At seven he again refused Miss Harden's hospitality and withdrew to his hotel. He was to return before nine to let her know his decision, and as yet he had done nothing towards thinking it out.
A letter had come for him by the evening post. It had been forwarded from his rooms and ran thus.
"My dear Rickets:"I haven't forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne. It's going to be awfully select."Ever your own and nobody else's,"Poppy Grace."P.S.—How is your poor head?"
"My dear Rickets:
"I haven't forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne. It's going to be awfully select.
"Ever your own and nobody else's,
"Poppy Grace.
"P.S.—How is your poor head?"
There are many ways of being kind and that was Poppy's way. She wanted to tell him not to be cut up about Wednesday night; that, whatever Dicky Pilkington thought of his pretensions, she still reckoned him in the number of the awfully select. And lest he should have deeper grounds for uneasiness her postscript hinted in the most delicate manner possible that she had not taken him seriously, attributing his utterances to their true cause. And yet she was his own and nobody else's. She was a good sort, Poppy, taking her all round.
He tried to think about Poppy and found it difficult. His mind wandered; not into the realms of fancy, but into paths strange and humiliating for a scholar and a poet. He caught himself murmuring, "Harmouth—Harcombe—Homer—Harden." He had got them all right. He never dreamed of—of dropping them when he wasn't excited. It was only in the beaten tracks where his father had gone before him that he was apt to slide. He was triumphant over Harmouth where he might have tripped over Hammersmith. Homer and Hesiod were as safe with him as with Horace Jewdwine. (He couldn't think how he had managed to come to grief over Homer just now. It was nerves, or luck, or pure accident, the sort of thing that might have happened to anybody.) Thank Heaven, his tongue was almost virgin to the aitch in Harden.
Harden—Lucia Harden. He knew her name and how to pronounce it; for he had seen it written in the fly-leaf of a book, and heard it spoken by the footman who called her Miss Loocher. This he took to be a corruption of the Italian form.
Here he again tried to evoke a vivid image of Poppy; but without success. And then he remembered that he had still to think it out.
First of all, then, he would eliminate sentiment. Sentiment apart, he was by no means sure that he would do well to act on the impulse of the morning and decamp. After all, whatwashe sure of? Was he sure that Sir Frederick Harden's affairs, including his library, were involved beyond redemption? Put it that there was an off-chance of Sir Frederick's financial recovery.
From the bare, uninteresting, financial point of view that event would entail some regrettable consequences for himself. He had been extremely rash. He had undertaken to accomplish three weeks' expert work to the value of fifty pounds for which he had charged fifteen, an estimate that at Rickman's would have been considered ridiculous for a man's bare time. He had not so much as mentioned his fare; he had refused board and lodging; and on the most sanguine computation his fees would only cover his expenses by about five pounds. The difference between fifteen pounds and fifty would have to be refunded out of his own private pocket. When it came to settling accounts with Rickman's his position would be, to say the least of it, embarrassing. It was difficult to unravel the mental process that had led him into it; but it was not the first time that these luxurious subtleties of conscience had caused him to run short of ready money. It was only another of those innumerable occasions when he and his father failed to see face to face, and when he had had to pay for the pleasure of supporting a fantastic personal view. Only the view in this case was so hideously complicated and—and exaggerated. And this time in order to clear himself he would be compelled to borrow again from Dicky Pilkington. There was no other way. No sooner did Sir Frederick's head appear rising above water than he saw his own hopelessly submerged.
Nevertheless it was this prospect that he found himself contemplating with all the ardour of desire. It justified not only his presence in the Harden Library, but Miss Harden's presence as his collaborator. With all its unpleasantness it was infinitely preferable to the other alternative. He let his mind dwell on it until the off-chance began to look like an absolute certainty.
Put it then that Sir Frederick recovered. In this case the Hardens scored. Since he had charged Miss Harden fifteen where he was entitled to fifty, the best part of his labour might be considered a free gift to the lady. What was more, in the matter of commission, he stood to lose a very considerable sum. Put it that the chances were even, and the whole business resolved itself into a game of pitch and toss. Heads, Miss Harden lost; tails, she won; and he wasn't responsible for the tossing.
But put it that Sir Frederick did not recover. Then he, Keith Rickman, was in a position most unpleasant for himself; but he could not make things a bit pleasanter for Miss Harden by wriggling out of it. The library would be sold whether he stayed there or not; and by staying he might possibly protect her interests in the sale. It wasn't a nice thing to have to be keeping his eye all the time on the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and theAurea Legendaof Wynkyn de Worde; but he would only be doing what must be done by somebody in any case. Conclusion; however unpleasant for him to be the agent for the sale, it would be safer for Miss Harden.
And how about those confounded profits, represented by his commission? That was easily settled. He would have nothing to do with the filthy things. He wouldn't touch his commission with the end of the poker. Unfortunately he would never be able to explain all this to her, and Heaven only knew what she would think of him when it all came out in the long-run, as it was bound to come. Well, it wouldn't matter what she thought of him so long as he knew that his hands were clean. Rickman's' hands might not be so presentable, but they were not human hands as his were; they were the iron, irresponsible hands of a machine.
There remained his arrangements for the Bank holiday. They seemed to have been made so long ago that they hardly counted. Still, there was that engagement to Poppy Grace, and he had promised to take poor Flossie to the Hippodrome. Poor Flossie would be disappointed if he did not take her to the Hippodrome. At the moment Flossie's disappointment presented itself as considerably more vital than his own.
To-morrow, then, being Saturday, he would go up to town; and on Monday he would return to his ambiguous post.
He had thought it out.
"There's a lot of rot," said Mr. Rickman, "talked about Greek tragedy. But really, if you come to think of it, it's only in Sophocles you get the tragedy of Fate. There isn't any such thing in Æschylus, you know."
He had gone up to acquaint Miss Harden with his decision and had been led off into this hopeful track by the seductions that still lurked in the Euripides.
"There's Nemesis, which is the same thing," said she.
"Not at all the same thing. Nemesis is simply the horrid jealousy of the gods; and the responsibility lies with the person who provokes them, whether it's Prometheus, or Agamemnon, or Agamemnon's great great grandfather. It's the tragedy of human responsibility, the most brutal tragedy of all. All these people are crumpled up with it, they go about tearing their hair over it, and howling out δρασαντι παθειν. There isn't any Fate in that, you know. Is there?"
He did not wait for an answer.
"In Sophocles now, it's all the other way about. His people aren't responsible in the least. They're just a thundering lot of lunatics. They go knocking their poor heads against the divine law, and trying to see which is the hardest, till they end by breaking both. There's no question of paying for the damage. It's pure Fate."
"Well—and Euripides?"
"Oh, Euripides goes on another tack altogether. There aren't any laws to break, yet everybody's miserable all round, and nobody's responsible. It's τω παθοντι παθεινn. They suffer because they suffer, and there's an end of it. And it's the end of Fate in Greek tragedy. I know this isn't the orthodox view of it."
He paused, a little out of breath, for he had talked as usual against time, leaving behind him a luminous trail of ideas struck out furiously as he rushed along. His excitement was of the strong-winged kind that carried him triumphantly over all obstacles, even the barrier of the aitch.
Was she listening?
She was; but as she listened she looked down, and her fingers played with the slender gold chain that went twice round her throat and fell among the laces of her gown. On her mouth there was the same smile he had seen when he first saw her; he took it for a smile of innermost amusement. It didn't lurk; there was nothing underhand about it. It hovered, delicately poised for flight.
"Euripides," she said, "had the deeper insight, then. He knew that character is destiny."
"That character is destiny? Whose character? For all I know your character may be my destiny."
It was one of those unconsidered speeches, flashed out in the heat of argument, which nevertheless, once uttered are felt to be terrific and momentous. He wondered how Miss Harden would take it. She took it (as she seemed to take most things) calmly.
"No character could have any power over you except through your own."
"Perhaps not. All the same, you are not me, you are something outside. You would be my destiny."
He paused again. Personalities were pitfalls which he must avoid. No such danger existed for the lady; she simply ignored it; her mind never touched those deeper issues of the discussion where his floundered, perilously immersed. Still she was not unwilling to pursue the theme.
"It all depends," said she, "on what you mean by destiny."
"Well, say I mean the end, the end I'm moving towards, the end I ultimately arrive at—"
"Surely that depends on your character, your character, of course, as a whole."
"It may or mayn't. It may depend on what I eat or don't eat for dinner, on the paper I take in or the pattern of my waistcoat. And the end may be utterly repellent to my character as a whole. Say I end by adopting an unsuitable profession. Is that my character or my destiny?"
"Your character, I think, or you wouldn't have adopted it."
"H'm. Supposing it adopts me?"
"It couldn't—against your will."
"No. But my will in this instance might not be the expression of my character as a whole. Why, I may be doing violence to my character as a whole by—by the unique absurdity that dishes me. That's destiny, if you like, but it's not character—not my character, anyhow."
Personalities again. Whither could he flee from their presence? Even the frigid realm of abstractions was shaken by the beating of his own passionate heart. Her eyes had the allurements of the confessional; he hovered, fascinated, round the holy precincts, for ever on the brink of revelation. It was ungovernable, this tendency to talk about himself. In another minute—But no, most decidedly that was not what he was there for.
If it came to that, whatwashe there for? It was so incredible that he should be there at all. And yet there he was going to stay, for three weeks, and more. He had come to tell her so.
Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone conclusion.
"It is settled, then?" said she, "you will have no more scruples?"
"None."
"There's only one thing. I must ask you not to give anybody any information about the library. We don't want to be bothered with dealers and collectors. Some of the books are so valuable that we should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known. Can you keep the secret?"
His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and theAurea Legendaof Wynkyn de Worde. But he pledged himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy. Why not? He was a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other dealers in the dark. It was an entirely sensible and business-like pledge. And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable. He had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman's. If it were Miss Harden's interest that he should defend that secret from his own father, he would have to defend it. He had given his word; and for the life of him he could not tell why.
In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and unforeseen. He had said to her, "Your character may be my destiny." And perhaps it was. He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from outside himself, rather than from within. And yet, as he sat there feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogueraisonné, he decided further that he would not go away at all.
He would not go back to town to-morrow. He could not afford the time. He must and would finish that catalogueraisonnéby the twenty-seventh. He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden. Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more. For he and she could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic assumption that the library was hers. Such a pledge would, he imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden met face to face. And on him it was conceivably more binding than the promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or to intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss Poppy Grace. Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more trivial and the grosser claim. His word to Miss Harden was one of those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of the actual. To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the great three days.
He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town by the river path at the bottom of the garden. Half-way to the river he stopped and looked back. The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope of glimmering lawn. The house loomed in the background, a grey mass with blurred outlines. From a window open in the east wing he could hear the sound of a piano.
He stood still and listened. All around was the tender, indescribable Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night, dividing the darkness. It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult, rhythmic and controlled. What was she playing? If he stayed till midnight he must hear it through. Night sheltered him, and he drew nearer lest he should lose a note. He stretched himself on the lawn, and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata Appassionata.
It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not tell him why he was there and what he was there for.
And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.
It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn. He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life that he knew not and that knew not him.
"Lucia—Lucia!" Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition standing in the south window. "Lu-chee-a!—" it pleaded. "You can't say you're out when I can see perfectly well that you're in."
"Go away Kitty, I'm busy."
"You've no business to be busy at five o'clock in the afternoon."
Miss Kitty Palliser's body was outside the window, but her head, crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was already within the room.
"I'm dying of thirst," she said; "take me in and be kind to me and give me tea."
Lucia rose and went to the window, reluctant but resigned. Scraps of their conversation floated down to Mr. Rickman's end of the room.
"Yes, you may well look at my hat."
"I wasn't looking at it, I was looking through it."
"Well, if you can see through my hat, Lucia, you can see through me. What do you think of it?"
"Of the hat? Oh, the hat is a poem."
"Isn't it? Did you ever see anything so inspired, so impassioned?"
"Inspired, but—don't you think—just a little, a little meaningless?"
"Meaningless? It'spackedwith meaning."
"I should like to know what it means."
"If it means nothing else it means that I've been going to and fro the whole blessed afternoon, paying calls in Harmouth for my sins."
"Poor Kitty."
"The last three times I paid calls in Harmouth," said poor Kitty, "I sported a cycling skirt, the blousiest of blouses, and a tam-o'shanter over my left ear. Of course everybody was in. So I thought if I went like this—brand new frock—swagger hat—white gloves—that everybody would be out."
"And were they?"
"No. Just like my luck—they were all—all in!"
"And yet you have the audacity to come here and ask for tea?"
"For Goodness' sake, don't talk of tea."
"I thought you were so thirsty."
"So I am. I thirst for amusement."
"Kitty! You've been amusing yourself all afternoon—at other people's expense."
"Yes. It's cheap—awfully cheap, but fatiguing. I don't want to amuse myself; I want to be amused."
Mr. Rickman took a longer look at the brilliant apparition.
Now, at a little distance, Miss Palliser passed as merely an ordinary specimen of a brilliant but conventional type. This effect was an illusion produced by her irreproachably correct attire. As she drew nearer it became apparent that convention could never have had very much to do with her. Tailor and milliner were responsible for the general correctness of Miss Palliser's appearance, Miss Palliser herself for the riot and confusion of the details. Her coat, flung open, displayed a tangle of laces disposed after her own fancy. Her skirts, so flawless and sedate, swept as if inspired by the storm of her long-legged impetuous stride. Under her too, too fashionable hat her brown hair was twisted in a way entirely her own; and fashion had left untouched the wild originality of her face. Bumpy brows, jutting eyebrows, and nose long in the bridge, wide in the nostril, tilted in a gentle gradient; a wide full-lipped nervous mouth, and no chin to speak of. A thin face lit by restless greenish eyes; stag-like, dog-like, humorous and alert.
Miss Palliser sent the gaze of those eyes round the room. The hungry, Satanic humour in them roved, seeking what it might devour. It fell upon Mr. Rickman.
"What have you got there?"
Miss Harden's reply was inaudible.
"Let me in. I want to look at it."
"Don't, Kitty." Apparently an explanation followed from Miss Harden. It also was inaudible.
"Lu-chee-a.! Where is Miss Roots, B.A.?"
"Please,please, Kitty. Do go into the morning-room."
This painful scene was cut short by Robert, who announced that tea was served.
"Oh joy!" said Miss Palliser, and disappeared.
Lucia, following, found her examining the tea-tray.
"Only two cups," said Miss Palliser. "Isn't it going to get any tea then?"
"Isn't what going to get any tea?"
"It. The man thing you keep in there."
"Yes. But it doesn't get it here."
"I think you might ask it in. It might amuse me."
Lucia ignored the suggestion.
"I haven't talked," said Miss Palliser, "to a man thing for ages."
"It hasn't come to be talked to. It's much too busy."
"Mayn't it come in, just for a treat?"
Lucia shook her head.
"What's it like? Is it nice to look at?"
"No—yes—no."
"What? Haven't you made up your mind yet?"
"I haven't thought about it."
"Lucia, you're a perfect dog in the manger. You don't care a rap about the creature yourself, and yet you refuse to share it with your friend. I put it to you. Here we are, you and I, living in a howling wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, where even curates are at a premium—is it right, is it fair of you, to have a presentable man-thing in the house and to keep it to yourself?"
"Well—you see, it—it isn't so very presentable."
"Rubbish, I saw it. It looked perfectly all right."
"That," said Lucia, "is illusion. You haven't heard it speak."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing—nothing. Only it isn't exactly what you'd call a gentleman."
"Oh. Well, I think you might have told me that before."
"I've been trying to tell you."
Kitty reflected a moment. "So it's making a catalogue, is it? Whose bright idea is that?"
"It was grandpapa's. It's mine now." She did not mention that it was also Horace Jewdwine's.
"And what will your little papa say?"
"He won't say anything. He never does. The library's mine—mine to do as I like with."
"You've broken the spell. Isn't there some weird legend about women never inheriting it?"
"Well, they never have. I shall be the first."
"I say, if I were you, I should feel a little creepy."
"I do—sometimes. That's one reason why I want to get this thing made in my lifetime, before I go away."
"Good gracious. You're not going away to die."
"I don't know what I'm going away to do. Anyhow, the catalogue will be done. All ready for Horace when he steps into my shoes."
"Unless—happy thought—you marry him. That, I suppose, isanotherpair of shoes?"
There was a pause, during which Miss Palliser gazed thoughtfully at her friend.
"What have you been doing to yourself? You look most awfully tired."
"I've been sitting up rather late the last few nights, cataloguing."
"What on earth did you do that for?"
"Because I want to finish by the twenty-seventh."
There was a pause while Miss Palliser ate tea-cake.
"Is Horace coming down before you go?"
"No. He's too busy. Besides, he never comes when father isn't here."
"Oh dear no, he doesn't think it proper. It's odd," said Miss Palliser, looking down at her tea-cake with an air of profound philosophic reflection. "You can't ask your cousin to stay with you, because it's improper; but it isn't improper to sit up making catalogues with young Mr. Thing-um-a-jig till all hours of the night."
"Why should it be improper?"
"For Goodness' sake don't ask me. How shouldIknow? Don't you find yourself wishing sometimes that Mr. Thing-um-a-jig was Mr. Jewdwine?"
"More tea, Kitty?"
"Rather! I'm going into the library to choose a book when I've finished my tea. I shall take the opportunity of observing for myself whether Mr.—Mr.—"
"Mr. Savage Keith Rickman."
"Good Lord deliver us! Whether Mr. Savage Keith Rickman is a proper person for you to know. That reminds me. Dearest, do you know what they talk about in Harmouth? They talk aboutyou. Conversation jiggers round you like a silly moth round a candle. Would you like to know what Harmouth thinks of you?"
"No. I haven't the smallest curiosity."
"I shall tell you all the same, because it's good for you to see yourself as others see you. They say, dear, that you do put on such a thundering lot of side. They say that attitude is absurd in one so young. They say you ought to marry, that if you don't marry you can't possibly hope to keep it up, and they say you never will marry if you continue to be so exclusive. Exclusive was the word. But before I left they'd married you to Mr. Jewdwine. You see dear, you're so exclusive that you're bound to marry into your own family, no other family being good enough."
"It's certainly a new light on my character."
"I ought to tell you that Mrs. Crampton takes a charitable view. She says she doesn't believe you really mean it, dear, she thinks that you are only very,veryshy. She has heardsomuch about you, and isdyingto know you. Don't be frightened, Lucia, I was most discreet."
"How did you show your discretion?"
"I told her not to die. I tried to persuade her that she wouldn't love you so much if she did know you."
"Kitty, that wasn't very kind."
"It was the kindest thing I could think of. It must soothe her to feel that this exclusiveness doesn't imply any reflection on her social position, but merely a weird unaccountable dislike. How is it that some people can't understand that your social position is like your digestion or the nose on your face, you're never aware of either, unless there's something wrong with it."
"Kitty, you're not in a nice mood this afternoon."
"I know I'm not. I've been in Harmouth. Lucy, there are moments when I loathe my fellow-creatures."
"Poor things. Whatever have they been doing now?"
"Oh, I don't know. The same old thing. They make my life a burden to me?"
"But how?"
"They're always bothering me, always trying to get at you through me. They're always asking me to tea to meet people in the hope that I'll ask them back to meet you. I'm worn out with keeping them off you. Some day all Harmouth will come bursting into your drawing-room over my prostrate form, flattened out upon the door-mat."
"Never mind."
"I wouldn't, sweetheart, if they really cared about you. But they don't. If you lost your money and your social position to-morrow they wouldn't care a rap. That's why I hate them."
"Why do you visit them if you hate them?"
"Because, as I told you, I hunger and thirst for amusement, and they do amuse me when they don't make me ill."
"Dear Kitty, I'm sure they're nicer than you think. Most people are, you know."
"If you think so, why don'tyouvisit them?" snapped Kitty.
"I would, if—"
"If they ceased to be amusing; if they broke their legs or lost their money, or if they got paralytic strokes, or something. You'd visit them in their affliction, but not in the ordinary playful circumstances of life. That's because you're an angel.I," said Miss Palliser sententiously, "am not. Why do I always come to you when I feel most hopelessly the other thing?"
Lucia said something that had a very soothing effect; it sounded like "Skittles!" but the word was "Kitti-kin!"
"Lucy, I shouldn't be such a bad sort if I lived with you. I've been here exactly twenty minutes, and I've laid in enough goodness to last me for a week. And now," said Miss Palliser with decision, "I'm going."
Lucia looked up in some trepidation.
"Where are you going to?"
"I am going—to choose that book."
"Oh, Kitty, do be careful."
"I am always careful," said Miss Palliser, "in choosing a book."
In about ten minutes' time she returned. Her chastened mood had vanished.
"Lucia," said she, "you have an immense regard for that young man."
"How do you know that I have an immense regard for him?"
"I suppose you expect me to say that I can tell by your manner. I can't. Your manner is perfection. It's by Robert's manner that I judged. Robert's manner is not perfection; for a footman, you know, it's a shade too eager, too emotional."
"That, to my mind, is the charm of Robert."
"Still, there are drawbacks. A footman's face ought not to betray the feelings of his mistress. That's how I knew that Mabel Flosser was cooling off—by the increasing frostiness of Blundell. I shall feel sure of you, Lucia, as long as Robert continues to struggle against his fascinating smile. Take my advice—if you should ever cherish a secret passion, get rid of Robert, for, sure as fate, he'll give you away. Perhaps," she added meditatively, itwasa little mean of me."
"Kitty, what have you been up to?"
"It was your fault. You shouldn't be so mysterious. Wishing to ascertain your real opinion of Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, I watched Robert as he was bringing in his tea."
"I hope he was properly attentive."
"Attentive isn't the word for it. He may have felt that my eye was upon him, and so got flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the thing. He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him. That won't do, you know. He'll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the Savage Keith. Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant."
"He is, as it happens, excessively observant."
"So I found out. I found out all sorts of things."
"What things?"
"Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious. He doesn't waste time. He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other; which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance. Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?"
"What a shame."
"Yes. I'm afraid he'll have to do a little re-copying."
"Oh, Kitty, why couldn't you leave the poor thing in peace?"
"There wasn't any peace to leave him in. Really, you'd have thought that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the Act. He couldn't have been more excited if I'd caught him in his bath. Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty."
"Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you. You might have had the decency to go away."
"There wouldn't have been any decency in going away. Flight would have argued that I shared the theory of his guilt. I stayed where I was for two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away—to the other end of the room."
"You should have gone away altogether."
"Why? The library is big enough for two. It's so big that you could take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of it at the other. I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him at his."
"In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly could."
"I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything. I did it on purpose. I am nothing if not subtle.Youwould have crushed him with a delicate and ladylike retreat;Ileft him as happy as he could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue."
"And then?"
"Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go. But before I went I made another discovery. You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to look at. Adieu, my exclusive one."
The chronicler who recorded that no woman had ever inherited the Harden Library contented himself with the bare statement of the fact. It was not his business to search into its causes, which belonged to the obscurer regions of psychology. Sir Joseph Harden and those book-lovers who went before him had the incurable defects of their qualities. Hereditary instinct, working in them with a force as of some blind fatality, drove too many of them to espouse their opposites. Their wives were not expected to do anything noteworthy, beyond sitting for their portraits to the masters of their day; though, as a matter of fact, many of them contrived to achieve a far less enviable distinction. The portraits have immortalized their faces and their temperaments. Ladies of lax fibre, with shining lips and hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads, they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable element in things, or that the library had been handed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its men should be scholars and its women beauties, occasionally frail.
And scholarship, in obedience to the family tradition, ran superbly in the male line for ten generations, when it encountered an insuperable obstacle in the temperament of Sir Frederick. Then came Sir Frederick's daughter, and between them they made short work of the family tradition. Sir Frederick had appropriated the features of one of his great grandmothers, her auburn hair, her side-long eyes, her fawn-like, tilted lip, her perfect ease of manners and of morals. By a still more perverse hereditary freak the Harden intellect which had lapsed in Sir Frederick appeared again in his daughter, not in its well-known austere and colourless form, but with a certain brilliance and passion, a touch of purely feminine uncertainty and charm.
The Harden intellect had changed its sex. It was Horace Jewdwine who had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable discoveries. Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition. Now in the opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a contradiction in terms. Having engaged the best masters in the county, whose fees together with their fares (second class from Exeter to Harmouth) he had himself punctually paid, he had declined to take any further interest in his grand-daughter. He had no objection to her taking up music, a study which, being no musician, he was unable to regard as in any sense intellectual. He supported his view by frequent allusions to the brainlessness of song-birds; in fact, he had been always a little bitter on the subject, having before his eyes the flagrant instance of his son Frederick.
Frederick was no scholar. He despised his forefathers as a race of pedants, and boasted that he never opened a book, barring the book of life, in which he flattered himself he could have stood a very stiff examination. He used a certain unbowdlerized edition which he was careful to conceal from the ladies of his family. Before he was forty Frederick had fiddled away the family tradition, and not only the family tradition, but the family splendour and the family credit. When Lucia at seventeen was studying the classics under Horace Jewdwine, Frederick's debts came rolling in; at about the same period old Sir Joseph's health showed signs of failing, and Frederick took to raising money on his expectations. He had just five years to do it in.
It was then that Lucia first began to notice a change in her grandfather's manner towards her. Sometimes she would catch his eyes fixed on her with a curious, scrutinizing gaze, and once or twice she thought she detected in them a profound sadness. Whenever at these moments they happened to meet her eyes they were immediately averted. Sir Joseph had not been given to betraying emotion, save only on points of scholarship, and it was evident that he had something on his mind.
What he had on his mind was the thought that at the rate Frederick was living he might at any moment cease to live, and then what would become of Lucia? And what would become of the Harden Library? What of the family tradition? By much pondering on the consequences of Frederick's decease Sir Joseph had considerably hastened his own. Lucia knew nothing of all this. She was only aware that her grandfather had sent for Horace Jewdwine on his death-bed. What had passed between them remained known only to Horace. But part of a sum of money left by Sir Joseph's will towards the founding of a Harden scholarship was transferred by a codicil to Lucia for her education.
The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady, Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he pronounced her the worst educated young woman in Europe. Of all that Miss Roots had so laboriously imparted to her she retained, not a smattering, but a masterly selection. And now at four and twenty she had what is called a beautiful view of life; with that exciting book which her father kept so sedulously out of her reach she was acquainted as it were through anthologies and translations. For anything Lucia knew to the contrary, life might be all bursts of lyric rapture and noble sequences of selected prose. She was even in danger of trusting too much to her own inspired version of certain passages. But anthologies are not always representative, and nobody knew better than Lucia that the best translations sometimes fail to give the spirit of the original.
Something of this spirit she caught from her father's brilliant and disturbing presence. Lucia adored her father. He brought into her life an element of uncertainty and freedom that saved it from the tyranny of books. It was a perpetual coming and going. A dozen times in a year Sir Frederick hurled himself from Harmouth to London, from London to the Continent, and from the Continent back again to Harmouth, to recruit. The very transience of his appearances and Lucia's ignorance of all that lay behind them preserved her in her attitude of adoration.
Sir Frederick took precious good care that it should not be disturbed by the familiarity born of frequent intercourse, that she should see him only in his moods of unnatural sobriety. And as he left Lucia to the library so much, it was to be supposed that, in defiance of the family tradition, he would leave the library to Lucia. But after all Sir Frederick had some respect for the family tradition. When it seemed only too likely that a woman would inherit the Harden Library, he stepped in and saved it from that supreme disgrace by the happy expedient of a bill of sale. Otherwise his natural inclination would have been to leave it to his daughter, for whom he had more or less affection, rather than to his nephew, for whom he had none.
As it happened, it was Horace Jewdwine who was responsible for the labour which Lucia had so impetuously undertaken. Lucia was aware that her grandfather's desire had been to rearrange and catalogue the library. When she came of age and found herself mistress of a tiny income (derived from capital left by her mother, carefully tied up to keep it from Sir Frederick, and enlarged by regular accumulations at compound interest) her first idea was to carry out her grandfather's wishes; but it was not until Horace Jewdwine's last visit that her idea became a determination. Horace had been strolling round the library, turning over the books, not exactly with the covetous eye of the heir apparent, but with that peculiar air of appropriation which he affected in all matters of the intellect. In that mood Lucia had found him irritating, and it had appeared that Horace had been irritated, too. He had always felt a little sore about the library; not that he really wanted it himself, but that he hated to see it in the possession of such a rank barbarian as his uncle Frederick. A person who, if his life depended on it, could not have told an Aldine from an Elzevir. A person, incapable not only of appreciating valuable books, but of taking ordinary decent care of them. There were gaps on the shelves, a thing that he hated to see. Lucia, too; Lucia would take books out by tens and twenties at a time and leave them lying all over the house, and they would be stuck in again anywhere and anyhow. No sort of method in their arrangement. No blinds, no glass doors to protect them. He had pointed this out to Lucia, suggesting that it was not a good thing to let too much dust accumulate on the tops of books, neither was it altogether desirable that a strong south-westerly light should play upon them all day long. Had she ever noticed how the bindings were cracking and fading? For all this he seemed to be blaming Lucia; and this, Lucia tried to persuade herself, was no great matter; but when he asked for a catalogue, and she calmly told him that there was none, he became involved in a sentence about a scandal and a Vandal in which his opinion of his uncle Frederick unmistakably appeared. He even forgot himself so far as to reflect on the sanity of the late Master of Lazarus, at which point Lucia had left him to his reflections.
She had not yet forgiven Horace for his interference that day, nor for his remark about the scandal and the Vandal. As for his other observations, they were insufferably rue. Hence her desperate efforts to set the library in order before she went abroad; hence the secrecy and haste with which she had applied to Rickman's, without asking Horace's advice as she naturally would have done; hence, too, her vast delight at the success of her unassisted scheme. Mr. Rickman was turning out splendidly. If she had looked all through London she could not have found a better man.