He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.
They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.
By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication ofThe Triumph of Life. The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks. Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more. He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.
Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived passionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?
She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.
"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."
"I always said he would."
"You doubted—once."
"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."
"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."
She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.
"Where is he, Horace?"
"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the possibility of the great poet's material success.
"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining here on the tenth."
Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality, perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity—no. It rose up before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the spectacle of Horace's abasement.
Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal; and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama." There the author of theProlegomena to Æsthetics, the apostle of the Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been his discovery in the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.
He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have said."
"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed it; but not now."
He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article, his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself. Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that he was justified in his changes of attitude. If his conscience joined with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short? Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in theProlegomena to Æsthetics? TheProlegomena to Æstheticswas not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not a prison.
But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it possible that he, the author of theProlegomena, had ceased to care about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he, the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very imposing figure by his philosophic attitude. In London he had found that the same attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous. Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by theProlegomena. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own damnation.
Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amusement in discussing whether the great dramatist were Maddox's discovery or Jewdwine's. With the readers ofMetropolishe passed as Jewdwine's—which was all that Jewdwine wanted. With the earnest aspiring public, striving to admire Keith Rickman because they had been told they ought to, he passed as their own. The few who had known him from the first knew also that poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover themselves. Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the absurd pretension. Enough that he lived, and was known to live, with Rickman as his friend.
They shared that little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his bride. It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the religious passion of his half-Celtic soul.
The poet had trusted the honour and the judgement of his friend so far as to appoint him his literary executor. Thus Maddox became possessed of the secret of the Sonnets. And here a heavy strain was put upon his judgement and his honour. Maddox had guessed that there was a power in Rickman's life more terrible than Jewdwine, who after all had never really touched him. There was, Maddox had always known, a woman somewhere. A thousand terrors beset the devotee when he noticed that since fame had lighted upon Rickman the divinity had again begun to furnish his part (the holy part) of the temple in a manner unmistakably suggestive of mortality. Maddox shuddered as he thought of the probable destination of that upper chamber which was the holiest of all. And now this terror had become a certainty. The woman existed; he knew her name; she was a cousin of the detestable Jewdwine; the Sonnets could never be given to the world as long as she withheld her consent, and apparently she did withhold it. More than this had not been revealed to Maddox, and it was in vain that he tried to penetrate the mystery.
His efforts were not the most delicate imaginable. One evening, sitting with Rickman in that upper chamber, he entered on the subject thus—
"Seen anything of the Spinkses lately?"
"I called there last Saturday."
"How is the divine Flossie?"
"Flourishing. At least there's another baby. By the way Maddy you were grossly wrong about her there. The Beaver is absolutely devoid of the maternal instinct. She's decent to the baby, but she's positively brutal to Muriel Maud. How Spinky—He protests and there are horrid scenes; but through them all I believe the poor chap's in love with her."
"Curious illusion."
Curious indeed. It had seemed incredible to Rickman when he had seen the Beaver pushing her first-born from her knee.
"Good Heavens, Rickman, what a deliverance for you."
"I wonder if he's happy."
"Can't say; but possibly he holds his own. You see, Spinky's position is essentially sound. My theory is—"
But Rickman had no desire for a theory of marriage as propounded by Maddox. He had always considered that in these matters Maddox was a brute.
Maddox drew his own conclusions from the disgusted protest. He remembered how once, when he had warned Rickman of the love of little women, Rickman had said it was the great women who were dangerous. The lady to whom he had entrusted the immortality of his Sonnets would be one of these. As the guardian of that immortality Maddox conceived it was his duty to call on the lady and prevail on her to give them up. Under all his loyalty he had the audacity of the journalist who sticks at nothing for his own glorious end.
There was after all a certain simplicity about Maddox. He considered himself admirably equipped by nature for this delicate mission. He was, besides, familiar with what he called the "society woman," and he believed that he knew how to deal with her. Maddox always had the air of being able to push his way anywhere by the aid of his mighty shoulders. He sent in his card without a misgiving.
Lucia knew that Maddox was a friend of Keith Rickman's, and she received him with a courtesy that would have disarmed a man less singularly determined. It was only when he had stated his extraordinary purpose that her manner became such that (so he described it afterwards) it would have "set a worm's back up." And Maddox was no worm.
It was a little while before Lucia realized that this rather overpowering visitor was requesting her to "give up" certain sonnets of Keith Rickman's, written in ninety-three. "I don't quite understand. Are you asking me to give you the manuscript or to give my consent to its publication?"
"Well—both. Ihaveto ask you because he never would do it himself."
"Why should he not?"
"Oh, well, you know his ridiculous notions of honour."
"I do indeed. I daresay some people would consider them ridiculous."
It was this speech, Maddox confessed, that first set his back up. He was irritated more by the calm assumption of proprietorship in Rickman than by the implied criticism of himself.
"Do you mind telling me," she continued, still imperturbably, "how you came to know anything about it?"
Maddox stiffened. "I am Mr. Rickman's oldest and most intimate friend, and he has done me the honour to make me his literary executor."
"Did he also give you leave to settle his affairs beforehand?"
Maddox shrugged his shoulders by way of a reply.
"If he did not," said Lucia, "there's nothing more to be said."
"Pardon me, there is a great deal more to be said. I don't know whether you have any personal reason for objecting—"
She coloured and was silent.
"If it's pride, I should have thought most women would have been prouder—" (A look from Lucia warned him that he would do well to refrain from thinking.) "Oh, well, for all I know you might have fifty good reasons. The question is, are you justified in sacrificing a work of genius to any mere personal feeling?"
He had her there, and she knew it. She was silently considering the question. Three years ago she would have had no personal feeling in the matter beyond pride in the simple dedication. Now that personal feeling had come in and had concentrated itself upon that work of genius, and made it a thing so sacred and so dear to her, she shrank with horror from the vision of publicity. Besides, it was all of Keith Rickman that was left to her. His other works were everybody's property; therefore she clung the more desperately to that one which, as he had said, belonged to nobody but her. And Mr. Maddox had no right to question her. Instead of answering him she moved her chair a little farther from him and from the light.
Now Maddox had the coldness as well as the passion of the Celt. He was not touched by Lucia's beauty, nor yet by the signs of illness or fatigue manifest in her face and all her movements. Her manner irritated him; it seemed the feminine counterpart of her cousin's insufferable apathy. He felt helpless before her immobility. But he meant to carry his point—by brute force if necessary.
But not yet. "I'm not asking you to give up a mere copy of verses. The Sonnets are unique—even for Rickman; and for one solitary lady to insist on suppressing them—well, you know, it's a large order."
This time she indeed showed some signs of animation. "How do you know they are unique? Did he show you them?"
"No, he did not. I found them among his papers when he was in hospital."
"In hospital?" She sat up and looked at him steadily and without emotion.
"Yes; I had to overhaul his things—we thought he was dying—and the Sonnets—"
"Never mind the Sonnets now, please. Tell me about his illness. What was it?"
Again that air of imperious proprietorship! "Enteric," he said bluntly, "and some other things."
"Where was he before they took him to the hospital?"
"He was—if you want to know—in a garret in a back street off Tottenham Court Road."
"What was he doing there?"
"To the best of my belief, he was starving. Do you find the room too close?"
"No, no. Go on."
Maddox went on. He was enjoying the sensation he was creating. He went on happily, piling up the agony. Since she would have it he was not reticent of detail. He related the story of the Rankins' dinner. He described with diabolically graphic touches the garret in Howland Street. "We thought he'd been drinking, you know, and all the time he was starving."
"He was starving—" she repeated slowly to herself.
"He was not doing it because he was a poet. It seems he had to pay some debt, or thought he had. The poor chap talked about it when he was delirious. Oh—letmeopen that window."
"Thank you. You say he was delirious. Were you with him then?"
Maddox leapt to his conclusion. Miss Lucia Harden had something to conceal. He gathered it from her sudden change of attitude, from her interrogation, from her faintness and from the throbbing terror in her voice.Thatwas why she desired the suppression of the Sonnets.
"Were you with him?" she repeated.
"No. God forgive me!"
"Nobody was with him—before they took him to the hospital?"
"Nobody, my dear lady, whom you would call anybody. He owes his life to the charity of a drunken prostitute."
She was woman, the eternal, predestined enemy of Rickman's genius. Therefore he had determined not to spare her, but to smite her with words like sledge-hammers.
And to judge by the look of her he had succeeded. She had turned away from him to the open window. She made no sign of suffering but for the troubled rising and falling of her breast. He saw in her a woman mortally smitten, but smitten, he imagined, in her vanity.
"Have I persuaded you," he said quietly, "to give up those Sonnets?"
"You shall have a copy. If Mr. Rickman wants the original he must come for it himself."
"Thanks." Maddox had ceased to be truculent, having gained his end. His blue eyes twinkled with their old infantile devilry. "Thanks. It's awfully nice of you. But—couldn't you make it seem a little more spontaneous? You see, I don't want Rickman to know I had to ask you for them." He had a dim perception of inconsistency in his judgement of the lady; since all along he had been trusting her generosity to shelter his indiscretion.
Lucia smiled even in her anguish. "That I can well imagine. The copy shall be sent to him."
And Maddox considered himself dismissed. He wondered why she called him back to ask for the number of that house in Howland Street.
That afternoon she dragged herself there, that she might torture her eyes because they had not seen, and her heart because it had not felt.
At Jewdwine's heart there was trouble and in his mind perfect peace. For he knew his own mind at last, though he was still a little indefinite as to the exact condition of his heart.
Three days after Maddox's extraordinary disclosures Lucia had become most obviously and inconsiderately ill; and had given her cousin Edith a great deal of trouble as well as a severe fright, till Kitty, also frightened, had carried her off to Devonshire out of the house of the Jewdwines. To Horace the working of events was on the whole beneficent. Lucia's change of attitude, her illness, her abrupt departure, though too unpleasant for his fastidious mind to dwell upon, had committed that mind irretrievably to the path of prudence.
So prudent was he, that of his saner matrimonial project the world in general took no note. Secure of the affections of Miss Fulcher, he had propitiated rumour by the fiction of his engagement to Lucia. Rumour, adding a touch of certainty to the story, had handed it on to Rickman by way of Maddox and Miss Roots. He there upon left off beautifying his house at Ealing, and agreed with Maddox that after Paris in November they should go on to Italy together, and that he would winter there for his health.
But by November there came more rumours, rumours of the breaking off of the engagement; rumours of some mysterious illness of Lucia's as the cause. They reached Rickman in the week before the date fixed for the production ofThe Triumph of Lifein Paris. He was paying a farewell call on Miss Roots, who became inscrutable at the mention of Lucia's name. He accused her with violence of keeping the truth from him, and implored her with pathos to tell it him at once. But Miss Roots had no truth, no certain truth to tell; there were only rumours. Miss Roots knew nothing but that Lucia had been lying on her back for months; she conjectured that possibly there might be something the matter with her spine. Her mother had been delicate, and Sir Frederick, well, the less said about Sir Frederick the better. Rickman retreated, followed by Miss Roots. As for an engagement, she was not aware that there ever had been one; there was once, she admitted half-way downstairs, an understanding, probably misunderstood. He had better ask Horace Jewdwine straight out. "But," she assured him from the doorstep, "it would take an earthquake to get the truth out ofhim."
He flung himself into a hansom, and was one with the driver in imprecation at the never-ending, ever-increasing gradient of the hill. The delay, however, enabled him to find Jewdwine at home and alone. He was aware that the interview presented difficulties, but none deterred him.
Jewdwine, questioned as to his engagement, betrayed no surprise; for with Rickman the unusual was to be expected. He might not have condescended to answer Rickman, his obscure disciple, but he felt that some concession must be made to the illustrious dramatist.
There had been, he admitted, an understanding between him and Miss Harden. It hardly amounted to an engagement; and it had been cancelled on the score of health.
"Ofherhealth?"
The compression of Jewdwine's lips intimated that the great poet had sinned (not for the first time) against convention.
"Sheisill, then?"
"I said on the score of health. We're first cousins, and it is not always considered advisable—"
"I see. Then that's all over."
"At any rate I'm not going to take any risks."
Rickman pondered that saying for a while. "Do you mean you're not going to let her take any risks?"
Jewdwine said nothing, but endeavoured to express by his manner a certain distaste for the conversation.
("Or does he mean," thought Rickman, "that he won't risk having a delicate wife on his hands?")
"It's not as if I didn't know," he persisted, "I know she—she lies on her back and can't move. Is it her spine?"
"No."
"Or her heart?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Is it something worse?"
Jewdwine was silent.
And in the silence Rickman's mind wandered free among all imaginable horrors and forebodings. At last, out of the silence, there appeared to him one more terrible than the rest. He saw what Jewdwine must have meant. He gathered it, not from anything he had said, but from what he refused to say, from the sternness of his face, from his hesitations, his reserves. Jewdwine had created the horror for him as vividly as if he had shaped it into words.
"You needn't tell me what it is. Do you mind telling me whether it's curable or not?"
"MydearRickman, if I knew why you are asking all these questions—"
"They must seem extraordinary. And my reason for asking them is more extraordinary still."
They measured each other with their eyes. "Then, I think," said Jewdwine quietly, "I must ask you for your reason."
"The reason is that if you're not going to marry her I am."
"That," said Jewdwine, "is by no means certain. There is not a single member of her family living except my sister and myself. Therefore I consider myself responsible. If I were her father or her brother I would not give my consent to her marrying, and I don't give it now."
"Oh. And why not?"
"For many reasons. Those that applied in my own case are sufficient."
"You only said there was a risk, and that you weren't going to take it. Now I mean to take it. You see, those fools of doctors may be mistaken. But whether they're mistaken or not, I shall marry her just the same."
"The risk, you see, involves her happiness; and judging by what I know of your temperament—"
"What do you know about my temperament?"
"You know perfectly well what I know about it."
"I know. You don't approve of my morals. I don't altogether blame you, considering that since I knew Miss Harden I very nearly married someone else. My code is so different from yours that I should have considered marrying that woman a lapse from virtue. So the intention may count against me, if you like."
"Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean. Neither of us is fit to marry Miss Harden—andIhave given her up." He said it with the sublime assurance of Jewdwine, the moral man.
"Does it—does her illness—make all that difference? It makes none to me."
"Oh, well—all right—if you think you can make her happy."
"My dear Jewdwine, I don't think, I know." He smiled that smile that Jewdwine had seen once or twice before. "It may be arrogant to suppose that I'll succeed where better men might fail; still—" He rose and drew himself up to all his slender height—"in some impossible things I have succeeded."
"They are not the same things."
"No; but in both, you see, it all depends upon the man." With that he left him.
As Rickman's back turned on him, Jewdwine perceived his own final error. As once before in judging the genius he had reckoned without the man, so now, in judging the man he had reckoned without his genius.
This horrid truth came home to him in his solitude. In the interminable watches of the night Jewdwine acknowledged himself a failure; and a failure for which there was no possible excuse. He had had every conceivable advantage that a man could have. He had been born free; free from all social disabilities; free from pecuniary embarrassment; free from the passions that beset ordinary men. And he had sold himself into slavery. He had opinions; he was packed full of opinions, valuable opinions; but he had never had the courage of them. He had always been a slave to other people's opinions. Rickman had been born in slavery, and he had freed himself. When Rickman stood before him, superb in his self-mastery, he had felt himself conquered by this man, whom, as a man, he had despised. Rickman's errors had been the errors of one who risks everything, who never deliberates or counts the cost. And in their repeated rivalries he had won because he had risked everything, when he, Jewdwine, had lost because he would risk nothing.
He had lost ever since the beginning. He had meant to discover this great genius; to befriend him; to protect him with his praise; eventually to climb on his shoulders into fame. And he had not discovered him; and as for climbing on his shoulders, he had been shaken off with one shrug of them. There had been risk in passing judgement on young Rickman, and he had not taken the risk. Therefore he had failed as a critic. He had waited to found an incorruptible review. It had been a risky proceeding, and he had not taken the risk. His paper was a venal paper, sold like himself to the public he despised. Of all that had ever appeared in it, nothing would live, nothing but a few immortal trifles, signed S.K.R. He had failed pretty extensively as an editor. Last of all he had wanted to marry his cousin Lucia; but there was risk in marrying her, and he would not take the risk, and Rickman would marry her. He had failed most miserably as a man.
With that Jewdwine turned on his pillow, and consoled himself by thinking of Miss Fulcher and her love.
Lucia had been lying still all the afternoon on her couch in the drawing-room; so still that Kitty thought she had been sleeping. But Kitty was mistaken.
"Kitty, it's past five, isn't it?"
"Yes, dear; a quarter past."
"It'll be all over by this time to-morrow. Do you think he'll be very terrible?"
"No, dear. I think he'll be very kind and very gentle."
"Not if he thinks I'm shamming."
"He won't think that." ("I wish he could," said Kitty to herself.)
They were waiting for the visit of Sir Wilfrid Spence. The Harmouth doctor had desired a higher light on the mysterious illness that kept Lucia lying for ever on her back. It might have been explained, he said, if she had suffered lately some deep mental or moral shock; but Lucia had not confessed to either, and in the absence of any mental cause it would be as well, said the Harmouth doctor, to look for a physical one. The fear at the back of the Harmouth doctor's mind was sufficiently revealed by his choice of the specialist, Sir Wilfrid Spence.
"Doyou think I'm shamming, Kitty? Sometimes I think I am, and sometimes I'm not quite sure. You know, if you think about your spine long enough you can imagine that it's very queer. But I haven't been thinking about my spine. It doesn't interest me. Dr. Robson would have told me if he thought I was shamming, because I asked him to. There's one thing makes me think it isn't fancy. I keep on wanting to do things. I want—you don't know how I want to go to the top of Harcombe Hill. And my ridiculous legs won't let me. And all the while, Kitty, I want to play. It's such a long time since I made my pretty music."
A long time indeed, as Kitty was thinking sadly. Lucia had not made her pretty music since that night six months ago when she had played to please Keith Rickman.
"Things keep on singing in my head, and I want to play them. It stands to reason that I would if I could. But Ican't. Oh, how I do talk about myself! Kitty, there must be a fine, a heavy fine, of sixpence, every time I talk about myself."
"I shouldn't make much by it," said Kitty.
Lucia closed her eyes, and Kitty went on with the manuscript she was copying. After a silence of twenty minutes Lucia opened her eyes again. They rested longingly on Kitty at her work.
"Kitty," she said, "Do you know, I sometimes think it would be better to sell those books. I can't bear to do it when he gave them to me. But I do believe I ought to. The worst of it is I should have to ask him to do it for me."
"Don't do anything in a hurry, dear. Wait and see," said Kitty cheerfully.
It seemed to Lucia that there was nothing to wait for now. She wondered why Kitty said that, and whether it meant that they thought her worse than they liked to say and whether that was why Sir Wilfrid Spence was coming?
"Kitty," she said again, "I want you to promise me something. Supposing—it's very unlikely—but supposing after all I were to go and die—"
"I won't suppose anything of the sort. People don't go and die of nervous exhaustion. You'll probably do it fifty years hence, but that is just the reason why I won't have you harrowing my feelings this way now."
"I know I've had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that it's horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too. I only meant if I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else—you wouldn't tell him, would you?"
"Well, dear, of course I won't mention it if you wish me not to—but he'd be sure to see it in the papers."
"Kitty—you know what I mean. He couldn't seethatin the papers. He couldn't see it anywhere unless you told him. And if you did, it might make him very uncomfortable, you know."
Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid Spence, was tortured by this conversation. She had half a mind to say, "You don't seem to think how uncomfortable you're makingme." But she forbore. Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve. She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in Dresden. It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, "a pretty illness," and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or word.
"I shouldn't mind anything, if only I'd been with him whenhewas ill. But perhaps he'd rather I hadn't been there. I think it's that, you know, that I really cannot bear."
Kitty would have turned to comfort her, but for the timely entrance of Robert. He brought a letter for Lucia which Kitty welcomed as an agreeable distraction. It was from Horace Jewdwine. "Any news?" she asked presently.
"Yes. Whatdoyou think? He's going to Paris to-morrow. Then he's going on to Italy—to Alassio, with Mr. Maddox."
"Horace Jewdwine and Mr. Maddox? What next?"
"It isn't Horace that's going." She gave the letter to Kitty because she had shrunk lately from speaking of Keith Rickman by his name.
"That's a very different tale," said Kitty
"I'm so glad he's going. That was what he always wanted to do. Do you remember how I asked him to be my private secretary? Now I'm his private secretary; which is as it should be."
"You meanIam."
"Yes. Do you think you could hurry up so that he'll get them before he goes? Poor Kitty—I can't bear your having all these things to do for me."
"Why not? You'd do them for me, if it was I, not you."
"I wish it were you. I mean I wish I were doing things for you. But you haven't done them all, Kitty. I did some. I forget how many."
"You did three, darling."
"Only three? And there are nine and twenty. Still, he'll see that I began them. Kitty—do you think he'll wonder and guess why I left off?"
"Oh no, he isn't as clever as all that."
"You mustn't tell him. You're writing the letter, dear, now, aren't you? You mustn't say a word about my illness. Only tell him I'm so glad to hear he's going to Alassio with Mr. Maddox."
"I don't think any the better of him for that. Fancy going to Italy with that brute of a man!"
"He wasn't really a brute. He only said those things because he cared for him. You can't blame him for that."
"I don't blame him for that. I blame him for being a most appalling bounder."
"Do you mind not talking about him any more?"
"No dear, I don't a bit."
Lucia lay very quiet for some time before she spoke again. "They can't say now I sacrificed his genius to my pride. Youwillcatch the post, won't you? What a plague I am, but if they're posted before seven he'll get them in the morning and he'll have time to write. Perhaps he won't be starting till the afternoon."
In the morning she again betrayed her mind's preoccupation. "He must have got them by now. Kitty, did you hear how the wind blew in the night? He'll have an awful crossing."
"Well then, let's hope he won't be very ill; but he isn't going by the Bay of Biscay, dear."
The wind blew furiously all morning, and when it dropped a little towards evening it was followed by a pelting rain.
"He's at Dover now."
"In a mackintosh," said Kitty by way of consolation. But Lucia, uncomforted, lay still, listening to the rain. It danced like a thousand devils on the gravel of the courtyard. Suddenly she sat up, raising herself by her hands.
"Kitty!" she cried. "He's coming. He is really. By the terrace. Can't you hear?"
Kitty heard nothing but the rain dancing on the courtyard. And the terrace led into it by the other wing. It was impossible that Lucia could have heard footsteps there.
"But Iknow, Kitty, I know. It's his walk. And he always came that way."
She slipped her feet swiftly on to the floor, and to Kitty's amazement sat up unsupported. Kitty in terror ran to her and put her arm round her, but Lucia freed herself gently from her grasp. She was trembling in all her body. Kitty herself heard footsteps in the courtyard now. They stopped suddenly and the door-bell rang.
"Do go to him, Kitty—and tell him. And send him here to me."
Kitty went, and found Keith Rickman standing in the hall. Her instinct told her that Lucia must be obeyed. And as she sent him in to her, she saw through the open door that Lucia rose to her feet, and came to him and never swayed till his arms held her.
She clung to him and he drew her closer and lifted her and carried her to her couch, murmuring things inarticulate yet so plain that even she could not misunderstand.
"I thought you were going to Paris?" she said.
"I'm not. I'm here."
She sat up and laid her hands about him, feeling his shoulders and his sleeves.
"How wet your coat is."
He kissed her and she held her face against his that was cold with the wind and rain; she took his hands and tried to warm them in her own, piteously forgetful of herself, as if it were he, not she, who needed tenderness.
"Lucy—are you very ill, darling?"
"No. I am very, very well."
He thought it was one of those things that people say when they mean that death is well. He gathered her to him as if he could hold her back from death. She looked smiling into his face.
"Keith," she said, "youdidn'thave a mackintosh. You must go away at once to Robert and get dry."
"Not now, Lucy. Let me stay."
"How long can you stay?"
"As long as ever you'll let me."
"Till you go to Italy?"
"Very well. Till I go to Italy."
"When are you going?"
"Not till you're well enough to go with me."
"How did you know I was ill?"
"Because I saw that Kitty had had to finish what your dear little hands had begun."
"Ah—you should have had them sooner—"
"Why should I have had them at all? Do you think I would have published them before I knew I had dedicated them to my wife?"
"Keith—dear—you mustn't talk about that yet."
She hid her face on his shoulder; he lifted it and looked at it as if it could have told him what he had to know. It told him nothing; it had not changed enough for that. It was like a beautiful picture blurred, and the sweeter for the blurring.
He laid his hand over her heart. At his touch it leapt and throbbed violently, suggesting a new terror.
"Darling, how fast your heart beats. Am I doing it harm?"
"No, it doesn't mind."
"But am I tiring it?"
"No, no, you're resting it."
She lay still a long time without speaking, till at last he carried her upstairs and delivered her into Kitty's care. At the open door of her room he saw a nurse in uniform standing ready to receive her. Her presence there was ominous of the unutterable things he feared.
"Kitty," said Lucia, when they were alone. "It looks as if I had been shamming after all. What do you think of me?"
"I think perhaps Sir Wilfrid Spence needn't come down to-morrow."
"Perhaps not. And yet it would be better to know. If there really is anything wrong I couldn't let him marry me. It would be awful. I want to be sure, Kitty, for his sake."
Kitty felt sure enough; and her certainty grew when Lucia came down the next morning. But she was unable to impart her certainty to Keith. The most he could do was to hide his anxiety from Lucia. It wanted but a day to the coming of the great specialist; and for that day they made such a brave show of happiness that they deceived both Kitty and themselves. Kitty, firm in her conviction, left them to themselves that afternoon while she went into Harmouth to announce to Lucia's doctor the miracle of her recovery.
When she had left the house a great peace fell on them. They had so much to say to each other, and so little time to say it in, when to-morrow might cut short their happiness. But Lucia was sorry for Kitty.
"Poor Kitty," said she, "she's going to marry her cousin Charlie Palliser. But that won't be the same."
"The same as what?"
"The same as my marrying you. Oh, Keith, that's one of the things I said we weren't to say. Do you know, once Kitty was angry with me. She said I was playing with fire—the divine fire. Ought I to have been afraid of it? Just a little bit in awe?"
"What? Of the divine fire? I gave it you, dearest, to play with—or to warm your little hands by."
"And now you've given it me to keep, to put my hands round it—so—and take care of it and see that it never goes out. I can do that, can't I, whatever happens?"
There was always that refrain: Whatever happens.
"I keep forgetting it doesn't really belong to me; it belongs to everybody, to the whole world. I believe I'm jealous."
"Of the British public? It doesn't really love me, Lucy, nor I it."
"Whether it does or not, youdoremember that I loved you first—before anybody ever knew?"
"I do indeed."
"Itisa shame to be so glad because Kitty is away."
Yet she continued to rejoice in the happiness that came of their solitude. It was Keith, not Kitty, who arranged her cushions for her and covered her feet; Keith, not Kitty, who poured out tea for her, and brought it her, and sat beside her afterwards, leaning over her and stroking her soft hair, as Kitty loved to do.
"Lucy," he said suddenly, "can you stand living with me in a horrid little house in a suburb?"
"I should love it. Dear little house."
"Maddox is in it now; but we'll turn him out. You don't know Maddox?"
She shuddered, and he drew the rug in closer about her.
"It's such a tiny house, Lucy; it would all go into this room."
"This room," said Lucy, "is much too large."
"There's only room for you and me in it."
"All the better, so long as there's room for me."
"And the walls are all lath and plaster. When Maddox is in another room I can hear him breathing."
"And when I'm in another room I shall hear you breathing; and then I shall know you're alive when I'm afraid you're not. I'm glad the walls are all lath and plaster."
"But it isn't a pretty house, Lucy."
"It will be a pretty house when I'm in it," said she, and was admitted to have had the best of the argument.
"Then, if you really don't mind, we shan't have to wait. Not a week, if you're ready to come to me."
But Lucia's face was sad. "Keith—darling—don't make plans till we know what Sir Wilfrid Spence says."
"I shall, whatever he says. But I suppose I must consult him before I take you to Alassio."
For still at his heart, under all its happiness, there lay that annihilating doubt; the doubt and the fear that had been sown there by Horace Jewdwine. He could see for himself that one of his terrors was baseless; but there remained that other more terrible possibility. None of them had dared to put it into words; but it was implied, reiterated, in the name of Sir Wilfrid Spence. He had moreover a feeling that this happiness of his was too perfect, that it must be taken away from him.
He confided his trouble to Kitty that night, sitting up over the drawing-room fire. Lucia's doctor had come and gone.
"What did he say, Kitty?"
"He says there's no need for Sir Wilfrid Spence to see her at all. He is going to wire to him not to come."
He gave a sigh of relief. Then his eyes clouded.
"No. He must come. I'd rather he came."
"But why? He isn't a nerve specialist."
He shuddered. "I know. That's why I must have him. I can't trust these local men."
"It will be horribly expensive, Keith. And it's throwing money away. Dr. Robson said so."
"That's my affair."
"Oh well, as for that, it was all arranged for."
"Nobody has any right to arrange for it but me."
"Much better arrange for a good time at Alassio."
"No. I want to be absolutely certain. You tell me she's perfectly well, and that doctor of yours swears she is, and I think it; and yet I can't believe it. I daren't."
"That's because you're not feeling very well yourself."
"I know that in some ways she is getting stronger every minute; but you see, I can't help thinking what that other man said."
"What other man?"
"Well, the Jewdwines' doctor."
"What didhesay?"
"Nothing. It was Jewdwine. He told me—well—that was why their engagement was broken off. Because she wasn't strong enough to marry."
Kitty's eyes blazed. "He told youthat?"
"Not exactly. He couldn't, you know. I only thought their doctor must have told him—something terrible."
"I don't suppose he told him anything of the sort."
"Oh well, you know, he didn't say so. But he let me think it."
"Yes. I know exactly how it was done. He wouldn't say anything he oughtn't to. But he'd let you think it. It was just his awful selfishness. He thought there was an off chance of poor Lucy being a sort of nervous invalid, and he wouldn't risk the bother of it. But as for their engagement, there never was any. That was another of the things he let you think. I suppose he cared for Lucy as much as he could care for anybody; but the fact is he wants to marry another woman, and he couldn't bear to see her married to another man."
"Oh, I say, you know—"
"It sounds incredible. But you don't know how utterly I distrust that man. He's false through and through. There's nothing sound in him except his intellect. I wish you'd never known him. He's been the cause of all your—your suffering, and Lucy's too. You might have been married long ago if it hadn't been for him."
"No, Kitty. I don't think that."
"You might, really. If he hadn't been in the way she would have known that she cared for you and let you know it, too. But nothing that he ever did or didn't do comes up to this."
"The truth is, Kitty, he thinks I'm rather a bad lot, you know."
"My dear Keith, he thinks that ifhedoesn't marry Lucy he'd rather you didn't. He certainly hit on the most effectual means of preventing it."
"Oh, did he! He doesn't know me. I shall marry her whatever Sir Wilfrid Spence says. If she's ill, all the more reason why I should look after her. I'm only afraid lest—lest—"
She knew what he thought and could not say—lest it should not be for very long.
"There are some things," he said quietly, "thatcan'tbe taken away from me."
Kitty was silent; for she knew what things they were.
"You can trust her to me, Kitty?"
"I can indeed."
And so on Sunday the great man came down.
It was over in half an hour. That half-hour Keith spent in pacing up and down the library, the place of so many dear and tender and triumphant memories. They sharpened his vision of Lucy doomed, of her sweet body delivered over to the torture.
He did not hear Kitty come in till she laid her hand upon his arm. He turned as if at the touch of destiny.
"Don't Keith, for Goodness' sake. It's all right. Only—he wants to see you."
Sir Wilfrid Spence stood in the morning-room alone. He looked very grave and grim. He had a manner, a celebrated manner that had accomplished miracles by its tremendous moral effect. It had helped to set him on his eminence and he was not going to sacrifice it now. He fixed his gaze on the poet as he entered and held him under it for the space of half a minute without speaking. He seemed, this master of the secrets of the body, to be invading despotically the province of the soul. It struck Rickman that the great specialist was passing judgement on him, to see whether in all things he were worthy of his destiny. The gaze thus prolonged became more than he could bear.
"Do you mind telling me at once what's wrong with her?"
"There isn't anything wrong with her. What fool ever told you that there was? She has been made ill with grief."
Lucia herself came to him there and led him back into the library. They sat together in the window-seat, held silent for a little while by the passing of that shadow of their fear.
"Keith," she said at last. "Is it true that you loved me when you were with me, here, ever so long ago?"
He answered her.
"And when you came to me and I was horrid to you, and when I sent you away? And when I never wrote to you, and Horace made you think I'd forgotten you? Did you love me then?"
"Yes, more than I did before, Lucy."
"But—Keith—you didn't love me when you were loving somebody else?"
"I did, more than ever then. That happened because I loved you."
"I can understand all the rest; but I can't understand that."
"I think I'd rather you didn't understand it, darling."
She sighed, puzzled over it and gave it up. "But you didn't love me when you—when I—when you wouldn't have me?"
He answered her; but not with words.
"And now," said she, "you're going to Paris to-morrow."
"Perhaps."
"You must. Perhaps they'll be calling for you."
"And perhaps I shan't be there. Do you know, Lucy, you've got violets growing among the roots of your hair?"
"I know you're going to Paris, to-morrow, to please me."
"Perhaps. And after that we're going to Alassio, and after that to Florence and Rome; all the places where your private secretary—"
"And when," said she, "is my private secretary going to take me home?"
"If his play succeeds, dear, he won't have to take you to that horrid house of his."
"Won't he? But I like it best of all."
"Why, Lucy?"
"Oh, for such a foolish reason. Because he's been in it."
"I'm afraid, darling, some of the houses he's been in—"
At that she fell to a sudden breathless sobbing, as if the life that had come back to her had spent itself again.
In his happiness he had forgotten Howland Street; or if he thought of it at all he thought of it as an enchanted spot, the stage that had brought him nearest to the place of his delight.
"Lucy, Lucy, how did you know? I never meant you to."
"Some one told me. And I—I went to see it."
"Good God!"
"I saw your room, the room they carried you out of. If I'd only known! My darling, why didn't you come to me then? Why didn't you? I had plenty. Why didn't you send for me?"
"How could I?"
"You could, you could—"
"But sweetest, I didn't even know where you were."
"Wherever I was I would have come to you. I would have taken you away."
"It was worth it, Lucy. If it hadn't been for that, I shouldn't be here now. Looking back it seems positively glorious. And whatever it was I'd go through years of it, for one hour with you here. One of those hours even when you didn't love me."
"I've always loved you, all my life long. Only I didn't know it was you. Do you remember my telling you that your dream was divorced from reality? It wasn't true. That was what was wrong with me."
"I'm afraid I wasn't always very faithful to my dream."
"Because your dream wasn't always faithful to you. And yet itwasfaithful."
"Lucy, do you remember the things I told you? Can you forgive me for being what I was?"
"It was before I knew you."
"Yes, but after? That was worse; it was the worst thing I ever did, because Ihadknown you."
She wondered why he asked forgiveness of her now, of all moments; and as she wondered the light dawned on her.
"I forgive you everything. It was my fault. I should have been there, and I wasn't."
Then he knew that after all she had understood. Her love was in her eyes, in their light and in their darkness. They gathered many flames of love into that tender tragic gaze, all pitying, half maternal. Those eyes had never held for him the sad secrets of mortality. Love in them looked upon things invisible, incorruptible; divining, even as it revealed, the ultimate mystery. He saw that in her womanhood Nature was made holy, penetrated by the spirit and the fire of God. He knelt down and laid his face against her shoulder, and her arm, caressing, held him there, as if it were she who sheltered and protected.
"Keith," she whispered, "did you mean to marry me before you came this time, or after?"
"Before, oh before."
"You thought—that terrible thing had happened to me; you thought you would always have me dragging on you? And yet you came? It made no difference. You came."
"I came because I wanted to take care of you, Lucy. I wanted nothing else. That was all."
Lucia's understanding was complete.
"I knew you were like that," said she; "I always knew it."
She bent towards his hidden face and raised it to her own.