Mrs. Downey's boarding-house was the light of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury. In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid, conspicuous. Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the allurements of the interior.
From both sides of the street, the entire length of the dinner-table was visible. Above it, a handsome gilt gaselier spread out its branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned furiously at once. In the intense illumination the faces of the boarders could be distinctly seen. They sat, as it were, transfigured, in a nebulous whorl or glory of yellow light. It fell on the high collars, the quite remarkably high collars of the young gentlemen, and on those gay, those positively hilarious blouses which the young ladies at Mrs. Downey's wear. Beside the water-bottles and tumblers of red glass it lay like a rosy shadow on the cloth. It gave back their green again to the aspidistras that, rising from a ruche of pink paper, formed the central ornament of the table. It made a luminous body of Mrs. Downey's face. The graver values were not sacrificed to this joyous expenditure of gas-light, for the wall-paper (the design was in chocolate, on a ground of ochre) sustained the note of fundamental melancholy. At the back of the apartment, immediately behind Mrs. Downey, an immense mahogany sideboard shone wine-dark in a gorgeous gloom. On the sideboard stood a Family Bible, and on the Family Bible a tea-urn, a tea-urn that might have been silver. There was design in this arrangement; but for the Bible the tea-urn would have been obliterated by Mrs. Downey; thus elevated, it closed, it crowned the vista with a beauty that was final, monumental and supreme.
You had only to glance through those windows to see that Mrs. Downey's combined the splendid publicity of an hotel with the refinements of a well-appointed home. That it offered, together with a luxurious table, the society of youthful persons of both sexes. And if everything around Mrs. Downey was on a liberal scale, so was Mrs. Downey herself. She was expansive in her person, prodigal in sympathy, exuberant in dress. If she had one eye to the main chance, the other smiled at you in pure benignity. On her round face was a festal flush, flooding and effacing the little care-worn lines and wrinkles which appeared on it by day. It wore the colour of the hour which, evening after evening, renewed for her the great drama and spectacle of the Dinner.
Her table was disposed with a view to scenic effect. It was not by accident that Mrs. Downey herself was seated at the obscure or sideboard end, and that she gathered round her there the older and less attractive members of her circle. This arrangement was flattering to them, for it constituted an order of precedence and they were in the seats of honour. It had also the further advantage of giving prominence to the young people whose brilliant appearance of an evening was as good as an advertisement for Mrs. Downey's.
First then, at the top of the table, sat two elderly ladies, dishevelled birds of passage, guests of a day and a night. Next, on Mrs. Downey's right, came old Miss Bramble, with old Mr. Partridge opposite on the left. The young gentleman at the extreme bottom or public end of the table was Mr. Spinks. He was almost blatantly visible from the street. At Mr. Spinks's side sat Miss Ada Bishop, the young lady in the fascinating pink blouse; and opposite him, Miss Flossie Walker, in the still more fascinating blue. To the left of Miss Bishop in the very centre of the table was a middle-aged commercial gentleman, Mr. Soper (not specially conspicuous); and facing him and on Miss Walker's right came Miss Roots, who might be any age you please between thirty and forty. Between them at the present moment, there was an empty chair.
Miss Roots was the link between the melancholy decadence above the aspidistras and the glorious and triumphant youth below. As far as could be inferred with any certainty she had leanings to the side of youth. Her presence was no restraint upon its glad and frolicsome humour. It felt that it could trust her. She had never been known to betray any of the secrets that passed at the risk of their lives from Miss Bishop's side of the table to Miss Walker's. There was reason to suppose that Miss Roots was aware of the surreptitious manufacture of bread pellets by Mr. Spinks (Mr. Spinks being the spirit of youth incarnate); but when one of these missiles struck Miss Roots full in the throat, when it should have just delicately grazed the top of Miss Flossie's frizzled hair, Miss Roots not only ignored the incident at the time, but never made the faintest allusion to it afterwards. Therefore Mr. Spinks voted Miss Roots to be a brick, and a trump, and what he called a real lady.
Very curious and interesting was the behaviour of these people among themselves. It was an eternal game of chivy or hide-and-seek, each person being by turn the hunter and the hunted. Mrs. Downey tried to talk to the birds of passage; but the birds of passage would talk to nobody but each other. Miss Bramble took not the slightest notice of Mr. Partridge. Mr. Partridge did everything he could to make himself agreeable to Miss Bramble; but she was always looking away over the aspidistras, towards the young end of the table, with a little air of strained attention, at once alien and alert. Mr. Spinks spent himself in perpetual endeavours to stimulate a sense of humour in Miss Walker, who hadn't quite enough of it, with very violent effects on Miss Bishop, who had it in excess; while Mr. Soper was incessantly trying to catch the eye of Miss Roots around the aspidistras, an enterprise in which he was but rarely successful; Miss Walker finally making no attempt to bridge over the space between her chair and Miss Roots.
That empty seat was reserved for Mr. Rickman, who was generally late. On his arrival the blinds would be pulled down in deference to his wish for a more perfect privacy. Meanwhile they remained up, so that wandering persons in hansoms, lonely persons having furnished apartments, persons living expensively in hotels or miserably in other boarding-houses, might look in, and long to be received into Mrs. Downey's, to enjoy the luxury, the comfort, the society.
The society—Yes; as Mrs. Downey surveyed her table and its guests, her imagination ignored the base commercial tie; she felt herself to be a social power, having called into existence an assembly so various, so brilliant, and so gay. One thing only interfered with Mrs. Downey's happiness, Mr. Rickman's habit of being late. Such a habit would not have mattered so much in any of the other boarders, because, remarkable as they were collectively, individually, Mrs. Downey seldom thought of them unless they happened to be there, whereas with Mr. Rickman, now, whether he was there or not, she could think of nothing else.
And to-night Mr. Rickman was later than ever.
"I'm really beginning to be afraid," said Mrs. Downey, "that he can't be coming."
The middle-aged gentleman, Mr. Soper, was heard muttering something to the effect that he thought they could bear up if he didn't come. Whereupon Mrs. Downey begged Mr. Soper's pardon in a manner which was a challenge to him to repeat his last remark. Therefore he repeated it.
"I say, I 'ope we can manage to bear up."
"Speak for yourself, Mr. Soper." (This from Mr. Spinks who adored Rickman.)
"Well, really, I can't think how it is you and he don't seem to hit it off together. A young fellow that can make himself so pleasant when he likes."
"Ah-h! When he likes. And when he doesn't like? When he comes into the room like a young lord with his head in the air, and plumps himself down straight in front of you, and looks at you as if you were a sorter ea'wig or a centerpede? Call that pleasant?"
Mr. Spinks chuckled behind his table napkin. "He means a centre piece. Wouldn't he make a handsome one!"
Mr. Soper combined a certain stateliness of carriage with a restless insignificance of feature.
"We all know," said Mrs. Downey, "that Mr. Rickman is a very reserved gentleman. He has his own thoughts."
"Thoughts? I've got my thoughts. But they don't make me disagreeable to everybody."
Mr. Spinks craned forward as far as the height of his collar permitted him. "I wouldn't be too cock-sure if I were you, Mr. Soper."
The young end of the table heaved and quivered with primeval mirth. Even Flossie Walker was moved to a faint smile. For Mr. Soper, though outwardly taciturn and morose, was possessed inwardly by a perfect fury of sociability, an immortal and insatiable craving to converse. It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign. Mr. Soper resented the rapidity with which Rickman had been accepted by the boarding-house; he himself, after two years' residence, only maintaining a precarious popularity by little offerings of bon-bons to the ladies. Hence the bitterness of his present mood.
"There are thoughtsandthoughts," said Mrs. Downey severely, for the commercial gentleman had touched her in a very sensitive place. "And when Mr. Rickman is in wot I call 'is vein, there's nobody like him for making a dinner go off."
Here Mr. Soper achieved a sardonic, a really sardonic smile. "Oh, of course, if you're eludin' to the young gentleman's appetite—"
But this was insufferable, it was wounding Mrs. Downey in the tenderest spot of all. The rose of her face became a peony.
"I'm doing no such thing. If any gentleman wishes to pay me a compliment—" her gay smile took for granted that no gentleman could be so barbarous as not to feel that wish—"let him show an appetite. As for the ladies, I wish they had an appetite to show. Mr. Partridge, let me give you a little more canary pudding. It's as light as light. No? Oh—come, Mr. Partridge."
Mr. Partridge's gesture of refusal was so vast, so expressive, that it amounted to a solemn personal revelation which implied, not so much that Mr. Partridge rejected canary pudding as that he renounced pleasure, of which canary pudding was but the symbol and the sign.
"Mr. Spinks then? He'll let me give him another slice,Iknow."
"You bet. Tell you wot it is, Mrs. Downey, the canary that pudding was made of, must have been an uncommonly fine bird."
There was a swift step on the pavement, the determined click of a latch-key, and the clang of a closing door.
"Why, hereisMr. Rickman," said Mrs. Downey, betraying the preoccupation of her soul.
Rickman's entrance produced a certain vibration down both sides of the table, a movement unanimous, yet discordant, as if the nerves of this social body that was "Mrs. Downey's" were being played upon every way at once. Each boarder seemed to be preparing for an experience that, whether agreeable or otherwise, would be disturbing to the last degree. The birds of passage raised their heads with a faint flutter. Miss Walker contemplated a chromo-lithograph with a dreamy air. Mr. Soper strove vainly to fix himself in an attitude of dignified detachment.
The boarding-house was about to suffer the tremendous invasion of a foreign element. For a moment it was united.
Mrs. Downey's face revealed a grave anxiety. She was evidently asking herself: "Was he, or was he not, in his vein?"
A glance at the object of his adoration decided the question for Mr. Spinks. Rickman was, thank goodness,notin his vein, in which state he was incomprehensible to anybody but Miss Roots. He was in that comparatively commonplace condition which rendered him accessible to Mr. Spinks.
"Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce my friend, the lyte Mr. Ryzors. Jemima, show the deceased gentleman to his chair. Miss Walker, Mr. Ryzors. He is really 'appy to myke your acquaintance, Miss Walker, though at first sight he may not appear so. Wot you might be apt to mistyke for coldness is merely 'is intense reserve."
"Oh, dry up, Spinks."
No, Mr. Rickman was certainly not in his vein this evening. He made no apology whatever for his lateness. He ignored the commercial gentleman's "Good-evening, Rickman." As he slipped into his place between Miss Walker and Miss Roots he forgot his usual "Busy to-day at the Museum, Miss Roots?"—a question that recognized her as a fellow worker in the fields of literature, thus lightening the obscurity that hid her labours there.
And for Miss Flossie's timid greeting (the lifting of her upper lip that just showed two dear little white teeth) he gave back a reluctant and embarrassed smile. He used to like sitting by Flossie because she was so pretty and so plump. He used to be sorry for her, because she worked so hard, and, though plump, was so pathetically anaemic and so shy. Critically considered, her body, in spite of its plumpness, was a little too small for her head, and her features were a little too small for her face, but then they were so very correct, as correct as her demeanour and the way she did her hair. She had clusters and curls and loops and coils of hair, black as her eyes, which were so black that he couldn't tell the iris from the pupil. Not that Flossie had ever let him try. And now he had forgotten whether they were black or blue, forgotten everything about them and her. Flossie might be as correct as Flossie pleased, she simply didn't matter.
When she saw him smile she turned up her eyes to the chromo-lithograph again. The little clerk brought with her from the City an air of incorruptible propriety, assumed for purposes of self-protection, and at variance with her style of hair-dressing and the blueness and gaiety of her blouse. With all that it implied and took for granted, it used to strike him as pathetic. But now, he didn't find Flossie in the least pathetic.
He was waiting for the question which was bound to come.
It came from Spinks, and in a form more horrible than any that he had imagined.
"I say, Rickets, wot did you want all those shirts for down in Devonshire?"
Instead of replying Rickets blew his nose, making his pocket-handkerchief conceal as much of his face as possible. At that moment he caught Miss Bishop staring at him, and if there was one thing that Mr. Rickman disliked more than another it was being stared at. Particularly by Miss Bishop. Miss Bishop had red hair, a loose vivacious mouth, and her stare was grossly interrogative.
Flossie sent out a little winged look at him like a soft dark butterfly. It skimmed and hovered about him, and flitted, too ethereal to alight.
Miss Bishop however had no scruples, and put it to him point blank.
"Devonshire?" said Miss Bishop, "what were you doing down there?" She planted her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her finger-tips; her stare thus tilted was partly covered by her eyelids.
"If you really want," said Mr. Spinks, "to see that gentleman opposite, you'll have to take a telescope." The adoring youth conceived that it had been given to him alone of the boarders to penetrate the mind of Rickman, that he was the guardian of his mood, whose mission it was to protect him from the impertinent approaches of the rest.
"A telescope? Wot d'you mean?"
"Don't you think he's got a sort of a far-away look? Especially about the mouth and nose?"
Whether it was from being stared at or for some other reason, but by this time Mr. Rickman had certainly become a little distant. He was not getting on well with anybody or anything, not even with Mrs. Downey's excellent dinner, nor yet with the claret, an extra ordered for his private drinking, always to Mrs. Downey's secret trepidation. She gave a half-timid, half-tender look at him and signalled to her ladies to withdraw. She herself remained behind, superintending the removal of the feast; keeping a motherly eye, too, on the poor boy and his claret. Ever since that one dreadful Sunday morning when she had found him asleep in full evening dress upon his bedroom floor, Mrs. Downey was always expecting to see him drop under the table. He had never done it yet, but there was no knowing when he mightn't.
Whatever the extent of Mr. Rickman's alleged intemperance, his was not the vice of the solitary drinker, and to-night the claret was nearly all drunk by Spinks and Soper. It had the effect of waking in the commercial gentleman the demon of sociability that slept.
What Mr. Soper wanted to know was whether Rickman could recommend 'Armouth as a holiday resort? Could he tell him of any first-class commercial hotel or boarding-house down there? To which Rickman replied that he really couldn't tell him anything at all.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Downey, peering over the edge of the table-cloth she was helping to fold. "Perhaps he has his reasons."
The claret had made Mr. Soper not only sociable but jocose. "Reasons? That's a new name for 'em. If he don't want more than one at a time, I wish he'd introduce the rest of 'em to me."
"I daresay he would be very happy, if he thought you would understand them, Mr. Soper."
"Understand 'em? Why, I don't suppose they talk Greek."
"Ryzors," said Spinks indignantly, "could give 'em points if they did. He speaks the language."
Mr. Soper replied that in that case perhaps Mr. Rickman would oblige him with the Greek for "crumby bits."
At the moment Mr. Rickman did not look like obliging Mr. Soper with anything. The provocation was certainly immense. Mr. Soper's voice inspired him with a fury of disgust. The muscles of his mouth twitched; the blood rushed visibly to his forehead; he stood looming over the table like a young pink thunder-god.
Mrs. Downey and Mr. Partridge retreated in some alarm. Mr. Soper, however, was one of those people who are not roused but merely disconcerted by the spectacle of passion. Mr. Soper said he supposed he could "make a 'armless remark." And still thirsting for companionship he pursued Mrs. Downey to the drawing-room. As he went, he fingered his little box of bon-bons as if it had been a talisman or charm.
Rickman poured himself out some claret which he drank slowly, with closed eyelids, leaning back in his chair. "For God's sake, Spinks," he muttered; "don't speak to me."
"All right, old chappy, I won't." But he whispered, "I wouldn't go off just yet, Ryzors, if I were you" (by "going off," Mr. Spinks meant departure in a train of thought). "He'll be back in another minute."
He was back already, sociable, elated, smoking a cigar. Upstairs with the ladies he and his bon-bons had met with unprecedented success. Rickman opened his eyes.
"Ever try," said Mr. Soper, "a Flor di Dindigul? 'Ave one. You'll find the flavour very delicate and mild." He held it out, that Flor di Dindigul, as an olive branch to the tempestuous young man.
It was not accepted. It was not even seen.
Rickman rose to his feet. To his irritated vision the opposite wall seemed to heave and bulge forward, its chocolate design to become distended and to burst, spreading itself in blotches on the yellow ochre. On the face of the hideous welter swam the face of Mr. Soper, as it were bodiless and alone.
He drew in his breath with a slight shudder, pushed his chair back from the table, and strode out of the room.
Spinks looked after him sorrowfully.
"Wy couldn't you leave him alone, Soper? You might see he didn't want to talk."
"How could I see wot he wanted? One minute 'e's as chatty and sociable—and the next he's up like three dozen of bottled stout.It's wot I sy.You can't dee-pend on 'im with any certainty."
That opinion was secretly shared by Miss Flossie Walker.
Rickman, it seemed, was doomed to inspire that sense of agonizing uncertainty.
It was the second evening after his return. The Dinner was not going off well. Miss Walker was depressed, Mr. Spinks was not in his accustomed spirits, and Mrs. Downey had been going about with red eyes all day. Mr. Rickman had confided to her the deplorable state of his finances. And Mrs. Downey had said to herself she had known from the first that he would not be permanent.
He didn't want to be permanent. He desired to vanish, to disappear from the boarding-house and the boarders, and from Poppy Grace on the balcony next door; to get away from every face and every voice that he had known before he knew Lucia Harden's. Being convinced that he would never see her again, he wanted to be alone with his vivid and piercing memory of her. At first it was the pain that pierced. She had taken out her little two-edged sword and stabbed him. It wouldn't have mattered, he said, if the sword had been a true little sword, but it wasn't; it had snapt and left a nasty bit of steel inside him. Her last phrase was the touch that finished him. But the very sting of it created a healthy reaction. By his revolt against that solitary instance of her cruelty he had recovered his right to dwell upon her kindness. He dwelt upon it until at times he entered again into possession of the tender, beautiful, dominating dream. So intense was his hallucination, that as he walked alone in any southerly direction he still felt Muttersmoor on his right hand and Harcombe on his left, and he had waked in the morning to the sound of the sea beating upon Harmouth beach.
But these feelings visited him more rarely in the boarding-house than elsewhere. That was why he wanted to get away from it. The illusion was destroyed by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table. Not that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before. He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even Spinks and Flossie as people he had once intimately known. Miss Roots alone, for some inscrutable reason, seemed familiar, in keeping with that divine experience to which the actual hour did violence. It was almost as if she understood.
A shrewdly sympathetic glance went out from a pair of hazel eyes set in a plain, clever, strenuous face. Miss Roots was glad, she said, to see him back again. He turned to her with the question that had never failed to flatter and delight. Was Miss Roots doing anything specially interesting now? But there was no interest in his tone.
Miss Roots looked up with a smile that would have been gay if it had not been so weary. Yes, she was collecting material for a book on Antimachus of Colophon. No, not her own book.
(At the mention of Antimachus of Colophon, Mr. Soper folded his arms and frowned with implacable resentment. Mr. Soper was convinced that these subjects were introduced on purpose to exclude him from the conversation.)
Miss Roots, like Mr. Rickman, lived apart from the murmur of the boarding-house. She had raised a barrier of books in a bedroom six feet by nine, behind which she worked obscurely. She had never been known to converse until Mr. Rickman came. A sort of fluctuating friendship had sprung up between Mr. Rickman and Miss Roots. He had an odd feeling, half pity, half liking, for this humble servant of literature, doomed to its labour, ignorant of its delight. And yet Miss Roots had a heart which went out to the mad-cap journalist, wild with youth and the joy of letters. And now these things were coming back to her. The sources of intellectual desire had been drying up with the blood in her cheeks; but when Rickman came they began to flow again. When Rickman talked as only he could talk, Miss Roots felt a faint fervour, a reminiscent thrill. She preened her poor little thoughts as if for pairing time, when soul fluttered to soul across the dinner-table. She knew that, intellectually speaking, she had been assigned to Rickman; for Mrs. Downey held that just as Mr. Rickman was the first to rouse Miss Roots to conversation, so Miss Roots alone had the power of drawing him out to the best advantage.
"Indeed?" said Rickman in a voice devoid of all intelligence.
Now if anything could have drawn Mr. Rickman out it was Antimachus of Colophon. Four weeks ago he would have been more interested in Antimachus than Miss Roots herself, he would have talked about him by the hour together. So that when he said nothing but "Indeed?" she perceived that something was the matter with him. But she also perceived that he was anxious to be talked to, therefore she talked on.
Miss Roots was right; though his mind was unable to take in a word she said to him, he listened, soothed by the singular refinement of her voice. It was a quality he had not noticed in it four weeks ago. Suddenly a word flashed out, dividing the evening with a line of light.
"So you've been staying in Harmouth?"
He started noticeably, and looked at her as if he had not heard. Miss Roots seemed unaware of having said anything specially luminous; she repeated her question with a smile.
"Why?" he asked. "Have you been there?"
"I've not only been there, I was born there."
He looked at her. Miss Roots had always been, to say the least of it, prosaic, and now it was as if poetry had dropped from her lips, as if she had said, "I too was born in Arcadia."
"I suppose," she said, "you saw that beautiful old house by the river?"
"Which beautiful old house by the river?"
"Court House. You see it from the bridge. You must have noticed it."
"Oh, yes, I know the one you mean."
"Did you happen to see or hear anything of the lady who lives in it? Miss Lucia Harden?"
"I—I must have seen her, but I can't exactly say. Do you know her?"
His words seemed to be torn from him in pieces, shaken by the violent beating of his heart.
"Know her?" said Miss Roots. "I lived five years with her. I taught her."
He looked at her again in wonder, in wonder and a sort of tenderness. For a second his heart had come to life again and leapt like a lunatic to his lips. Happily his wits were there before it. He stroked his upper lip, as if brushing away some wild phrase that sat there.
"Then I'm sure," he said, contriving a smile, "that Miss Harden is an exceedingly well educated lady."
Miss Roots' hazel eyes looked up at him intelligently; but as they met that unnatural smile of gallantry there was a queer compression of her shrewd and strenuous face. She changed the subject. He wondered if by any chance she knew; if she corresponded with Miss Harden; if Miss Harden had mentioned him in the days before her troubles came; if Miss Roots were trying to test him, to draw him out as she had never drawn him out before. No, it was not in the least likely that Miss Harden should have mentioned him; if she had, Miss Roots would have said so. She would never have set a trap for him; she was a kind and straightforward little lady. Her queer look meant nothing, it was only her way of dealing with a compliment.
The sweat on his forehead witnessed to the hot labour of his thought. He wondered whether anybody had observed it.
Mr. Soper had, and drew his own conclusions.
"'E's been at it again," said Mr. Soper, with significance. But nobody took any notice of him; and upstairs in the drawing-room that night his bon-bons failed to charm.
"I suppose you're pleased," said he, approaching his hostess, "now you've got Mr. Rickman back again?"
A deeper flush than the Dinner could account for was Mrs. Downey's sole reply.
"'is manners 'aven't improved since 'is residence in the country. I met 'im in the City to-day—wy, we were on the same slab of pavement—and 'e went past and took no more notice of me than if I'd been the Peabody statue."
"Depend upon it, he was full of something."
"Full of unsociability and conceit. And wot is 'e? Wot is 'e? 'Is father keeps a bookshop."
"A very fine bookshop, too," said Miss Roots. It was the first time that she had ever spoken of her own accord to Mr. Soper.
"He may have come out lately, but you should have seen the way 'e began, in a dirty little second 'and shop in the City. A place," said Mr. Soper, "I wouldn't 'ave put my nose into if I was paid. Crammed full of narsty, mangy, 'Olloway Street rubbish."
"Look here now," said Mr. Spinks, now scarlet with fury, "you needn't throw his business in his face, for he's chucked it."
"I don't think any the better of him for that."
"Don't you? Well, he won't worry himself into fits about your opinion."
"'Ad he got a new berth then, when he flung up the old one?"
Now one thing Mrs. Downey, with all her indulgence, did not permit, and that was any public allusion to her boarders' affairs. She might not refuse to discuss them privately with Miss Bramble or Miss Roots, but that was a very different thing. Therefore she maintained a dignified silence.
"Well, then, I should like to know 'ow he's going to pay 'is way."
Before the grossness of this insinuation Mrs. Downey abandoned her policy of silence.
"Some day," said Mrs. Downey, "Mr. Rickman will be in a very different position to wot he is now. You mark my words." (And nobody marked them but little Flossie Walker.)
Two tears rolled down Mrs. Downey's face and mingled with the tartan of her blouse. A murmur of sympathy went round the room, and Mr. Soper perceived that the rest of the company were sitting in an atmosphere of emotion from which he was shut out.
"I beg of you, Mr. Soper, that you will let Mr. Rickman be, for once this evening. Living together as we do, we all ought," said Mrs. Downey, "to respect each other's feelings."
"Ah—feelings. Wot sort of respect does your young gentleman ever show to mine? Takes me up one day and cuts me dead the next."
"He wouldn't have dreamed of such a thing if he hadn't been worried in his mind. Mr. Rickman, Mr. Soper, is in trouble."
Mr. Soper was softened. "Is he? Well, really, I'm very sorry to hear it, very sorry, I'm sure."
"My fear is," said Mrs. Downey, controlling her voice with difficulty, "that he may be leaving us."
"If he does, Mrs. Downey, nobody will regret it more than I do."
"Well, I hope it won't come to that."
Mrs. Downey did not consider it politic to add that she was prepared to make any sacrifice to prevent it. It was as well that Mr. Soper should realize the consequences of an inability to pay your way. She was not prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of keepinghim.
"But what," said Mrs. Downey to herself, "will the Dinner be without Mr. Rickman?"
The Dinner was, in her imagination, a function, a literary symposium. At the present moment, if you were to believe Mrs. Downey, no dinner-table in London could show such a gathering of remarkable people. But to none of these remarkable people did Mrs. Downey feel as she felt to Mr. Rickman, who was the most remarkable of them all. By her own statement she had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for studying the ways of genius. There was a room at Mrs. Downey's which she exhibited with pride as "Mr. Blenkinsop's room." Mr. Blenkinsop was a poet, and Mr. Rickman had succeeded him. If Mrs. Downey did not immediately recognize Mr. Rickman as a genius it was because he was so utterly unlike Mr. Blenkinsop. But she had felt from the first that, as she expressed it, "there was something about him," though what it was she couldn't really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in her heart—"He will not be permanent." The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability's decree. "Perhaps," she said, "we might come to some arrangement."
All night long in her bedroom on the ground-floor, Mrs. Downey lay awake considering what arrangement could be come to. This was but a discreet way of stating her previous determination to make any sacrifice if only she could keep him. The sacrifice which Mrs. Downey (towards the small hours of the morning) found herself contemplating amounted to no less than four shillings a week. Occupying his present bed-sitting room he should remain for twenty-one shillings a week instead of twenty-five.
Unfortunately, at breakfast the next morning their evil genius prompted Mr. Spinks and Mr. Soper to display enormous appetites, and Mrs. Downey, to her everlasting shame, was herself tempted of the devil. A fall of four shillings a week, serious enough in itself, was not to be contemplated with gentlemen eating their heads off in that fashion. It would have to be made up in some way, to be taken out of somebody or something. She would—yes, she would take it out of them all round by taking it out of the Dinner. And yet when it came to the point, Mrs. Downey's soul recoiled from the immorality of this suggestion. There rose before her, as in a vision, the Dinner of the future, solid in essentials but docked of its splendour, its character and its pride. No; that must not be. What the Dinner was now it must remain as long as there were eight boarders to eat it. If Mrs. Downey made any sacrifice she must make it pure.
"On the condition," said Mrs. Downey by way of putting a business-like face on it, "on the condition of his permanence."
But it seemed that twenty-one shillings were more than Mr. Rickman could afford to pay.
Mrs. Downey spent another restless night, and again towards the small hours of the morning she decided on a plan. After breakfast she watched Mr. Soper out of the dining-room, closed the door behind him with offensive and elaborate precaution, and approached Mr. Rickman secretly. If he would promise not to tell the other gentlemen, she would let him have the third floor back for eighteen shillings.
Mr. Rickman stood by the door like one in great haste to be gone. He could not afford eighteen shillings either. He would stay where he was on the old terms for a fortnight, at the end of which time, he said firmly, he would be obliged to go. Mr. Rickman's blue eyes were dark and profound with the pathos of recent illness and suffering, so that he appeared to be touched by Mrs. Downey's kindness. But he wasn't touched by it; no, not the least bit in the world. His heart inside him was like a great lump of dried leather. Mrs. Downey looked at him, sighed, and said no more. Things were more serious with him than she had supposed.
Things were very serious indeed.
His absence at Harmouth had entailed consequences that he had not foreseen. During those four weeks, owing to the perturbation of his mind and the incessant demands on his time, he had written nothing. True, while he was away his poems had found a publisher; but he had nothing to expect from them; it would be lucky if they paid their expenses. On his return to town he found that his place onThe Planethad been filled up. At the most he could only reckon on placing now and then, at infrequent intervals, an article or a poem. The places would be few, for from the crowd of popular magazines he was excluded by the very nature of his genius. To make matters worse, he owed about thirty pounds to Dicky Pilkington. The sum of two guineas, whichThe Museionowed him for his sonnet, would, if he accepted Mrs. Downey's last offer, keep him for exactly two weeks. And afterwards? Afterwards, of course, he would have to borrow another ten pounds from Dicky, hire some den at a few shillings a week, and try his luck for as many months as his money held out. Then there would be another "afterwards," but that need not concern him now.
The only thing that concerned him was the occult tie between him and Miss Roots. Up to the day fixed for his departure he was drawn by an irresistible fascination to Miss Roots. His manner to her became marked by an extreme gentleness and sympathy. Of course it was impossible to believe that it was Miss Roots who lit the intellectual flame that burnt in Lucia. Enough to know that she had sat with her in the library and in the room where she made music; that she had walked with her in the old green garden, and on Harcombe Hill and Muttersmoor. Enough to sit beside Miss Roots and know that all the time her heart was where his was, and that if he were to speak of these things she would kindle and understand. But he did not speak of them; for from the way Miss Roots had referred to Lucia Harden and to Court House, it was evident that she knew nothing of what had happened to them, and he did not feel equal to telling her. Lucia's pain was so great a part of his pain that as yet he could not touch it. But though he never openly approached the subject of Harmouth, he was for ever skirting it, keeping it in sight.
He came very near to it one evening, when, finding himself alone with Miss Roots in the back drawing-room, he asked her how long it was since she had been in Devonshire. It seemed that it was no longer ago than last year. Only last year? It was still warm then, the link between her and the woman whom he loved. He found himself looking at Miss Roots, scanning the lines of her plain face as if it held for him some new and wonderful significance. For him that faced flamed transfigured as in the moment when she had first spoken of Lucia. The thin lips which had seemed to him so utterly unattractive had touched Lucia's, and were baptized into her freshness and her charm; her eyes had looked into Lucia's and carried something of their light. In her presence he drifted into a sort of mysticism peculiar to lovers, seeing the hand of a holy destiny in the chance that had seated him beside her. Though her shrewdness might divine his secret he felt that with her it would be safe.
As for his other companions of the dinner-table he was obliged to admit that they displayed an admirable delicacy. After Mrs. Downey's revelation not one of them had asked him what he had been doing those four weeks. Spinks had a theory, which he kept to himself. Old Rickets had been having a high old time. He had eloped with a barmaid or an opera girl. For those four weeks, he had no doubt, Rickets had been gloriously, ruinously, on the loose. Mrs. Downey's speculations had taken the same turn. Mr. Rickman's extraordinary request that all his clean linen should be forwarded to him at once had set her mind working; it suggested a young man living in luxury beyond his means. Mrs. Downey's fancy kindled and blushed by turns as it followed him into a glorious or disreputable unknown. Whatever the adventures of those four weeks she felt that they were responsible for his awful state of impecuniosity. And yet she desired to keep him. "There is something about him," said Mrs. Downey to Miss Roots, and paused searching for the illuminating word; "something that goes to your heart without 'is knowing it."
She had found it, the nameless, ineluctable charm.
And so for those last days the Dinner became a high funereal ceremony, increasing in valedictory splendour that proclaimed unmistakably, "Mr. Rickman is going."
In a neighbouring street he had found a room, cheap and passably clean, and (failing a financial miracle worked on his behalf) he would move into it to-morrow. He was going, now that he would have given anything to stay.
In the dining-room after dinner, Spinks with a dejected countenance, sat guarding for the last time the sacred silence of Rickman. They had finished their coffee, when the door that let out the maid with empty cups let in Miss Bishop, Miss Bramble and Miss Walker.
First came Miss Bishop; she advanced in a side-long and embarrassed manner, giggling, and her face for once was as red as her hair. She carried a little wooden box which with an unaccustomed shyness she asked him to accept. The sliding lid disclosed a dozen cedar pencils side by side, their points all ready sharpened, also a card with the inscription: "Mr. Rickman, with best wishes from Ada Bishop." At one corner was a date suggesting that the gift marked an epoch; at the other the letters P.T.O. The reverse displayed this legend, "If you ever want any typing done, I'll always do it foryouat 6d. a thou.Only don't let on.Yours, A.B." Now Miss Bishop's usual charge was, as he knew, a shilling per thousand.
"Gentlemen," said she, explaining away her modest offering, "always like anything that saves them trouble." At this point, Miss Bishop, torn by a supreme giggle, vanished violently from the scene.
Mr. Rickman smiled sadly, but his heart remained as before. He had not loved Miss Bishop.
Next came Miss Bramble with her gift mysteriously concealed in silver paper. "All brain-workers," said Miss Bramble, "suffered from cold feet." So she had just knitted him a pair of socks—"bed-socks" (in a whisper), "that would help to keep him warm." Her poor old eyes were scarlet, not so much from knitting the bed-socks, as from contemplating the terrible possibility of his needing them.
Under Mr. Rickman's waistcoat there was the least little ghost of a quiver. He had not loved Miss Bramble; but Miss Bramble had loved him. She had loved him because he was young, and because he had sometimes repeated to her the little dinner-table jests that she was too deaf to hear.
Last of the three, very grave and demure, came Flossie, and she, like her friend, carried her gift uncovered. She proffered it with her most becoming air of correctness and propriety. It was a cabinet photograph of herself in her best attitude, her best mood and her best blue blouse. It was framed beautifully and appropriately in white silk, embroidered with blue forget-me-nots by Flossie's clever hands. She had sat up half the night to finish it. He took it gently from her and looked at it for what seemed to Flossie an excessively long time. He was trying to think of something particularly pretty and suitable to say. In his absorption he did not notice that he was alone with her, that as Flossie advanced Spinks and Soper had withdrawn.
"I don't know whether you'll care for it," said she. She was standing very close beside him, and her face under the gas-light looked pale and tender.
"Of course I'll care for it." He laid her gift on the table beside the others and stood contemplating them. She saw him smile. He was smiling at the bed-socks.
"You are all much too good to me, you know."
"Oh, Mr. Rickman, you've been so awfully good to me."
He looked round a little anxiously and perceived that they were alone.
"No, Flossie," he said, "I've not been good to anyone, I'm not very good to myself. All the same, I'm not an utter brute; I shan't forget you."
Flossie's eyes had followed, almost jealously, the movement of his hand in putting down her gift; and they had rested there, fixed on her own portrait, and veiled by their large white lids. She now raised them suddenly, and over their black profundity there moved a curious golden glitter that flashed full on his face.
"You didn't remember me, much, last time you went away."
"I didn't remember anybody, Flossie; I had too much to think of."
It struck him that this was the first time she had looked him full in the face; but it did not strike him that it was also the first time that he had found himself alone in a room with her, though they had been together many times out of doors and in crowded theatres and concert halls. Her look conveyed some accusation that he at first failed to understand. And then there came into his mind the promise he had made to her at Easter, to take her to the play, the promise broken without apology or explanation. So she still resented it, did she? Poor little Flossie, she was so plump and pretty, and she had been so dependent on him for the small pleasures of her life.
"You're always thinking," said Flossie, and laughed.
"I'm sorry, Flossie; it's a disgusting habit, I own. I'll make up for it some day. We'll do a lot of theatres and—and things together, when my ship comes in."
"Thank you, Mr. Rickman," said she with a return to her old demeanour. "And now I suppose I'd better say good-night?"
She turned. They said good-night. He sprang to open, the door for her. As she went through it, his heart, if it did not go with her, was touched, most palpably, unmistakably touched at seeing her go. He had not loved Flossie; but he might have loved her.
Mr. Soper, who had been waiting all the while on the stairs, walked in through the open door. He closed it secretly.
He laid his hand affectionately on Rickman's shoulder. "Rickman," he said solemnly, "while I 'ave the opportunity, I want to speak to you. If it should 'appen that a fiver would be useful to you, don't you hesitate to come to me."
"Oh, Soper, thanks most awfully. Really, no, I couldn't think of it."
"But I mean it. I really do. So don't you 'esitate; and there needn't be any hurry about repayment. That," said Mr. Soper, "is quite immaterial." Failing to extract from Rickman any distinct promise, he withdrew; but not before he had pressed upon his immediate acceptance a box of his favourites, the Flor di Dindigul.
By this time Rickman's heart was exceedingly uncomfortable inside him. He had hated Soper.
He thought it was all over, and he was glad to escape from these really very trying interviews to the quiet of his own room. There he found Spinks sitting on his bed waiting for him. Spinks had come to lay before him an offering and a scheme. The offering was no less than two dozen of gents' best all-wool knitted hose, double-toed and heeled. The scheme was for enabling Rickman thenceforward to purchase all manner of retail haberdashery at wholesale prices by the simple method of impersonating Spinks. At least in the long-run it amounted to that, and Rickman had some difficulty in persuading Spinks that his scheme, though in the last degree glorious and romantic, was, from an ethical point of view, not strictly feasible.
"What a rum joker you are, Rickman. I never thought of that. I wonder—" (He mused in an unconscious endeavour to restore the moral balance between him and Rickman). "I wonder who'll put you to bed, old chappy, when you're tight."
"Don't fret, Spinky. I'm almost afraid that I shall never be tight again in this world."
"Oh, Gosh," said Spinks, and sighed profoundly. Then, with a slight recovery, "do you mean you won't be able to afford it?"
"You can put it that way, if you like."
In time Spinks left him and Rickman was alone. Just as he was wondering whether or no he would pack his books up before turning in, there was a soft rap at his door. He said, "Come in" to the rap; and to himself he said, "Who next?"
It was Mrs. Downey; she glanced round the room, looked at Flossie's photograph with disapproval, and removed, not without severity, Miss Bramble's bed-socks from a chair. She had brought no gift; but she sat down heavily like a woman who has carried a burden about with her all day, and can carry it no farther. Her features were almost obliterated with emotion and glazed with tears that she made no effort to remove.
"Mr. Rickman," she said, "do you reelly wish to go, or do you not?"
He looked up surprised. "My dear Mrs. Downey, I don't; believe me. Did I ever say I did?"
Her face grew brighter and rounder till the very glaze on it made it shine like a great red sun. "Well, we'd all been wondering, and some of us said one thing, and some another, and I didn't know what to think. But if you want to stay perhaps—we can come to some arrangement." It was the consecrated phrase.
He shook his head.
"Come, I've been thinking it over. You won't be paying less than five shillings a week for your empty room, perhaps more?"
He would, he said, be paying six shillings.
"There now! And that, with your food, makes sixteen shillings at the very least."
"Well—it depends upon the food."
"I should think it did depend upon it." Mrs. Downey's face literally blazed with triumph. She said to herself, "I was right. Mr. Spinks said he'd take it out of his clothes. Miss Bramble said he'd take it out of his fire.Isaid he'd take it out of his dinner."
"Now," she continued, "if you didn't mind moving into the front attic—it's a good attic—for a time, I could let you 'ave that,andboard you, for fifteen shillings a week, or for fourteen, I could, and welcome. As I seldom let that attic, it would be money in the pocket to me."
"Come," she went on, well pleased. "I know all about it. Why, Mr. Blenkinsop, when he first started to write, he lived up there six months at a time. He had his ups, you may say, and his downs. One year in the attic and the next on the second floor, having his meals separate and his own apartments. Then up he'd go again quite cheerful, as regularly as the bills came round." Here Mrs. Downey entered at some length upon the history of the splendour and misery of Mr. Blenkinsop. "And that, I suppose," said Mrs. Downey, "is what it is to be a poet."
"In fact," said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss Roots, "talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly understand the allusion."
After about half an hour's conversation she left him without having received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal. That did not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman was not going after all.
At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door. It was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the next evening. Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the signature made his brain reel for a second. He stood staring at it. From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.
Jewdwine? Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do with him.
Jewdwine was another link. And at that thought his heart heaved and became alive again.