Inspite of Sprats’s sermon in the little café-restaurant, Lucian made no effort to follow her advice. He was at work on a new tragedy which was to be produced at the Athenæum in the following autumn, and had therefore no time to give to considerations of economy, and when he was not at work he was at play, and play with Lucian was a matter of as much importance, so far as strenuous devotion to it was concerned, as work was. But there came a morning and an occurrence which for an hour at least made him recall Sprats’s counsel and ponder rather deeply on certain things which he had never pondered before.
It was ten o’clock, and Lucian and Haidee were breakfasting. They invariably spent a good hour over this meal, for both were possessed of hearty appetites, and Lucian always read his letters and his newspapers while he ate and drank. He was alternately devoting himself to his plate and to a leading article in theTimes, when the footman entered and announced that Mr. Pepperdine wished to see him. Lucian choked down a mouthful, uttered a joyous exclamation, and rushed into the hall. Mr. Pepperdine, in all the glories of a particularly horsy suit of clothes, was gazing about him as if he had got into a museum. He had visited Lucian’s house before, and always went about in it with his mouth wide open and an air of expectancy—there was usually something fresh to see, and he never quite knew where he might come across it.
‘My dear uncle!’ cried Lucian, seizing him in his arms and dragging him into the dining-room, ‘why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Have you breakfasted? Have some more, any way—get into that chair.’
Mr. Pepperdine solemnly shook hands with Haidee,who liked him because he betrayed such ardent and whole-souled admiration of her and had once bought her a pair of wonderful ponies, assured himself by a careful inspection that she was as pretty as ever, and took a chair, but not at the table. He had breakfasted, he said, at his hotel, two hours earlier.
‘Then have a drink,’ said Lucian, and rang the bell for whisky and soda. ‘How is everybody at Simonstower?’
‘All well,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine, ‘very well indeed, except that Keziah has begun to suffer a good deal from rheumatism. It’s a family complaint. I’m glad to see you both well and hearty—you keep the roses in your cheeks, ma’am, and the light in your eyes, something wonderful, considering that you are a townbird, as one may say. There are country maidens with less colour and brightness, so there are!’
‘You said that so prettily that I shall allow you to smoke a cigar, if you like,’ said Haidee. ‘Lucian, your case.’
Mr. Pepperdine shook his head knowingly as he lighted a cigar and sipped his whisky and soda. He knew a pretty woman when he saw her, he said to himself, and it was his opinion that Mrs. Lucian Damerel was uncommonly pretty. Whenever he came to see her he could never look at her enough, and Haidee, who accepted admiration on principle, used to smile at him and air her best behaviour. She was sufficiently woman of the world to overlook the fact that Mr. Pepperdine was a tenant-farmer and used the language of the people—he was a handsome man and a dandy in his way, and he was by no means backward, in spite of his confirmed bachelorhood, of letting a pretty woman see that he had an eye for beauty. So she made herself very agreeable to Mr. Pepperdine and told him stories of the ponies, and Lucian chatted of various things, and Mr. Pepperdine, taking in the general air of comfort and luxury which surrounded these young people, felt that his nephew had begun life in fine style and was uncommonly clever.
They went into Lucian’s study when breakfast was over, and Lucian lighted a pipe and began to chat carelessly of Simonstower and old times there. Mr. Pepperdine, however, changed the subject somewhat abruptly.
‘Lucian, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s brought me here: I want you to lend me a thousand pounds for a twelvemonth. Will you do that?’
‘Why, of course!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I shall be only too pleased—for as long as ever you like.’
‘A year will do for me,’ answered Mr. Pepperdine. ‘I’ll explain matters,’ and he went on to tell Lucian the story of the Bransby defalcations, and his own loss, and of the late Lord Simonstower’s generosity. ‘He was very good about it, was the old lord,’ he said: ‘it made things easy for me while he lived, but now he’s dead, and I can’t expect the new lord to be as considerate. I’ve had a tightish time lately, Lucian, my boy, and money’s been scarce; but you can have your thousand pounds back at the twelvemonth end—I’m a man of my word in all matters.’
‘My dear uncle!’ exclaimed Lucian, ‘there must be no talk of that sort between us. Of course you shall have the money at once—that is as soon as we can get to the bank. Or will a cheque do?’
‘Aught that’s of the value of a thousand pounds’ll do for me,’ replied Mr. Pepperdine. ‘I want to complete a certain transaction with the money this afternoon, and if you give me a cheque I can call in at your bank.’
Lucian produced his cheque-book and wrote out a cheque for the amount which his uncle wished to borrow. Mr. Pepperdine insisted upon drawing up a formal memorandum of its receipt, and admonished his nephew to put it carefully away with his other business papers. But Lucian never kept any business papers—his usual practice was to tear everything up that looked like a business document and throw the fragments into the waste-paper basket. He would treasure the most obscure second-hand bookseller’s catalogue as if it hadbeen a gilt-edged security, but bills and receipts and business letters annoyed him, and Mr. Pepperdine’s carefully scrawled sheet of notepaper went into the usual receptacle as soon as its writer had left the room. And as he crumpled it up and threw it into the basket, laughing at the old-fashioned habits of his uncle, Lucian also threw off all recollection of the incident and became absorbed in his new tragedy.
Coming in from the theatre that night he found a little pile of letters waiting for him on the hall table, and he took them into his study and opened them carelessly. There was a long epistle from Mrs. Berenson—he read half of it and threw that and the remaining sheets away with an exclamation of impatience. There was a note from the great actor-manager who was going to produce the new tragedy—he laid that open on his desk and put a paper-weight upon it. The rest of his letters were invitations, requests for autographs, gushing epistles from admiring readers, and so on—he soon bundled them all together and laid them aside. But there was one which he had kept to the last—a formal-looking affair with the name of his bank engraved on the flap of the envelope, and he opened it with some curiosity. The letter which it enclosed was short and formal, but when Lucian had read it he recognised in some vague and not very definite fashion that it constituted an epoch. He read it again and yet again, with knitted brows and puzzled eyes, and then he put it on his desk and sat staring at it as if he did not understand the news which it was meant to convey to him.
It was a very commonplace communication this, but Lucian had never seen anything of its sort before. It was just a brief, politely worded note from his bankers, informing him that they had that day paid a cheque for one thousand pounds, drawn by him in favour of Simpson Pepperdine, Esquire, and that his account was now overdrawn by the sum of £187, 10s. 0d. That was all—there was not even a delicately expressed request to him to put the account in credit.
Lucian could not quite realise what this letter meant; he said nothing to Haidee of it, but after breakfast next morning he drove to the bank and asked to see the manager. Once closeted with that gentleman in his private room he drew out the letter and laid it on the desk at which the manager sat.
‘I don’t quite understand this letter,’ he said. ‘Would you mind explaining it to me?’
The manager smiled.
‘It seems quite plain, I think,’ he said pleasantly. ‘It means that your account is overdrawn to the amount of £187, 10s. 0d.’
Lucian sat down and stared at him.
‘Does that mean that I have exhausted all the money I placed in your hands, and have drawn on you for £187, 10s. 0d. in addition?’ he asked.
‘Precisely, Mr. Damerel,’ answered the manager. ‘Your balance yesterday morning was about £820, and you drew a cheque in favour of Mr. Pepperdine for £1000. That, of course, puts you in our debt.’
Lucian stared harder than ever.
‘You’re quite sure there is no mistake?’ he said.
The manager smiled.
‘Quite sure!’ he replied. ‘But surely you have had your pass-book?’
Lucian had dim notions that a small book bound in parchment had upon occasions been handed to him over the counter of the bank, and on others had been posted by him to the bank at some clerk’s request; he also remembered that he had once opened it and found it full of figures, at the sight of which he had hastily closed it again.
‘I suppose I have,’ he answered.
‘I believe it is in our possession just now,’ said the manager. ‘If you will excuse me one moment I will fetch it.’
He came back with the pass-book in his hand and offered it to Lucian.
‘It is posted up to date,’ he said.
Lucian took the book and turned its pages over.
‘Yes, but—’ he said. ‘I—do I understand that all the money that has been paid in to my account here is now spent? You have received royalties on my behalf from Mr. Robertson and from Mr. Harcourt of the Athenæum?’
‘You will find them all specified in the pass-book, Mr. Damerel,’ said the manager. ‘There will, I presume, be further payments to come from the same sources?’
‘Of course there will be the royalties from Mr. Robertson every half-year,’ answered Lucian, turning the pages of his pass-book. ‘And Mr. Harcourt produces my new tragedy at the Athenæum in December.’
‘That,’ said the manager, with a polite bow, ‘is sure to be successful.’
‘But,’ said Lucian, with a childlike candour, ‘what am I to do if you have no money of mine left? I can’t go on without money.’
The manager laughed.
‘We shall be pleased to allow you an overdraft,’ he said. ‘Give us some security, or get a friend of stability to act as guarantor for you—that’s all that’s necessary. I suppose the new tragedy will bring you a small fortune? You did very well out of your first play, if I remember rightly.’
‘I can easily procure a guarantor,’ answered Lucian. His thoughts had immediately flown to Darlington. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I think we shall have a long run—longer, perhaps, than before.’
Then he went away, announcing that he would make the necessary arrangements. When he had gone, the manager, to satisfy a momentary curiosity of his own, made a brief inspection of Lucian’s account. He smiled a little as he totalled it up. Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel had gone through seventeen thousand pounds in four years, and of that amount twelve thousand represented capital.
Lucian carried the mystifying pass-book to his cluband began to study the rows of figures. They made his head ache and his eyes burn, and the only conclusion he came to was that a few thousands of pounds are soon spent, and that Haidee of late had been pretty prodigal with her cheques. One fact was absolutely certain: his ten thousand, and her two thousand, and the five thousand which he had earned, were all gone, never to return. He felt somewhat depressed at this thought, but recovered his spirits when he remembered the value of his pictures, his books, and his other possessions, and the prospects of increased royalties in the golden days to be. He went off to seek out Darlington in the city as joyously as if he had been embarking on a voyage to the Hesperides.
Darlington was somewhat surprised to see Lucian in Lombard Street. He knew all the details of Lucian’s business within ten minutes, and had made up his mind within two more.
‘Of course, I’ll do it with pleasure, old chap,’ he said, with great heartiness. ‘But I think I can suggest something far preferable. These people don’t seem to have given you any particular advantages, and there was no need for them to bother you with a letter reminding you that you owed them a miserable couple of hundred. Look here: you had better open two accounts with us; one for yourself and one for Mrs. Damerel, and keep them distinct—after all, you know, women rather mix things up. Give Robertson and Harcourt instructions to pay your royalties into your own account here, and pay your household expenses and bills out of it. Mrs. Damerel’s account won’t be a serious matter—mere pinmoney, you know—and we can balance it out of yours at periodic intervals. That’s a much more convenient and far simpler thing than giving the other people a guarantee for an overdraft.’
‘It seems to be so, certainly,’ said Lucian. ‘Thanks, very many. And what am I to do in arranging this?’
‘At present,’ answered Darlington, ‘you are to run away as quickly as possible, for I’m over the ears inwork. Come in this afternoon at three o’clock, and we will settle the whole thing.’
Lucian went out into the crowded streets, light-hearted and joyous as ever. The slight depression of the morning had worn off; all the world was gold again. A whim seized him: he would spend the three hours between twelve and three in wandering about the city—it was an almost unknown region to him. He had read much of it, but rarely seen it, and the prospect of an acquaintance with it was alluring. So he wandered hither and thither, his taste for the antique leading him into many a quaint old court and quiet alley, and he was fortunate enough to find an old-fashioned tavern and an old-world waiter, and there he lunched and enjoyed himself and went back to Darlington’s office in excellent spirits and ready to do anything.
There was little to do. Lucian left the private banking establishment of Darlington and Darlington a few minutes after he had entered it, and he then carried with him two cheque-books, one for himself and one for Haidee, and a request that Mrs. Damerel should call at the office and append her signature to the book wherein the autographs of customers were preserved. He went home and found Haidee just returned from lunching with Lady Firmanence: Lucian conducted her into his study with some importance.
‘Look here, Haidee,’ he said, ‘I’ve been making some new business arrangements. We’re going to bank at Darlington’s in future—it’s much the wiser plan; and you are to have a separate account. That’s your cheque-book. I say—we’ve rather gone it lately, you know. Don’t you think we might economise a little?’
Haidee stared, grew perplexed, and frowned.
‘I think I’m awfully careful,’ she said. ‘If you think——’
Lucian saw signs of trouble and hastened to dispel them.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said hurriedly, ‘I know, of course, that you are. We’ve had such a lot of absolutely necessaryexpense, haven’t we? Well, there’s your cheque-book, and the account is your own, you know.’
Haidee asked no questions, and carried the cheque-book away. When she had gone, Lucian wrote out a cheque for £187, 10s. and forwarded it to his former bankers, with a covering letter in which he explained that it was intended to balance his account and that he wished to close the latter. That done, he put all thoughts of money out of his mind with a mighty sigh of relief. In his own opinion he had accomplished a hard day’s work and acquitted himself with great credit. Everything, he thought, had been quite simple, quite easy. And in thinking so he was right—nothing simpler, nothing easier, could be imagined than the operation which had put Lucian and Haidee in funds once more. It had simply consisted of a brief order, given by Eustace Darlington to his manager, to the effect that all cheques bearing the signatures of Mr. and Mrs. Damerel were to be honoured on presentation, and that there was to be no limit to their credit.
Inspite of the amusing defection of his host, Saxonstowe had fully enjoyed the short time he had spent under the Damerels’ roof. Mrs. Berenson had amused him almost as much as if she had been a professional comedian brought there to divert the company; Darlington had interested him as a specimen of the rather reserved, purposeful sort of man who might possibly do things; and Haidee had made him wonder how it is that some women possess great beauty and very little mind. But the recollection which remained most firmly fixed in him was of Sprats, and on the first afternoon he had at liberty he set out to find the Children’s Hospital which she had invited him to visit.
He found the hospital with ease—an ordinary house in Bayswater Square, with nothing to distinguish it from its neighbours but a large brass plate on the door, which announced that it was a Private Nursing Home for Children. A trim maid-servant, who stared at him with reverent awe after she had glanced at his card, showed him into a small waiting-room adorned with steel engravings of Biblical subjects, and there Sprats shortly discovered him inspecting a representation of the animals leaving the ark. It struck him as he shook hands with her that she looked better in her nurse’s uniform than in the dinner-gown which she had worn a few nights earlier—there was something businesslike and strong about her in her cap and cuffs and apron and streamers: it was like seeing a soldier in fighting trim.
‘I am glad that you have come just now,’ she said. ‘I have a whole hour to spare, and I can show you all over the place. But first come into my parlour and have some tea.’
She led him into another room, where Biblical printswere not in evidence—if they had ever decorated the walls they were now replaced by Sprats’s own possessions. He recognised several water-colour drawings of Simonstower, and one of his own house and park at Saxonstowe.
‘These are the work of Cyprian Damerel—Lucian’s father, you know,’ said Sprats, as he uttered an exclamation of pleasure at the sight of familiar things. ‘Lucian gave them to me. I like that one of Saxonstowe Park—I have so often seen that curious atmospheric effect amongst the trees in early autumn. I am very fond of my pictures and my household gods—they bring Simonstower closer to me.’
‘But why, if you are so fond of it, did you leave it?’ he asked, as he took the chair which she pointed out to him.
‘Oh, because I wanted to work very hard!’ she said, busying herself with the tea-cups. ‘You see, my father married Lucian Damerel’s aunt—a very dear, nice, pretty woman—and I knew she would take such great care of him that I could be spared. So I went in for nursing, having a natural bent that way, and after three or four years of it I came here; and here I am, absolute she-dragon of the establishment.’
‘Is it very hard work?’ he asked, as he took a cup of tea from her hands.
‘Well, it doesn’t seem to affect me very much, does it?’ she answered. ‘Oh yes, sometimes it is, but that’s good for one. You must have worked hard yourself, Lord Saxonstowe.’
Saxonstowe blushed under his tan.
‘I look all right too, don’t I?’ he said, laughing. ‘I agree with you that it’s good for one, though. I’ve thought since I came back that—— ’ He paused and did not finish the sentence.
‘That it would do a lot of people whom you’ve met a lot of good if they had a little hardship and privation to go through,’ she said, finishing it for him. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t let them off with a little,’ he said. ‘I’d give them—some of them, at any rate—a good deal. Perhaps I’m not quite used to it, but I can’t stand this sort of life—I should go all soft and queer under it.’
‘Well, you’re not obliged to endure it at all,’ said Sprats. ‘You can clear out of town whenever you please and go to Saxonstowe—it is lovely in summer.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I’m going there soon. I—I don’t think town life quite appeals to me.’
‘I suppose that you will go off to some waste place of the earth again, sooner or later, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I should think that if one once tastes that sort of thing one can’t very well resist the temptation. What made you wish to explore?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I always wanted to travel when I was a boy, but I never got any chance. Then the title came to me rather unexpectedly, you know, and when I found that I could indulge my tastes—well, I indulged them.’
‘And you prefer the desert to the drawing-room?’ she said, watching him.
‘Lots!’ he said fervently. ‘Lots!’
Sprats smiled.
‘I should advise you,’ she said, ‘to cut London the day your book appears. You’ll be a lion, you know.’
‘Oh, but!’ he exclaimed, ‘you don’t quite recognise what sort of book it is. It’s not an exciting narrative—no bears, or Indians, or scalpings, you know. It’s—well, it’s a bit dry—scientific stuff, and so on.’
Sprats smiled the smile of the wise woman and shook her head.
‘It doesn’t matter what it is—dry or delicious, dull or enlivening,’ she remarked sagely, ‘the people who’ll lionise you won’t read it, though they’ll swear to your face that they sat up all night with it. You’ll see it lying about, with the pages all cut and a book-marker sticking out, but most of the people who’ll rave to your face about it wouldn’t be able to answer any question that you asked them concerning it. Lionising is anamusing feature of social life in England—if you don’t like the prospect of it, run away.’
‘I shall certainly run,’ he answered. ‘I will go soon. I think, perhaps, that you exaggerate my importance, but I don’t want to incur any risk—it isn’t pleasant to be stared at, and pointed out, and all that sort of—of——’
‘Of rot!’ she said. ‘No—it isn’t, to some people. To other people it seems quite a natural thing. It never seemed to bother Lucian Damerel, for example. You cannot realise the adulation which was showered upon him when he first flashed into the literary heavens. All the women were in love with him; all the girls love-sick because of his dark face and wondrous hair; he was stared at wherever he went; and he might have breakfasted, lunched, and dined at somebody else’s expense every day.’
‘And he liked—that?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘It’s a bit difficult,’ answered Sprats, ‘to know what Lucian does like. He plays lion to perfection. Have you ever been to the Zoo and seen a real first-class, AIdiamond-of-the-first-water sort of lion in his cage?—especially when he is filled with meat? Well, you’ll have noticed that he gazes with solemn eyes above your head—he never sees you at all—you aren’t worth it. If he should happen to look at you, he just wonders why the devil you stand there staring at him, and his eyes show a sort of cynical, idle contempt, and become solemn and ever-so-far-away again. Lucian plays lion in that way beautifully. He looks out of his cage with eyes that scorn the miserable wondering things gathered open-mouthed before him.’
‘Does he live in a cage?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘We all live in cages,’ answered Sprats. ‘You had better hang up a curtain in front of yours if you don’t wish the crowd to stare at you. And now come—I will show you my children.’
Saxonstowe followed her all over the house with exemplary obedience, secretly admiring her mastery ofdetail, her quickness of perception, and the motherly fashion in which she treated her charges. He had never been in a children’s hospital before, and he saw some sights that sent him back to Sprats’s parlour a somewhat sad man.
‘I dare say you get used to it,’ he said, ‘but the sight of all that pain must be depressing. And the poor little mites seem to bear it well—bravely, at any rate.’
Sprats looked at him with the speculative expression which always came into her face when she was endeavouring to get at some other person’s real self.
‘So you, too, are fond of children?’ she said, and responded cordially to his suggestion that he might perhaps be permitted to come again. He went away with a cheering consciousness that he had had a glimpse into a little world wherein good work was being done—it had seemed a far preferable world to that other world of fashion and small things which seethed all around it.
On the following day Saxonstowe spent the better part of the morning in a toy-shop. He proved a good customer, but a most particular one. He had counted heads at the children’s hospital: there were twenty-seven in all, and he wanted twenty-seven toys for them. He insisted on a minute inspection of every one, even to the details of the dolls’ clothing and the attainments of the mechanical frogs, and the young lady who attended upon him decided that he was a nice gentleman and free-handed, but terribly exacting. His bill, however, yielded her a handsome commission, and when he gave her the address of the hospital she felt sure that she had spent two hours in conversation—on the merits of toys—with a young duke, and for the rest of the day she entertained her shopmates with reminiscences of the supposed ducal remarks, none of which, according to her, had been of a very profound nature.
Saxonstowe wondered how soon he might call at the hospital again—at the end of a week he found himself kicking his heels once more in the room wherein Noah, his family, and his animals trooped gaily down the slopesof Mount Ararat. When Sprats came in she greeted him with an abrupt question.
‘Was it you who sent a small cart-load of toys here last week?’ she asked.
‘I certainly did send some toys for the children,’ he answered.
‘I thought it must be your handiwork,’ she said. ‘Thank you. You will now receive a beautifully written, politely worded letter of thanks, inscribed on thick, glossy paper by the secretary—do you mind?’
‘Yes, I do mind!’ he exclaimed. ‘Please don’t tell the secretary—what has he or she to do with it?’
‘Very well, I won’t,’ she said. ‘But I will give you a practical tip: when you feel impelled to buy toys for children in hospital, buy something breakable and cheap—it pleases the child just as much as an expensive plaything. There was one toy too many,’ she continued, laughing, ‘so I annexed that for myself—a mechanical spider. I play with it in my room sometimes. I am not above being amused by small things.’
After this Saxonstowe became a regular visitor—he was accepted by some of the patients as a friend and admitted to their confidences. They knew him as ‘the Lord,’ and announced that ‘the Lord’ had said this, or done that, in a fashion which made other visitors, not in the secret, wonder if the children were delirious and had dreams of divine communications. He sent these new friends books, and fruit, and flowers, and the house was gayer and brighter that summer than it had ever been since the brass plate was placed on its door.
One afternoon Saxonstowe arrived with a weighty-looking parcel under his arm. Once within Sprats’s parlour he laid it down on the table and began to untie the string. She shook her head.
‘You have been spending money on one or other of my children again,’ she said. ‘I shall have to stop it.’
‘No,’ he said, with a very shy smile. ‘This—is—for you.’
‘For me?’ Her eyes opened with something likeincredulous wonder. ‘What an event!’ she said; ‘I so seldom have anything given to me. What is it?—quick, let me see—it looks like an enormous box of chocolate.’
‘It’s—it’s the book,’ he answered, shamefaced as a schoolboy producing his first verses. ‘There! that’s it,’ and he placed two formidable-looking volumes, very new and very redolent of the bookbinder’s establishment, in her hands. ‘That’s the very first copy,’ he added. ‘I wanted you to have it.’
Sprats sat down and turned the books over. He had written her name on the fly-leaf of the first volume, and his own underneath it. She glanced at the maps, the engravings, the diagrams, the scientific tables, and a sudden flush came across her face. She looked up at him.
‘I should be proud if I had written a book like this!’ she said. ‘It means—such a lot of—well, ofmanliness, somehow. Thank you. And it is really published at last?’
‘It is not supposed to be published until next Monday,’ he answered. ‘The reviewers’ copies have gone out to-day, but I insisted on having a copy supplied to me before any one handled another—I wanted you to have the very first.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because I think you’ll understand it,’ he said; ‘and you’ll read it.’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I shall read it, and I think I shall understand. And now all the lionising will begin.’
Saxonstowe shrugged his shoulders.
‘If the people who really know about these things think I have done well, I shall be satisfied,’ he said. ‘I don’t care a scrap about the reviews in the popular papers—I am looking forward with great anxiety to the criticisms of two or three scientific periodicals.’
‘You were going to run away from the lionising business,’ she said. ‘When are you going?—there is nothing to keep you, now that the book is out.’
Saxonstowe looked at her. He was standing at the edge of the table on which she had placed the two volumes of his book; she was sitting in a low chair at its side. She looked up at him; she saw his face grow very grave.
‘I didn’t think anything would keep me,’ he said, ‘but I find that something is keeping me. It is you. Do you know that I love you?’
The colour rose in her cheeks, and her eyes left his for an instant; then she faced him.
‘I did not know it until just now,’ she answered, laying her hand on one of the volumes at her side. ‘I knew it then, because you wished me to have the first-fruits of your labour. I was wondering about it—as we talked.’
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Will you let me be perfectly frank with you?’ she said. ‘Are you sure about yourself in this?’
‘I am sure,’ he answered. ‘I love you, and I shall never love any other woman. Don’t think that I say that in the way in which I dare say it’s been said a million times—I mean it.’
‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I understand. You wouldn’t say anything that you didn’t mean. And I am going to be equally truthful with you. I don’t think it’s wrong of me to tell you that I have a feeling for you which I have not, and never had, for any other man that I have known. I could depend on you—I could go to you for help and advice, and I should rely on your strength. I have felt that since we met, as man and woman, a few weeks ago.’
‘Then——’ he began.
‘Stop a bit,’ she said, ‘let me finish. I want to be brutally plain-spoken—it’s really best to be so. I want you to know me as I am. I have loved Lucian Damerel ever since he and I were boy and girl. It is, perhaps, a curious love—you might say that there is very much more of a mother’s, or a sister’s, love in it than a wife’s. Well, I don’t know. I do know that it nearly brokemy heart when I heard of his marriage to Haidee. I cannot tell—I have never been able to tell—in what exact way it was that I wanted him, but I did not want her to have him. Perhaps all that, or most of that, feeling has gone. I have tried hard, by working for others, to put all thought of another woman’s husband out of my mind. But the thought of Lucian is still there—it may, perhaps, always be there. While it is—even in the least, the very least degree—you understand, do you not?’ she said, with a sudden note of eager appeal breaking into her voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I understand.’
She rose to her feet and held out her hand to him.
‘Then don’t let us try to put into words what we can feel much better,’ she said, smiling. ‘We are friends—always. And you are going away.’
The children found out that for some time at any rate there would be no more visits from the Lord. But the toys and the books, the fruit and flowers, came as regularly as ever, and the Lord was not forgotten.
Duringthe greater part of that summer Lucian had been working steadily on two things: the tragedy which Mr. Harcourt was to produce at the Athenæum in December, and a new poem which Mr. Robertson intended to publish about the middle of the autumn season. Lucian was flying at high game in respect of both. The tragedy was intended to introduce something of the spirit and dignity of Greek art to the nineteenth-century stage—there was to be nothing common or mean in connection with its production; it was to be a gorgeous spectacle, but one of high distinction, and Lucian’s direct intention in writing it was to set English dramatic art on an elevation to which it had never yet been lifted. The poem was an equally ambitious attempt to revive the epic; its subject, the Norman Conquest, had filled Lucian’s mind since boyhood, and from his tenth year onwards he had read every book and document procurable which treated of that fascinating period. He had begun the work during his Oxford days; the greater part of it was now in type, and Mr. Robertson was incurring vast expense in the shape of author’s corrections. Lucian polished and rewrote in a fashion that was exasperating; his publisher, never suspecting that so many alterations would be made, had said nothing about them in drawing up a formal agreement, and he was daily obliged to witness a disappearance of profits.
‘What a pity that you did not make all your alterations and corrections before sending the manuscript to press!’ he exclaimed one day, when Lucian called with a bundle of proofs which had been hacked about in sucha fashion as to need complete resetting. ‘It would have saved a lot of trouble—and expense.’
Lucian stared at him with the eyes of a young owl, round and wondering.
‘How on earth can you see what a thing looks like until it’s in print?’ he said irritably. ‘What are printers for?’
‘Just so—just so!’ responded the publisher. ‘But really, you know, this book is being twice set—every sheet has had to be pulled to pieces, and it adds to the expense.’
Lucian’s eyes grew rounder than ever.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he answered. ‘That is your province—don’t bother me about it.’
Robertson laughed. He was beginning to find out, after some experience, that Lucian was imperturbable on certain points.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘By the bye, how much more copy is there—or if copy is too vulgar a word for your mightiness, how many more lines or verses?’
‘About four hundred and fifty lines,’ answered Lucian.
‘Say another twenty-four pages,’ said Robertson. ‘Well, it runs now to three hundred and fifty—that means that it’s going to be a book of close upon four hundred pages.’
‘Well?’ questioned Lucian.
‘I was merely thinking that it is a long time since the public was asked to buy a volume containing four hundred pages of blank verse,’ remarked the publisher. ‘I hope this won’t frighten anybody.’
‘You make some very extraordinary remarks,’ said Lucian, with unmistakable signs of annoyance. ‘Whatdoyou mean?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing!’ answered Robertson, who was on sufficient terms of intimacy with Lucian to be able to chaff him a little. ‘I was merely thinking of trade considerations.’
‘You appear to be always “merely thinking” ofsomething extraordinary,’ said Lucian. ‘What can trade considerations have to do with the length of my poem?’
‘What indeed?’ said the publisher, and began to talk of something else. But when Lucian had gone he looked rather doubtfully at the pile of interlineated proof, and glanced from it to the thin octavo with which the new poet had won all hearts nearly five years before. ‘I wish it had been just a handful of gold like that!’ he said to himself. ‘Four hundred pages of blank verse all at one go!—it’s asking a good deal, unless it catches on with the old maids and the dowagers, like theCourse of Timeand theEpic of Hades. Well, we shall see; but I’d rather have some of your earlier lyrics than this weighty performance, Lucian, my boy—I would indeed!’
Lucian finished his epic before the middle of July, and fell to work on the final stages of his tragedy. He had promised to read it to the Athenæum company on the first day of the coming October, and there was still much to do in shaping and revising it. He began to feel impatient and irritable; the sight of his desk annoyed him, and he took to running out of town into the country whenever the wish for the shade of woods and the peacefulness of the lanes came upon him. Before the end of the month he felt unable to work, and he repaired to Sprats for counsel and comfort.
‘I don’t know how or why it is,’ he said, telling her his troubles, ‘but I don’t feel as if I had a bit of work left in me. I haven’t any power of concentration left—I’m always wanting to be doing something else. And yet I haven’t worked very hard this year, and we have been away a great deal. It’s nearly time for going away again, too—I believe Haidee has already made some arrangement.’
‘Lucian,’ said Sprats, ‘why don’t you go down to Simonstower? They would be so glad to have you at the vicarage—there’s heaps of room. And just thinkhow jolly it is there in August and September—I wish I could go!’
Lucian’s face lighted up—some memory of the old days had suddenly fired his soul. He saw the familiar scenes once more under the golden sunlight—the grey castle and its Norman keep, the winding river, the shelving woods, and, framing all, the gold and purple of the moorlands.
‘Simonstower!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, of course—it’s Simonstower that I want. We’ll go at once. Sprats, why can’t you come too?’
Sprats shook her head.
‘I can’t,’ she answered. ‘I shall have a holiday in September, but I can’t take a single day before. I’m sure it will do you good if you go to Simonstower, Lucian—the north-country air will brighten you up. You haven’t been there for four years, and the sight of the old faces and places will act like a tonic.’
‘I’ll arrange it at once,’ said Lucian, delighted at the idea, and he went off to announce his projects to Haidee. Haidee looked at him incredulously.
‘Whatever are you thinking of, Lucian?’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember that we’re cramful of engagements from the beginning of August to the end of September?’ She recited a list of arrangements already entered into, which included a three-weeks’ sojourn on Eustace Darlington’s steam-yacht, and a fortnight’s stay at his shooting-box in the Highlands. ‘Had you forgotten?’ she asked.
‘I believe I had!’ he replied; ‘we seem to have so many engagements. Look here: do you know, I think I’ll back out. I must have this tragedy finished for Harcourt and his people by October, and I can’t do it if I go rushing about from one place to another. I think I shall go down to Simonstower and have a quiet time and finish my work there—I’ll explain it all to Darlington.’
‘As you please,’ she answered. ‘Of course, I shall keep my engagements.’
‘Oh, of course,’ he said. ‘You won’t miss me, you know. I suppose there are lots of other people going?’
‘I suppose so,’ she replied carelessly, and there was an end of the conversation. Lucian explained to Darlington that night that he would not be able to keep his engagement, and set forth the reasons with a fine air of devotion to business. Darlington sympathised, and applauded Lucian’s determination—he knew, he said, what a lot depended upon the success of the new play, and he’d no doubt Lucian wouldn’t feel quite easy until it was all in order. After that he must have a long rest—it would be rather good fun to winter in Egypt. Lucian agreed, and next day made his preparations for a descent upon Simonstower. At heart he was rather more than glad to escape the yacht, the Highland shooting-box, and the people whom he would have met. He cared little for the sea, and hated any form of sport which involved the slaying of animals or birds; the thought of Simonstower in the last weeks of summer was grateful to him, and all that he now wanted was to find himself in a Great Northern express gliding out of King’s Cross, bound for the moorlands.
He went round to the hospital on the morning of his departure, and told Sprats with the glee of a schoolboy who is going home for the holidays, that he was off that very afternoon. He was rattling on as to his joy when Sprats stopped him.
‘And Haidee?’ she asked. ‘Does she like it?’
‘Haidee?’ he said. ‘But Haidee is not going. She’s joining a party on Darlington’s yacht, and they’re going round the coast to his place in the Highlands. I was to have gone, you know, but really I couldn’t have worked, and I must work—it’s absolutely necessary that the play should be finished by the end of September.’
Sprats looked anxious and troubled.
‘Look here, Lucian,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s quite right to leave Haidee like that?—isn’t it rather neglecting your duties?’
‘But why?’ he asked, with such sincerity that it became plain to Sprats that the question had never even entered his mind. ‘Haidee’s all right. It would be beastly selfish on my part if I dragged her down to Simonstower for nearly two months—you know, she doesn’t care a bit for the country, and there would be no society for her. She needs sea air, and three weeks on Darlington’s yacht will do her a lot of good.’
‘Who are the other people?’ asked Sprats.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lucian replied. ‘The usual Darlington lot, I suppose. Between you and me, Sprats, I’m glad I’m not going. I get rather sick of that sort of thing—it’s too much of a hot-house existence. And I don’t care about the people one meets, either.’
‘And yet you let Haidee meet them!’ Sprats exclaimed. ‘Really, Lucian, you grow more and more paradoxical.’
‘But Haidee likes them,’ he insisted. ‘That’s just the sort of thing she does like. And if she likes it, why shouldn’t she have it?’
‘You are a curious couple,’ said Sprats.
‘I think we are to be praised for our common-sense view of things,’ he said. ‘I am often told that I am a dreamer—you’ve said so yourself, you know—but in real, sober truth, I’m an awfully matter-of-fact sort of person. I don’t live on illusions and ideals and things—I worship the God of the Things that Are!’
Sprats gazed at him as a mother might gaze at a child who boasts of having performed an impossible task.
‘Oh, you absolute baby!’ she said. ‘Is your pretty head stuffed with wool or with feathers? Paragon of Common-Sense! Compendium of all the Practical Qualities! I wonder I don’t shrivel in your presence like a bit of bacon before an Afric sun. Do you think you’ll catch your train?’
‘Not if I stay here listening to abuse. Seriously, Sprats, it’s all right—about Haidee, I mean,’ he said appealingly.
‘If you were glissading down a precipice at a hundredmiles a minute, Lucian, everything would be all right with you until your head broke off or you snapped in two,’ she answered. ‘You’re the Man who Never Stops to Think. Go away and be quiet at Simonstower—you’re mad to get there, and you’ll probably leave it within a week.’
In making this calculation, however, Sprats was wrong. Lucian went down to Simonstower and stayed there three weeks. He divided his time between the vicarage and the farm; he renewed his acquaintance with the villagers, and had forgotten nothing of anything relating to them; he spent the greater part of the day in the open air, lived plainly and slept soundly, and during the second week of his stay he finished his tragedy. Mr. Chilverstone read it and the revised proofs of the epic; as he had a great liking for blank verse, rounded periods, and the grand manner, he prophesied success for both. Lucian drank in his applause with eagerness—he had a great belief in his old tutor’s critical powers, and felt that whatever he stamped with the seal of his admiration must be good. He had left London in somewhat depressed and irritable spirits because of his inability to work; now that the work was completed and praised by a critic in whom he had good reason to repose the fullest confidence, his spirits became as light and joyous as ever.
Lucian would probably have remained longer at Simonstower but for a chance meeting with Lord Saxonstowe, who had got a little weary of the ancestral hall and had conceived a notion of going across to Norway and taking a long walking tour in a district well out of the tourist track. He mentioned this to Lucian, and—why, he could scarcely explain to himself at the moment—asked him to go with him. Lucian’s imagination was fired at the mere notion of exploring a country which he had never seen before, and he accepted the invitation with fervour. A week later they sailed from Newcastle, and for a whole month they spent nights and days side by side amidst comparative solitudes. Each began tounderstand the other, and when, just before the end of September, they returned to England, they had become firm friends, and were gainers by their pilgrimage in more ways than one.
WhenLucian went back to town Haidee was winding up a short round of visits in the North; she rejoined him a week later in high spirits and excellent health. Everything had been delightful; everybody had been nice to her; no end of people had talked about Lucian and his new play—she was dreaming already of the glories of the first night and of the radiance which would centre about herself as the wife of the brilliant young author. Lucian had returned from Norway in equally good health and spirits; he was confident about the tragedy and the epic: he and his wife therefore settled down to confront an immediate prospect of success and pleasure. Haidee resumed her usual round of social gaieties; Lucian was much busied with rehearsals at the theatre and long discussions with Harcourt; neither had a care nor an anxiety, and the wheels of their little world moved smoothly.
Saxonstowe, who had come back to town for a few weeks before going abroad again, took to calling a good deal at the little house in Mayfair. He had come to understand and to like Lucian, and though they were as dissimilar in character as men of different temperament can possibly be, a curious bond of friendship, expressed in tacit acquiescence rather than in open avowal, sprang up between them. Each had a respect for the other’s world—a respect which was amusing to Sprats, who, watching them closely, knew that each admired the other in a somewhat sheepish, schoolboy fashion. Lucian, being the less reserved of the two, made no secret of his admiration of the man who had done things the doing of which necessitated bravery, endurance, and self-denial. He was a fervent worshipper—almost to a pathetic extreme—of men of action: the sight of soldiers marching made his toestingle and his eyes fill with the moisture of enthusiasm; he had been so fascinated by the mere sight of a great Arctic explorer that he had followed him from one town to another during a lecturing tour, simply to stare at him and conjure up for himself the scenes and adventures through which the man had passed. He delighted in hearing Saxonstowe talk about his life in the deserts, and enjoyed it all the more because Saxonstowe had small gift of language and told his tale with the blushes of a schoolboy who hates making a fuss about anything that he has done. Saxonstowe, on his part, had a sneaking liking, amounting almost to worship, for men who live in a world of dreams—he had no desire to live in such a world himself, but he cherished an immense respect for men who, like Lucian, could create. Sometimes he would read a page of the new epic and wonder how on earth it all came into Lucian’s head; Lucian at the same moment was probably turning over the leaves of Saxonstowe’s book and wondering how a man could go through all that that laconic young gentleman had gone through and yet come back with a stiff upper lip and a smile.
‘You and Lucian Damerel appear to have become something of friends,’ Lady Firmanence remarked to her nephew when he called upon her one day. ‘I don’t know that there’s much in common between you.’
‘Perhaps that is why we are friends,’ said Saxonstowe. ‘You generally do get on with people who are a bit different to yourself, don’t you?’
Lady Firmanence made no direct answer to this question.
‘I’ve no doubt Lucian is easy enough to get on with,’ she said dryly. ‘The mischief in him, Saxonstowe, is that he’s too easy-going about everything. I suppose you know, as you’re a sort of friend of the family, that a good deal is being said about Mrs. Damerel and Eustace Darlington?’
‘No,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I’m not in the way to hear that sort of thing.’
‘I don’t know that you’re any the better for being out of the way. I am in the way. There’s a good deal being said,’ Lady Firmanence retorted with some asperity. ‘I believe some of you young men think it a positive crime to listen to the smallest scrap of gossip—it’s nothing of the sort. If you live in the world you must learn all you can about the people who make up the world.’
Saxonstowe nodded. His eyes fixed themselves on a toy dog which snored and snuffled at Lady Firmanence’s feet.
‘And in this particular case?’ he said.
‘Why was Lucian Damerel so foolish as to go off in one direction while his wife went in another with the man she originally meant to marry?’ inquired Lady Firmanence. ‘Come now, Saxonstowe, would you have done that?’
‘No,’ he said hesitatingly, ‘I don’t think I should; but then, you see, Damerel looks at things differently. I don’t think he would ever give the foolishness of it a thought, and he would certainly think no evil—he’s as guileless as a child.’
‘Well,’ remarked Lady Firmanence, ‘I don’t admire him any the more for that. I’m a bit out of love with grown-up children. If Lucian Damerel marries a wife he should take care of her. Why, she was three weeks on Darlington’s yacht, and three weeks at his place in Scotland (of course there were lots of other people there too, but even then it was foolish), and he was with her at two or three country houses in Northumberland later on—I met them at one myself.’
‘Lucian and his wife,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘are very fond of having their own way.’
Lady Firmanence looked at her nephew out of her eye-corners.
‘Oh!’ she said, with a caustic irony, ‘you think so, do you? Well, you know, young people who like to have their own way generally come to grief. To mymind, your new friends seem to be qualifying for trouble.’
Saxonstowe studied the pattern of the carpet and traced bits of it out with his stick.
‘Do you think men like Damerel have the power of reckoning things up?’ he said, suddenly looking at his aunt with a quick, appealing glance. ‘I don’t quite understand these things, but he always seems to me to be a bit impatient of anything that has to do with everyday life, and yet he’s keen enough about it in one way. He’s a real good chap, you know—kindly natured and open-hearted and all that. You soon find that in him. And I don’t believe he ever had a wrong thought of anybody—he’s a sort of confiding trust in other people that’s a bit amusing, even to me, and I haven’t seen such an awful lot of the world. But——’ He came to a sudden pause and shook his head. Lady Firmanence laughed.
‘Yes, but,’ she repeated. ‘That “but” makes all the difference. But this is Lucian Damerel—he is a child who sits in a gaily caparisoned, comfortably appointed boat which has been launched on a wide river that runs through a mighty valley. He has neither sail nor rudder, and he is so intent on the beauty of the scenery through which he is swept that he does not recognise their necessity. His eyes are fixed on the rose-flushed peak of a far-off mountain, the glitter of the sunshine on a dancing wave, or on the basket of provisions which thoughtful hands have put in the boat. It may be that the boat will glide to its destination in safety, and land him on the edge of a field of velvety grass wherein he can lie down in peace to dream as long as he pleases. But it also may be that it will run on a rock in mid-stream and knock his fool’s paradise into a cocked hat—and what’s going to happen then?’ asked Lady Firmanence.
‘Lots of things might happen,’ said Saxonstowe, smiling triumphantly at the thought of beating his clever relative at her own game. ‘He might be able to swim,for example. He might right the boat, get into it again, and learn by experience that one shouldn’t go fooling about without a rudder. Some other chap might come along and give him a hand. Or the river might be so shallow that he could walk ashore with no more discomfort than he would get from wet feet.’
Lady Firmanence pursed her lips and regarded her nephew with a fixed stare which lasted until the smile died out of his face.
‘Or there might be a crocodile, or an alligator, at hand, which he could saddle and bridle, and convert into a park hack,’ she said. ‘There are indeed many things which might happen; what I’m chiefly concerned about is, what would happen if Lucian’s little boat did upset? I confess that I should know Lucian Damerel much more thoroughly, and have a more accurate conception of him, if I knew exactly what he would say and do when the upsetting happened. There is no moment in life, Saxonstowe, wherein a man’s real self, real character, real quality, is so severely tested and laid bare as that unexpected one in which Fortune seizes him by the scruff of his neck and bundles him into the horsepond of adversity—it’s what he says and does when he comes up spluttering that stamps him as a man or a mouse.’
Saxonstowe felt tolerably certain of what any man would say under the circumstances alluded to by Lady Firmanence, but as she seemed highly delighted with her similes and her epigrams, he said nothing of his convictions, and soon afterwards took his departure.
Ona certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way.
‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are—well, they’re not very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press here,—Times,Telegraph,Post,News,Chronicle, andStandard—and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’
The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein—taking them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting inhis latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.
Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to Lucian the later—and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at.
‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one—Tennyson was wise in giving his public theIdylls of the Kingin fragments—if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to present the thing as a whole. And itisgood, however they may damn it with faint praise.’
‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.
‘Sell? Why, I don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a book,’ answered Lucian. ‘I really don’t know—I suppose the people who bought all my other volumes will buy this.’
But as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what would happen if the new volume did not sell. He knew exactly how many copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory, and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and muscle. He recalled the figures of the last statement of account rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity cheered him. Whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a public of considerable size. And after all, this was the first time the critics had not burned incense at his shrine—he forgave them with generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full as ever of confident optimism. He felt as regards those particular reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast, and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions of the banquet—he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.
But if Lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less cock-sure about it and himself. It was the general opinion amongst a certain class of critics, who exerciseda certain influence upon public thought, that there was too much of the workshop in hismagnum opus. It was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching mallet. It was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it wanted life and fire and rude strength.
‘It reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence, ‘of the statue of Galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,—yes, neuter—as it appeared at the very moment ere Pygmalion’s love breathed into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’
This man was young and newly come to town—the others looked at him with shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to say, and they also knew, being older, how difficult it is to express oneself in words.
‘How very differently one sees things!’ sighed one of them. ‘Damerel’s new poem, now, reminds me of a copy of thePink ’Un, carefully edited by a committee of old maids for the use of mixed classes in infant schools.’
The young man who used mellifluous words manifested signs of astonishment. He looked at the last speaker with inquiring eyes.
‘You mean——’ he began.
‘Ssh!’ whispered a voice at his elbow, ‘don’t askhimwhat he means at any time. He means that the thing’s lacking in virility.’
It may have been the man who likened Lucian’s epic to an emasculated and expurgatedPink ’Unto whom was due a subsequent article in thePorthole, wherein, under the headingLucian the Ladylike, much sympathy was expressed with William the Conqueror at his sad fate in being sung by a nineteenth-century bard. There was much good-humoured satire in that article, but agood many of its points were sharply barbed, and Lucian winced under them. He was beginning to find by that time that his epic was not being greeted with the enthusiasm which he had anticipated for it; the great literary papers, the influential journals of the provinces, and the critics who wrote of it in two or three of the monthly reviews, all concurred that it was very fine as a literary exercise, but each deplored the absence of a certain something which had been very conspicuous indeed in his earlier volumes.
Lucian began to think things over. He remembered how his earlier work had been written—he recalled the free, joyous flush of thought, the impulse to write, the fertility and fecundity which had been his in those days, and he contrasted it all with the infinite pains which he had taken in polishing and revising the epic. It must have been the process of revision, he thought, which had sifted the fire and life out of the poem. He read and re-read passages of it—in spite of all that the critics said, they pleased him. He remembered the labour he had gone through, and valued the results by it. And finally, he put the whole affair away from him, feeling that he and his world were not in accord, and that he had better wrap himself in his cloak for a while. He spoke of the epic no more. But unfortunately for Lucian, there were monetary considerations at the back of the new volume, and when he discovered at the end of a month that the sales were small and already at a standstill, he felt a sudden, strange sinking at the heart. He looked at Mr. Robertson, who communicated this news to him, in a fashion which showed the publisher that he did not quite understand this apparently capricious neglect on the part of the public. Mr. Robertson endeavoured to explain matters to him.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘there is such a thing as a vogue, and the best man may lose it. I don’t say that you have lost yours, but here’s the fact that the book is at a standstill. The faithful bought as a religious duty as soon as we published; those of the outer courts won’t buy. Forone thing, your poem is not quite in the fashion—what people are buying just now in poetry is patriotism up-to-date, with extension of the Empire, and Maxim-guns, and deification of the soldier and sailor, and so on.’
‘You talk as if there were fashions in poetry as there are in clothes,’ said Lucian, with some show of scornful indignation.
‘So there are, my dear sir!’ replied the publisher. ‘If you lived less in the clouds and more in the world of plain fact you would know it. You, for instance, would think it strange, if you had ever read it, to find Pollok’s poem,The Course of Time, selling to the extent of thousands and tens of thousands, or of Tupper’sProverbial Philosophymaking almost as prominent a figure in the middle-class household as the Bible itself. Of course there’s a fashion in poetry, as there is in everything else. Byron was once the fashion; Mrs. Hemans was once the fashion; even Robert Montgomery was once fashionable. You yourself were very fashionable for three years—you see, if you’ll pardon me for speaking plainly, you were an interesting young man. You had a beautiful face; you were what the women call “interesting”; you aroused all the town by your romantic marriage—you became a personality. I think you’ve had a big run of it,’ concluded Mr. Robertson. ‘Why, lots of men come up and go down within two years—you’ve had four already.’
Lucian regarded him with grave eyes.
‘Do you think of me as of a rocket or a comet?’ he said. ‘If things are what you say they are, I wish I had never published anything. But I think you are wrong,’ and he went away to consider all that had been said to him. He decided, after some thought and reflection, that his publisher was not arguing on sound lines, and he assured himself for the hundredth time that the production of the tragedy would put everything right.
It was now very near to the day on which the tragedy was to be produced at the Athenæum, and both Lucian and Mr. Harcourt had been worried to the point of deathby pressmen who wanted to know all about it. Chiefly owing to their persistency the public were now in possession of a considerable amount of information as to what it might expect to hear and see. It was to witness—that portion of it, at any rate, which was lucky enough to secure seats for the first night—an attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek art. As this attempt was being made at the close of the nineteenth century, it was quite in accordance with everything that vast sums of money should be laid out on costumes, scenery, and accessories, and it was well known to the readers of the halfpenny newspapers that the production involved the employment of so many hundreds of supernumeraries, that so many thousands of pounds had been spent on the scenery, that certain realistic effects had been worked up at enormous cost, and that the whole affair, to put it in plain language, was a gigantic business speculation—nothing more nor less, indeed, than the provision of a gorgeous spectacular drama, full of life and colour and modern stage effects, which should be enthralling and commanding enough to attract the public until a handsome profit had been made on the outlay. But the words ‘an attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art’ looked well in print, and had a highly respectable sound, and the production of Lucian’s second tribute to the tragic muse was looked forward to with much interest by many people who ignored the fact that many thousands of pounds were being expended in placing it upon the stage.