris?" she said.
"I'm not. I'm here."
She sat up and laid her hands about him, feeling his shoulders and his
sleeves.
"How wet your coat is."
He kissed her and she held her face against his that was cold with the
wind and rain; she took his hands and tried to warm them in her own,
piteously forgetful of herself, as if it were he, not she, who needed
tenderness.
"Lucy--are you very ill, darling?"
"No. I am very, very well."
He thought it was one of those things that people say when they mean
that death is well. He gathered her to him as if he could hold her
back from death. She looked smiling into his face.
"Keith," she said, "you _didn't_ have a mackintosh. You must go away
at once to Robert and get dry."
"Not now, Lucy. Let me stay."
"How long can you stay?"
"As long as ever you'll let me."
"Till you go to Italy?"
"Very well. Till I go to Italy."
"When are you going?"
"Not till you're well enough to go with me."
"How did you know I was ill?"
"Because I saw that Kitty had had to finish what your dear little
hands had begun."
"Ah--you should have had them sooner--"
"Why should I have had them at all? Do you think I would have
published them before I knew I had dedicated them to my wife?"
"Keith--dear--you mustn't talk about that yet."
She hid her face on his shoulder; he lifted it and looked at it as if
it could have told him what he had to know. It told him nothing; it
had not changed enough for that. It was like a beautiful picture
blurred, and the sweeter for the blurring.
He laid his hand over her heart. At his touch it leapt and throbbed
violently, suggesting a new terror.
"Darling, how fast your heart beats. Am I doing it harm?"
"No, it doesn't mind."
"But am I tiring it?"
"No, no, you're resting it."
She lay still a long time without speaking, till at last he carried
her upstairs and delivered her into Kitty's care. At the open door of
her room he saw a nurse in uniform standing ready to receive her. Her
presence there was ominous of the unutterable things he feared.
"Kitty," said Lucia, when they were alone. "It looks as if I had been
shamming after all. What do you think of me?"
"I think perhaps Sir Wilfrid Spence needn't come down to-morrow."
"Perhaps not. And yet it would be better to know. If there really is
anything wrong I couldn't let him marry me. It would be awful. I want
to be sure, Kitty, for his sake."
Kitty felt sure enough; and her certainty grew when Lucia came down
the next morning. But she was unable to impart her certainty to Keith.
The most he could do was to hide his anxiety from Lucia. It wanted but
a day to the coming of the great specialist; and for that day they
made such a brave show of happiness that they deceived both Kitty and
themselves. Kitty, firm in her conviction, left them to themselves
that afternoon while she went into Harmouth to announce to Lucia's
doctor the miracle of her recovery.
When she had left the house a great peace fell on them. They had so
much to say to each other, and so little time to say it in, when
to-morrow might cut short their happiness. But Lucia was sorry for
Kitty.
"Poor Kitty," said she, "she's going to marry her cousin Charlie
Palliser. But that won't be the same."
"The same as what?"
"The same as my marrying you. Oh, Keith, that's one of the things I
said we weren't to say. Do you know, once Kitty was angry with me. She
said I was playing with fire--the divine fire. Ought I to have been
afraid of it? Just a little bit in awe?"
"What? Of the divine fire? I gave it you, dearest, to play with--or to
warm your little hands by."
"And now you've given it me to keep, to put my hands round it--so--and
take care of it and see that it never goes out. I can do that, can't
I, whatever happens?"
There was always that refrain: Whatever happens.
"I keep forgetting it doesn't really belong to me; it belongs to
everybody, to the whole world. I believe I'm jealous."
"Of the British public? It doesn't really love me, Lucy, nor I it."
"Whether it does or not, you _do_ remember that I loved you
first--before anybody ever knew?"
"I do indeed."
"It _is_ a shame to be so glad because Kitty is away."
Yet she continued to rejoice in the happiness that came of their
solitude. It was Keith, not Kitty, who arranged her cushions for her
and covered her feet; Keith, not Kitty, who poured out tea for her,
and brought it her, and sat beside her afterwards, leaning over her
and stroking her soft hair, as Kitty loved to do.
"Lucy," he said suddenly, "can you stand living with me in a horrid
little house in a suburb?"
"I should love it. Dear little house."
"Maddox is in it now; but we'll turn him out. You don't know Maddox?"
She shuddered, and he drew the rug in closer about her.
"It's such a tiny house, Lucy; it would all go into this room."
"This room," said Lucy, "is much too large."
"There's only room for you and me in it."
"All the better, so long as there's room for me."
"And the walls are all lath and plaster. When Maddox is in another
room I can hear him breathing."
"And when I'm in another room I shall hear you breathing; and then I
shall know you're alive when I'm afraid you're not. I'm glad the walls
are all lath and plaster."
"But it isn't a pretty house, Lucy."
"It will be a pretty house when I'm in it," said she, and was admitted
to have had the best of the argument.
"Then, if you really don't mind, we shan't have to wait. Not a week,
if you're ready to come to me."
But Lucia's face was sad. "Keith--darling--don't make plans till we
know what Sir Wilfrid Spence says."
"I shall, whatever he says. But I suppose I must consult him before I
take you to Alassio."
For still at his heart, under all its happiness, there lay that
annihilating doubt; the doubt and the fear that had been sown there by
Horace Jewdwine. He could see for himself that one of his terrors was
baseless; but there remained that other more terrible possibility.
None of them had dared to put it into words; but it was implied,
reiterated, in the name of Sir Wilfrid Spence. He had moreover a
feeling that this happiness of his was too perfect, that it must be
taken away from him.
He confided his trouble to Kitty that night, sitting up over the
drawing-room fire. Lucia's doctor had come and gone.
"What did he say, Kitty?"
"He says there's no need for Sir Wilfrid Spence to see her at all. He
is going to wire to him not to come."
He gave a sigh of relief. Then his eyes clouded.
"No. He must come. I'd rather he came."
"But why? He isn't a nerve specialist."
He shuddered. "I know. That's why I must have him. I can't trust
these local men."
"It will be horribly expensive, Keith. And it's throwing money away.
Dr. Robson said so."
"That's my affair."
"Oh well, as for that, it was all arranged for."
"Nobody has any right to arrange for it but me."
"Much better arrange for a good time at Alassio."
"No. I want to be absolutely certain. You tell me she's perfectly
well, and that doctor of yours swears she is, and I think it; and yet
I can't believe it. I daren't."
"That's because you're not feeling very well yourself."
"I know that in some ways she is getting stronger every minute; but
you see, I can't help thinking what that other man said."
"What other man?"
"Well, the Jewdwines' doctor."
"What did _he_ say?"
"Nothing. It was Jewdwine. He told me--well--that was why their
engagement was broken off. Because she wasn't strong enough to marry."
Kitty's eyes blazed. "He told you _that_?"
"Not exactly. He couldn't, you know. I only thought their doctor must
have told him--something terrible."
"I don't suppose he told him anything of the sort."
"Oh well, you know, he didn't say so. But he let me think it."
"Yes. I know exactly how it was done. He wouldn't say anything he
oughtn't to. But he'd let you think it. It was just his awful
selfishness. He thought there was an off chance of poor Lucy being a
sort of nervous invalid, and he wouldn't risk the bother of it. But as
for their engagement, there never was any. That was another of the
things he let you think. I suppose he cared for Lucy as much as he
could care for anybody; but the fact is he wants to marry another
woman, and he couldn't bear to see her married to another man."
"Oh, I say, you know--"
"It sounds incredible. But you don't know how utterly I distrust that
man. He's false through and through. There's nothing sound in him
except his intellect. I wish you'd never known him. He's been the
cause of all your--your suffering, and Lucy's too. You might have been
married long ago if it hadn't been for him."
"No, Kitty. I don't think that."
"You might, really. If he hadn't been in the way she would have known
that she cared for you and let you know it, too. But nothing that he
ever did or didn't do comes up to this."
"The truth is, Kitty, he thinks I'm rather a bad lot, you know."
"My dear Keith, he thinks that if _he_ doesn't marry Lucy he'd rather
you didn't. He certainly hit on the most effectual means of preventing
it."
"Oh, did he! He doesn't know me. I shall marry her whatever Sir
Wilfrid Spence says. If she's ill, all the more reason why I should
look after her. I'm only afraid lest--lest--"
She knew what he thought and could not say--lest it should not be for
very long.
"There are some things," he said quietly, "that _can't_ be taken away
from me."
Kitty was silent; for she knew what things they were.
"You can trust her to me, Kitty?"
"I can indeed."
And so on Sunday the great man came down.
It was over in half an hour. That half-hour Keith spent in pacing up
and down the library, the place of so many dear and tender and
triumphant memories. They sharpened his vision of Lucy doomed, of her
sweet body delivered over to the torture.
He did not hear Kitty come in till she laid her hand upon his arm. He
turned as if at the touch of destiny.
"Don't Keith, for Goodness' sake. It's all right. Only--he wants to
see you."
Sir Wilfrid Spence stood in the morning-room alone. He looked very
grave and grim. He had a manner, a celebrated manner that had
accomplished miracles by its tremendous moral effect. It had helped to
set him on his eminence and he was not going to sacrifice it now. He
fixed his gaze on the poet as he entered and held him under it for
the space of half a minute without speaking. He seemed, this master of
the secrets of the body, to be invading despotically the province of
the soul. It struck Rickman that the great specialist was passing
judgement on him, to see whether in all things he were worthy of his
destiny. The gaze thus prolonged became more than he could bear.
"Do you mind telling me at once what's wrong with her?"
"There isn't anything wrong with her. What fool ever told you that
there was? She has been made ill with grief."
Lucia herself came to him there and led him back into the library.
They sat together in the window-seat, held silent for a little while
by the passing of that shadow of their fear.
"Keith," she said at last. "Is it true that you loved me when you were
with me, here, ever so long ago?"
He answered her.
"And when you came to me and I was horrid to you, and when I sent you
away? And when I never wrote to you, and Horace made you think I'd
forgotten you? Did you love me then?"
"Yes, more than I did before, Lucy."
"But--Keith--you didn't love me when you were loving somebody else?"
"I did, more than ever then. That happened because I loved you."
"I can understand all the rest; but I can't understand that."
"I think I'd rather you didn't understand it, darling."
She sighed, puzzled over it and gave it up. "But you didn't love me
when you--when I--when you wouldn't have me?"
He answered her; but not with words.
"And now," said she, "you're going to Paris to-morrow."
"Perhaps."
"You must. Perhaps they'll be calling for you."
"And perhaps I shan't be there. Do you know, Lucy, you've got violets
growing among the roots of your hair?"
"I know you're going to Paris, to-morrow, to please me."
"Perhaps. And after that we're going to Alassio, and after that to
Florence and Rome; all the places where your private secretary--"
"And when," said she, "is my private secretary going to take me home?"
"If his play succeeds, dear, he won't have to take you to that horrid
house of his."
"Won't he? But I like it best of all."
"Why, Lucy?"
"Oh, for such a foolish reason. Because he's been in it."
"I'm afraid, darling, some of the houses he's been in--"
At that she fell to a sudden breathless sobbing, as if the life that
had come back to her had spent itself again.
In his happiness he had forgotten Howland Street; or if he thought of
it at all he thought of it as an enchanted spot, the stage that had
brought him nearest to the place of his delight.
"Lucy, Lucy, how did you know? I never meant you to."
"Some one told me. And I--I went to see it."
"Good God!"
"I saw your room, the room they carried you out of. If I'd only known!
My darling, why didn't you come to me then? Why didn't you? I had
plenty. Why didn't you send for me?"
"How could I?"
"You could, you could--"
"But sweetest, I didn't even know where you were."
"Wherever I was I would have come to you. I would have taken you
away."
"It was worth it, Lucy. If it hadn't been for that, I shouldn't be
here now. Looking back it seems positively glorious. And whatever it
was I'd go through years of it, for one hour with you here. One of
those hours even when you didn't love me."
"I've always loved you, all my life long. Only I didn't know it was
you. Do you remember my telling you that your dream was divorced from
reality? It wasn't true. That was what was wrong with me."
"I'm afraid I wasn't always very faithful to my dream."
"Because your dream wasn't always faithful to you. And yet it _was_
faithful."
"Lucy, do you remember the things I told you? Can you forgive me for
being what I was?"
"It was before I knew you."
"Yes, but after? That was worse; it was the worst thing I ever did,
because I _had_ known you."
She wondered why he asked forgiveness of her now, of all moments; and
as she wondered the light dawned on her.
"I forgive you everything. It was my fault. I should have been there,
and I wasn't."
Then he knew that after all she had understood. Her love was in her
eyes, in their light and in their darkness. They gathered many flames
of love into that tender tragic gaze, all pitying, half maternal.
Those eyes had never held for him the sad secrets of mortality. Love
in them looked upon things invisible, incorruptible; divining, even as
it revealed, the ultimate mystery. He saw that in her womanhood Nature
was made holy, penetrated by the spirit and the fire of God. He knelt
down and laid his face against her shoulder, and her arm, caressing,
held him there, as if it were she who sheltered and protected.
"Keith," she whispered, "did you mean to marry me before you came this
time, or after?"
"Before, oh before."
"You thought--that terrible thing had happened to me; you thought you
would always have me dragging on you? And yet you came? It made no
difference. You came."
"I came because I wanted to take care of you, Lucy. I wanted nothing
else. That was all."
Lucia's understanding was complete.
"I knew you were like that," said she; "I always knew it."
She bent towards his hidden face and raised it to her own.