But it was on his own account, for his healing and his consolation, that she advised him to make a clean breast of it.
Lucia was in the library and alone. Everything was as she had left it that morning two weeks ago; she saw the same solid floor and ceiling, the same faded Persian rugs, the same yellow pale busts on their tall pedestals, the same bookshelves, wing after wing and row upon row. The south lattice still showed through its leaded lozenge panes the bright green lawn, the beech tree and the blue sky; the west lattice held the valley and the hills, with the river, a sinuous band of silver between the emerald and the amethyst. These things were so woven with the tissue of her mind that the sense of them had remained with her during the terrible seven days at Cannes. But now they appeared to her stripped of their air of permanence and familiarity. They were blurred and insubstantial, like things remembered rather than actually seen. All that subdued and tender loveliness belonged only to her young past, and she had been torn from it so violently, it had been flung so far behind her, that it seemed to her at the moment incredible and impossible. Life, that had hitherto dealt with her so gently and so graciously, had in the last two weeks turned hideous and brutal.
She had no very clear idea of how she had got to Cannes. The going was wiped out. She had been driven through the garden of the Villa des Palmes and had recognized it as the garden of her dream. She had passed (through the doors of the Villa) into a state of stupor in which she had recognized nothing, and thence into a sequence of states which she could now too well recall. There had been a state of waking, in which she had found herself in a little gilt and velvet salon. There was another woman in it, a vast woman in a thin black dress twinkling all over with little black eyes. She had a great white powdered face, and they called her Madame. Then followed a state of hallucination, in which she believed Madame to be an innocent person, the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details of her father's death as presented brokenly by Madame. Last had come a state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame. After that something had appeared to her in vivid violent illumination.
So vivid and so violent that it seemed to her even now that she was still sitting in the gilt and velvet salon in the Villa des Palmes; she still saw the thin green light that came slanting through the half-closed shutters; warm southern smells floated in, they mixed with the thick stifling scent of patchouli and orris root wafted from Madame as she went to and fro, and with some other odour, bitter and sickly, that came from the room beyond.
She had made out certain familiar objects in this unfamiliar scene. Her father's travelling rug lay folded on the red velvet sofa; his cap and gloves were there, just as he had flung them down; his violin, dumb in its black coffin-like case, stood propped up against the wall. Everywhere else (only gradually discerned) were things belonging to Madame, evidence of her supreme and intimate occupation of the room.
And outside was the garden of sharp aloes and palms, where, as she believed, her father's spirit had gone looking for her, and had not found her. His body lay in the inner room behind the closed door.
That horrible little gilt and velvet salon! Whenever she thought of it she saw Madame; she saw Madame's little dry eyes blinking in her great white powdered face; she saw the vast heaving of Madame's bust where the little jet sequins shivered and shook; she heard her voice cooing and purring voluptuous condolence; and she felt again her own passion of disgust and fear as she wrenched herself free from the warm scented body, quivering in its thin black sheath.
Then she saw the inner room behind the closed door. Nothing was obscure and secret there. The slats of the shutter let in great shafts of daylight; the coffin stood in the middle of the room, raised on trestles, and covered with a white sheet. A crucifix stood at the head of the coffin, propped against a chest of drawers. Three candles, flickering in their sockets, were set on the table at its foot. On each knob of the two top-drawers hung a wreath of yellow immortelles.
That long coffin, raised high on its trestles, seemed to fill the little room. Lucia saw it now, she saw the face in it turned up to the ceiling, sharp and yellow, the limp red moustache hanging like a curtain over the half-open mouth. No trace of the tilted faun-like smile.
She would never get away from that terrible room. The pattern of its walls (garlands of pink rosebuds between blue stripes) was stamped upon her brain. There too, as in the salon, abode the inextinguishable odour shaken from Madame's dress, it mixed with the hot reek of carbolic and the bitter stabbing odour of the coffin.
On the floor by the trestles lay a glove, a long enormous glove, Madame's glove; it was greyish white, and wrinkled like the cast skin of a snake. The finger of its fellow hung from the chest of drawers beside the crucifix. It pointed downwards at the dead man.
Within the gay garlanded walls, surrounded by those symbols and souvenirs of Madame, he lay with his face turned up to the ceiling, and his mouth half open, as if it still gasped piteously for breath. One more breath to beg for forgiveness, to defend himself, explain; while bit by bit the place he had lived in gave up his secret.
She could not tell whether she forgave him or not. When she stood by him there she could have imploredhisforgiveness for having thus come upon him unawares, for having found what he had taken such pains to hide from her. It seemed somehow cruel and unfair. She did not tax him with hypocrisy, because he had so long contrived to keep himself clean in her sight; she was grateful to him for having spared her this knowledge. But whether she forgave him or not—no, looking back on it at this moment she could not tell. Lucia was too young for the great forgiveness that comes of understanding.
She walked up and down the library, staring at the books, at the tables piled with papers; she stood at each window in turn and looked out on the garden, the valley and the hills, Harmouth Gap, and the long brown rampart line of Muttersmoor. It was simply impossible for her to realize their once intimate relation to her life.
She was unaware that her mood was chiefly the result of physical and mental exhaustion. It seemed to her rather that she had acquired strange powers of insight, that she had pierced to the back of the illusion. Never had she possessed so luminous a sense of the unreality of things. She found this view consoling, for it is the desire of unhappy youth that there shall be no permanence where there is pain.
On this unreal and insubstantial background faces came and went all day long, faces solemn and obsequious, faces glazed and feverish with emotion; Robert's face with red-rimmed eyes hiding Robert's unutterable sympathy under a thin mask of fright; Kitty's face with an entirely new expression on it; and her own face met them with an incomprehensible and tearless calm. For she was not even sure of that, not even sure of her own sorrow. She had had to do with sorrow once before, when her grandfather died, and she thought she would be sure to know it when it came to her again; but she had no name for this new feeling, and at times it seemed to her that it was not sorrow at all.
Whatever it was, she had determined to bear it as far as possible alone. She was almost sorry that she had not refused Kitty's offer to stay with her; she suffered so from Kitty's inability to conceal the truth. Not that Kitty said anything; it was her unnatural silence that was so terrible. With that extraordinary acuteness that had come upon her now Lucia saw, in the involuntary hardening and flushing of Kitty's face, that in Kitty's mind her father was not only suspected, but condemned. She was afraid lest she herself should in some moments of weakness betray him; and Kitty's strange unusual tenderness inspired her with terror. She shrank even from old Mrs. Palliser, Kitty's mother, with her soft trembling face and clinging hands. Their sympathy was poignant and unnerving, and she needed all her strength for the things she had to do.
She did them, too. While one half of her brain had slackened its grip of the world, the other half retained the most perfect grasp of certain necessary details. She spent the morning with her father's solicitor, while he explained to her the first principles of finance, and the inner meaning of mortgages and bills of sale. She understood clearly that the things which would naturally have come to her on her father's death belonged in a certain sense to Mr. Richard Pilkington of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr. Schofield, poor man, had approached this branch of his subject gently and gingerly, with every delicacy of phrasing that his fancy could suggest. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through half-closed eyes, respectfully veiling the shrewdness of his gaze. Lucia had at first displayed so little interest and intelligence that he felt himself compelled to a broader and simpler statement of the facts. With the exception of her own personal possessions, nothing in Court House remained to her, nothing, not a book, not a solitary piece of drawing-room furniture. Mr. Pilkington's bill of sale was, he grieved to say, inclusive of everything, from the Harden library and the great gallery of portraits, to the glass and china in the pantry, and the blankets on the beds. "Not even," he had said, "that little paper weight that you have in your hand, Miss Harden." And Lucia had examined the paper weight as if she saw it for the first time; she put it down and smiled. It struck her as incomprehensible, ludicrous almost that any one could spend so much passion and solemnity on things so unimportant, so irrelevant; she was not in the least surprised to hear that they did not belong to her; the inconceivable thing was that they ever had belonged to her.
And as the solicitor looked at her the corners of his mouth twitched with a little spasm of pity; his eyes lost their veiled shrewdness, and when she smiled they stared in frankest fright. For a moment he supposed that the shock of his announcement had turned her brain. It never occurred to that astute intelligence that she was smiling at his own simplicity.
When he had left she returned to the writing-table; she sorted and arranged a disordered heap of business letters, letters of condolence and tradesmen's bills. She pushed aside the letters of condolence—Kitty would answer those. She unlocked a drawer and took from it two open envelopes scored with many postmarks and addressed to Harmouth, to Cannes and to Harmouth again; these she scrutinized anxiously, as if they disclosed some secret guarded by their contents. Then she read the letters carefully all over again.
One was from her cousin Edith Jewdwine. Edith's sympathy covered two sheets; it flowed from her pen, facile and fluent. Edith had had the influenza, otherwise Edith would have come to Lucia at once. Could not Lucia come to her instead? Edith could not bear to think of Lucia alone there in her trouble, in that great big house. She was glad that Kitty Palliser was with her. If only she had not been so unfortunate as to catch influenza, and so on!
Lucia was sorry that Edith had influenza, but she was not sorry that she had not come. She did not want Edith with her.
The other letter was from Horace. Horace had refined his expressions of condolence into one faultless phrase. The rest of his letter consisted of apologies and offers of service. These his close cramped handwriting confined to the centre of the sheet, leaving a broad and decent margin to suggest the inexpressible. He had heard of his uncle's death indirectly; why had she not sent for him? If she had wired to him at once he could have made arrangements to meet and take her to Cannes, or he could have joined her there and brought her home. At present he was overwhelmed with business; but he hoped to run down to Harmouth at the end of the week, and travel up to town with her. He understood that she was going to stay with Edith. Busy as he was, he would come now, at any minute, if he could be of any immediate use. She had only to wire if she wanted him.
She laid down that letter, pushed it aside, took it up again, and read it a second time, as if to satisfy herself as to the writer's meaning. She was not sure as to what Horace was or was not willing to do, but there could be no doubt that he was deeply sorry for her. Why had she not sent for him? Why indeed? Her first instinct had been to send for him. She had only to let him know that she was in trouble, and he would have come to her at any inconvenience to himself. And that, of course, was why she had not sent. It would have been so impossible for him to refuse.
And now she was thankful that she had spared him, and that he had not followed her to those terrible rooms in the Villa des Palmes, that he knew nothing of those seven days. She would have endured any suffering, paid any price to obliterate the memory of them. It was horrible to think how nearly Horace had been there. Horace of all people—the fastidious, the immaculate, the merciless. If she had found it hard to judge her dead father tenderly, she knew what Horace's judgement would have been.
She had "only to wire if she wanted him." Oh no; he was the last person that she wanted now.
Those two letters she answered without more delay. To Horace she wrote in a reassuring manner, so as to absolve him from any sense of obligation he might happen to feel. She would rather he came down a little later than he proposed. Meanwhile he was not to be anxious, for Mr. Schofield was managing her affairs extremely well. She admitted that when those wonderful affairs were settled her income would be but small (she considered that this was a thing Horace ought to be told before—before he wrote any more letters). She added that the library, the pictures and the furniture would have to be sold. And Court House, too, she was afraid. (That also was a fact that must not be concealed from him for a moment. It seemed to concern Horace so much more than it did her.) These things, which it was her duty to tell him, she told simply and plainly. But she omitted to mention that two men in possession were sitting in the housekeeper's room, in attitudes of more or less constraint. She ended by assuring Horace of her gratitude, with a fervency which suggested that he had some cause to doubt it. And indeed, at the moment, she could hardly tell whether she were more grateful to him for offering to come to her or for having stopped away.
All this necessary business Lucia transacted with one half of her mind; while the other stood far off, possessed by its sense of unreality, of illusion.
Next she went through the tradesmen's bills. There were a great many people to be paid, and unless Court House were sold there would be nothing to pay them with. It was at this point that Robert came in with the announcement that Mr. Rickman had called and wished to see her.
At first (the active intelligence being busy with accounts), her only idea was that she owed Mr. Rickman fifteen pounds and that when all debts were paid fifteen pounds would represent a very solid portion of her income. Then her dreaming self awoke to the memory of something unachieved, an obligation rashly incurred, a promise that could never be fulfilled.
Yes. She would see Mr. Rickman.
Lucia had risen and was standing in the embrasure of the south window. She had her back to the door, so that she could not see him as he came in.
He wondered how on earth he was going to get over the space between the window and the door. A sudden wave of weakness went through his body; he had horrible sensations of sinking at the middle and of giving way altogether at the knees. He had been afraid of seeing her suffer; now he knew that what he was really afraid of was her fear of seeing him. He expected to see her face set in abhorrence of his sympathy, her body shrink in anticipation of a touch on her pain.
Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had happened.
His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.
"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me—"
"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not come. Sit down, please."
She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.
He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the table. She turned so as to face him.
She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted. And yet shewaschanged, too. Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.
"You have been ill?" she said.
And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.
She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him well at the hotel.
Decidedly she had grown older and her manner had grown older too. It suggested that it was she who was the protector; that she wished, as far as possible, to spare him in an interview which must necessarily be painful. It was as if she remembered that he at any rate was young, and that these gloomy circumstances must be highly distasteful to his youth. In that she was the same as ever; every nerve in her shrank from the pain of giving pain.
At least that was his first impression. And then (no consoling view being really open to him) he told himself he was a fool to suppose that in the circumstances she could think of him at all. He had nothing tangible to go upon. He could see through it. He could see perfectly through the smile, the self-possession, even the air of polite and leisurely interest in his illness. She dwelt on him because he was of all themes the one most indifferent to her. She was simply holding herself in, according to the indestructible instincts of her race.
He need not have been afraid of seeing her suffer; that, at any rate, he would not see. To let him see it would have been to her an extreme personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class. This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood between them, waving him away. It opened up again the impassable gulf. He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from her beyond all possibility of approach. She had not changed. She had simply reverted to her type.
Her eyes waited for him to speak. But they were not the eyes he knew, the eyes that had drawn him to confession. It was borne in upon him that this (though it might be his last moment with her) was not the moment to confess. There was a positive grossness in the idea of unburdening himself in the presence of this incommunicable grief. It was like putting in a claim for consideration as an equal sufferer. He had no right to obtrude himself upon her at all. In her calm-eyed attention there was a hint—a very delicate and gentle one—that he would do well to be impersonal, business-like, and, above all, brief.
"It was about the library that I wanted to see you, Miss Harden."
"Was it? I was just going to ask you not to do anything more to the catalogue if you have not finished it."
"I finished it ten days ago—before the twenty-seventh."
She smiled faintly. "Then you kept your promise. It doesn't matter. What I most wanted to speak to you about was the secretaryship I offered you. I'm afraid we must give it up."
"Oh—Miss Harden—" his tone expressed that he had always given it up, that it was not to be thought of for an instant. But evidently she was possessed with the idea that he had a claim upon her.
"I'm very sorry, but as things have turned out I shan't be able to keep a secretary. In fact, as you may have heard, I'm not able to keep anything hardly—not even my promises."
"Please—please don't think of it—"
"There is no use thinking of it. Still, I wanted you to know that I really meant it—I believed it could be done. Of course I don't know how much you really wanted it."
"Wanted it? I'd 'ave given half my life for a year of it."
Lucia's hand, laid lightly on the table's edge, felt a strong vibration communicated to it from Mr. Rickman's arm. She looked up, in time to see his white face quiver before he hid it with his hand.
"I'm so sorry. Did it mean so much to you?"
He smiled through his agony at the cause assigned to it. "I'm not thinking of that. What it means to me—what it always will mean is your goodness—in thinking of it. In thinking of it now."
It was his nearest approach to a sympathetic allusion.
She did not wince (perceptibly), but she ignored the allusion.
"Oh, that's nothing. You would have been of great use to me. If I thought of helping you at all, my idea was simply—how shall I put it?—to make up in some way for the harm I've done you."
"What harm have you ever done me?"
For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she explained.
"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was responsible for your illness."
He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not know that."
"I knew it, though."
"You knew it? How did you know it?"
"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to you about."
He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done, point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.
"If," she said, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's your father who is going to buy it."
He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father) that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.
It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.
Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view. Her practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human, and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to nothing less than a moral miracle. But Miss Harden would have a higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than his own, and ifheconsidered that his father was morally bound to withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his remaining in it. Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.
"Why shouldn't he buy it?" she asked.
"Because, I'm afraid, selling it in—in that way, you won't make much money over it."
"Well—it's not a question of making money, it's a question of paying a debt."
"How much you make—or lose—of course, depends on the amount of the debt—what it was valued at."
Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet. She had the required fact at her fingers' ends and instantly produced it. "It was valued at exactly one thousand pounds."
"And it should have been valued at four. My father can't give anything like that. We ought to be able to find somebody who can. But it might take a considerable time."
"And there is no time. What do you advise me to do then?"
"Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that would be all right. If we can't, I advise you to buy it back, or a part of it, yourself. Buy back the books that make it valuable. You've got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and theAurea Legendaprinted by Wynken de Worde." (He positively blushed as he consummated this final act of treachery to Rickman's.) "And heaps of others equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so. You can buy them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand. If Pilkington collars the rest he'll still be paid, and there may be something over."
She considered a moment. "Has Mr. Pilkington any idea of the value of those books?"
"I'm certain he hasn't. Only an expert could have."
"Would it be perfectly fair to him?"
"Tohim? Perfectly fair. You buy them at his own valuation."
"I see. I should like to do that—if—if it can be managed."
"I think it can be managed. My father isn't likely to settle with Mr. Pilkington without consulting me. If hehassettled we must try and get him to withdraw."
"Oh, surely there would be no difficulty about that?"
He said nothing. It was really terrible the way she took integrity for granted. To be sure his father had a reputation with the family. He remembered how Sir Joseph used to praise him to his face as the only honest dealer in London. But Sir Joseph was in the habit of buying books, not selling them.
He rose and turned away, evading her innocent eyes.
"I hope not. I'll see Mr. Pilkington about it. By the way, hereisMr. Pilkington. Did you expect him?"
"No, I—" Her voice died away, extinguished in her horror.
There could be no mistake about it.
Mr. Pilkington was coming by the private way, stepping softly over a fair green lawn. The low golden light before sunset flooded the lawn so that Mr. Pilkington walking in it was strangely and gloriously illuminated. Everything about him shone, from his high silk hat to the tips of his varnished boots. His frock coat and trousers of grey summer suiting clung to his figure like a warm and sunny skin. All over Mr. Pilkington and round about him there hung the atmosphere of the City. Not of the actual murky labyrinth, roofed with fog, but of the City as she stands transfigured before the eyes of the young speculator, in her orient golden mood.
Lucia had seen him. The light died out of her face, her lips straightened. She stood motionless, superb, intent. With such a look and in such an attitude a Roman maiden might have listened to the feet of the Vandal at the gate.
He was coming very swiftly, was Dicky, as if borne by an impetus of conquest. As he caught sight of Miss Harden through the open window, though he kept his head rigidly averted, his eyes slewed round towards her, and at the same moment his fingers rose instinctively to his little fair moustache. It was the gesture of the irresistible male.
"MustI see him?" she asked helplessly. She had realized everything in that moment.
"Not unless you like. Shall I deal with him?"
"If you would be so good. But no—it doesn't matter. I shall have to see him later."
She sat down again and waited. The silence was so tense that it seemed to bear the impact of her pulses; it throbbed and quivered with pain. Outside, the sound of the pebbles, crunched under Pilkington's footsteps, became a concert of shrieks.
Rickman did not offer to go as Mr. Pilkington advanced; for, Heaven knew how, in some obscure and subtle way she had managed to convey to him that his presence was a protection.
Mr. Pilkington entered the room with the air of a man completely assured as to his reception. He bowed to Miss Harden; an extraordinary bow. No words could have conveyed the exquisite intimations of Mr. Pilkington's spine. It was as if he had said to her, "Madam, you needn't be afraid; in your presence I am all deference and chivalry and restraint." But no sooner had Dicky achieved this admirable effect of refinement than he spoilt it all by the glance he levelled at young Rickman.Thatexpressed nothing but the crude emotion of the insolent male, baulked of his desire to find himself alone on the field. It insulted her as brutally as any words by its unblushing assumption of the attitude of sex.
"I must introduce myself, Miss 'Arden," he said, ignoring Rickman. "I think I havenothad the pleasure—" His large mouth closed reluctantly on the unfinished phrase.
He seated himself with circumstance, parting the tails of his coat very carefully. He had chosen a seat opposite the window. As if conscious of the glory of his appearance, he offered himself liberally to the light. He let it play over his figure, a figure that youth subdued to sleekness that would one day be corpulence; it drew out all the yellow in his moustache and hair; it blazed in his gold-rimmed eye-glass; thence it alighted, a pale watery splendour, on the bridge of his nose. It was a bridge where two nationalities met and contended for mastery. Mr. Pilkington's nose had started with a distinctly Semitic intention, frustrated by the Anglo-Saxon in him, its downward course being docked to the proportion of a snub. Nobody knew better than Mr. Pilkington that it was that snub that saved him. He was proud of it as a proof of his descent from the dominant race. Assisted by his reluctantly closing mouth and double eye-glass it inspired confidence, giving to Mr. Pilkington's face an expression of extreme openness and candour. He was proud of his eye-glass too. He considered that it made him look like a man of science or of letters. But it didn't. It did much better for him than that. It took all the subtlety out of his face and endowed it with an earnest and enormous stare. And as that large mouth couldn't and wouldn't close properly, his sentences had a way of dying off in a faint gasp, leaving a great deal to the imagination. All these natural characteristics were invaluable for business purposes.
But if you had asked Mr. Pilkington for the secret of his success, he would have told you that he owed it to his possession of two qualities, "bounce" and "tact." To both, mind you; for tact without bounce will carry a man neither far nor high; while bounce without tact will elevate him occasionally to his own perdition. Conversationally he was furnished with tentacles sensitive to the lightest touch of an idea; he had the very subtlest discernment of shades within shades. He grasped with airy impact; he moved by a delicate contact and recoil, a process he was pleased to describe as "feelin' his way."
He did not rush brutally into business, as a man of coarser fibre might have done. He removed his gloves, adjusted his eye-glass and admired the view. He shrank from the suggestion that he had come to "take possession," but clearly he could not take possession of the view. It was a safe and soothing topic.
"You have a very glorious outlook here, Miss Harden."
Then Mr. Pilkington perceived a shade. Miss Harden's outlook wasnotglorious.
By an almost visible recoil from his own blunder he strove to convey an impression of excessive delicacy.
"Wot very exceptional weather we are enjoying—" Perceiving another and a finer shade (for evidently Miss Harden was not enjoying the weather, or indeed anything else) Mr. Pilkington again shifted his ground. He spoke of books. He noticed with approval the arrangement of the library. He admired the Harden taste in costly bindings, as if he were by no means personally concerned with any of these things. And thus by a delicate and imperceptible transition, he slid into his theme.
"Now, as regards this—this sale, Miss Harden. I hope you understand—"
"I understand that you are my father's chief creditor, and that the sale is necessary."
"Quite so. But I'm most awfully sorry for the necessity As for time—I don't want you to feel that you're pressed or hurried in any way." Mr. Pilkington's eyes gazed up at her under their great glasses, humid and immense. His lower lip drooped in an uncertain manner. He had a great deal of nice feeling about him, had Dicky.
"I hope those men aren't making a nuisance of themselves They've had strict orders to keep in the background I'm orf'ly upset," said Mr. Pilkington in a thick emotional voice, "about this affair; and I want to consider you, Miss Harden, in every possible way."
"You are very kind. But I would rather you didn't consider me, in any way at all."
As she said this Mr. Rickman looked at her with a grave smile, conveying (behind Mr. Pilkington's back) an unmistakable warning.
Mr. Pilkington smiled too, a large and fluttering smile as of one indulgent to any little attempt at brilliance on the part of a young lady under a cloud. Lucia swept him and his smile with her long and steady gaze, a gaze which made Dicky exceedingly uncomfortable.
"I think if you have any arrangements to make, you had better see my solicitor."
"I have an appointment," said Dicky, not without a certain dignity, "with Mr. Schofield, to-morrow morning."
"Then I suppose what you want now is to look over the house?"
The question and the gaze were so direct that Dicky (who had meant to amble delicately round that point for another quarter of an hour) lost his head, dropped his eye-glass, and fairly let himself go.
"Well, perhaps as Iamhere, I'd better 'ave a look round. Of course—if—if it's in any way inconvenient—"
"Not in the least. You can look round at once."
She rang the bell. On her way to it she gathered up some books that were lying out of sight and laid them on the table.
"These," she said to Rickman, "belong to the library. They must go with the rest."
He looked at them. One was an Aldine Dante, he had seen her reading it. He took Pilkington aside and said something to him in a tone which Lucia could not hear. Her hand was on the door when Pilkington sprang forward.
"One moment, Miss Harden. Everything must be sold in the regular way, but if you'll tell me of any books you've a special fancy for, I'll make a note of them and buy them in for you." He paused, awaiting the breath of inspiration. It came. "For—for a merely nominal sum."
To do Dicky justice this delicate idea greatly commended itself to his good nature. Business is business, but not willingly did Dicky inflict pain, least of all upon a young and pretty woman. Besides he had an eye to his reputation; he was disposed to do this thing handsomely. Rickman envied him his inspiration, his "merely nominal sum."
"Thank you. The books were not mine," said Lucia in spite of another meaning look from her ally.
"Quite so. But I should disregard that if I were you. Anyhow you can think it over, and if you change your mind you can let me or Mr Rickman know before the sale."
Lucia looked down at him from her height. "I shall not change my mind. If I want to keep any of the books, I can buy them from Mr. Rickman."
She turned to Rickman in the doorway. "All the same, it was kind of you to think of it." She said it very distinctly, so that Mr. Pilkington could hear.
Rickman followed her out of the room and closed the door behind them. She turned on him eyes positively luminous with trust. It was as if she had abandoned the leading of her intellect and flung the reins on the neck of her intuition.
"I was right, wasn't I? I would so much rather buy them back from you."
"From my father?"
"It's the same thing, isn't it?"
He smiled sadly. "I'm afraid it isn't, quite. Why didn't you accept his offer?"
"I couldn't." She shuddered slightly. Her face expressed her deep and desperate repugnance. "Icanbuy them back from you. He is really arranging with your father, isn't he?"
"Yes." It was the third time that she had appealed from Pilkington to him, and there was a profound humiliation in the thought that at this precise moment the loathsome Dicky might be of more solid use to her than he.
"Well then," she said almost triumphantly. "I shall be safe. You will do your best for me."
It was a statement, but he met it as if it had been a question.
"I will indeed."
He saw that it was in identifying his father with him that she left it to their honour.
Dicky Pilkington did not belong to the aristocracy of finance. Indeed, finance had not in any form claimed him at the first.
Under the grey frock-coat and gleaming shirt-front, hidden away behind the unapparent splendours of Dicky Pilkington's attire (his undermost garments were of woven silk), in a corner of his young barbarian heart there lurked an obscure veneration for culture and for art. When his day's work was done, the time that Dicky did not spend in the promenade of the Jubilee Variety Theatre, he spent in reading Karl Pearson and Robert Louis Stevenson, with his feet on the fender. He knew the Greek characters. Hesaidhe could tell Plato from Aristotle by the look of the text. Dicky had begun life as a Junior Journalist. But before that, long, long before, when he was an innocent schoolboy, Dicky had a pair of wings, dear little cherubic wings, that fluttered uneasily under his little jacket. The wings moulted as Dicky grew older; they shrank (in the course of his evolution) to mere rudimentary appendages, and poor Dicky flopped instead of flying. Finally they dropped off and Dicky was much happier without them. Rickman used to say that if you stripped him you saw the marks of them still quite plainly; and Dicky was always stripping himself and showing them. They proved to these writing fellows what he might have been if he had only chosen. He had begun by being a poet like the best of them, and in his heart of hearts Dicky believed that it was as a poet he should end. His maxim upon this head was: "When I've feathered my nest it will be time enough for me to sing."
Dicky's nest was not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon, walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he came to forsake literature for finance.
He had begun in a small way by financing little tradesmen, little journalists and actresses in temporary difficulties; lending small sums to distressed clergymen, to governesses and the mistresses of boarding-houses. By charging a moderate interest he acquired a character for fairness and straight-forwardness. Now and then he did what he called a really tip-top generous thing. "Character," said Dicky Pilkington, "is capital"; and at thirty he had managed to save enough of it to live on without bothering about earning any more.
Then, by slow degrees, Dicky extended his business. He lent larger sums at correspondingly higher interest. Then he let himself go. He was caught by the glory of the thing, the poetry of finance. He soared to all the heights and sounded all the depths of speculation. He took risks with rapture. He fancied himself lending vast sums at giddy interest. "That," said Dicky to his conscience, was to "cover his risk." He hadn't forgotten that character is capital. And when it occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he was making rather a large hole in it, he would then achieve some colossal act of generosity which set him on his legs again. So that Dicky Pilkington was always happy in his conscience as in everything else.
He had been prepared to do the handsome thing by Miss Harden, only her manner had somehow "choked him off." He could have afforded it, for he considered this Freddy Harden business as his very largest deal. He held a mortgage on the land, from the river to the top of Harcombe Hill. There was any amount to be got out of the pictures and the furniture. And the library was not altogether to be sneezed at. It had been Fred Harden's last desperate resource, (rather poor security in Dicky's opinion); but if the sum advanced had not been prodigious (compared with the sums that had gone before it) the interest had been high. So that, in returning from his tour of inspection, he felt considerably elated.
Rickman, as he went down the High Street that evening, saw Dicky a little way in front of him. He noticed that the financial agent was an object of considerable interest to the people of Harmouth. Men stood at shop doors and street corners, women (according to their social standing) hung out of bedroom windows or hid behind parlour curtains to look after him as he went. Here and there Rickman caught sullen and indignant glances, derisive words and laughter. Evidently the spirit of Harmouth was hostile to Dicky. A Harden was a Harden, and Sir Frederick's magnificently complete disaster had moved even the townspeople, his creditors.
The excitement caused by Dicky concentrated at the windows of the London and Provincial Bank, where Sir Frederick had had a large balance—overdrawn.
Harmouth High Street is a lane, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, which gives on to the esplanade between the Marine Hotel and the Bank. At a certain distance these buildings cut the view into a thin slip of grey beach and steep blue sea. The form of Dicky was now visible in the centre of that slip, top-hatted, distinct against the blue. He stood on the edge of the esplanade as on a railway platform, reading the paper and smoking a cigar. From time to time, looking up with an expression half visionary, half voluptuous, he puffed and spat in dreamy rhythmic sequence.
"Coelum, non animam," said Rickman to himself, "they change their skies, but not their habits." When he came up with him, he found the soul of Pilkington disporting itself in its own airy element, exchanging ideas with two young damsels who frolicked on the beach below. Backwards and forwards flew the light-hearted banter, like balls of sea-foam, Mr. Pilkington the inspirer and the inspired. The after-glow of his last triumphant witticism still illuminated his countenance when he turned again to the printed page.
Now, owing to its peculiar construction, Harmouth High Street acts as a funnel for the off-shore breezes; they rush through it as they rush through Windy Gap, that rift in the coast before which the wary fisherman slackens sail. Just such an air was careering seawards when Mr. Pilkington was about to perform the difficult feat of folding his paper backwards. It smote one side of the broadsheet and tore it from his grasp, making it flutter like a sail escaped from the lanyard. The breeze dropped; it hovered; it waited like the wanton that it was; and when Mr. Pilkington's free hand made a clutch at the flying columns, it seized that moment to lift his hat from his head and dash it to the ground. Then the demon of the wind entered into and possessed that high thing; the hat rolled, it curvetted, it turned brim over crown, it took wings and flew, low and eager like a cormorant; finally it struck the beach, gathering a frightful impetus from the shock, and bounded seawards, the pebbles beating from it a thin drum-like note. Never was any created thing so tortured with indecent merriment in the face of doom. The end seemed certain, for Dicky Pilkington, though he joined in the hysterics of the crowd, had not compromised his dignity by pursuit; when, just as the hat touched the foam of perdition, Molly Trick, the fat bathing woman, interposed the bulwark of her body; she stooped; she spread her wide skirts, and the maniac leapt into them as into a haven.
The young men who watched this breezy incident over the blinds of the London and Provincial Bank were immensely diverted. Even Rickman laughed as Dicky turned to him his cheerful face buffeted by the wind.
Mr. Pilkington had put up at the same hotel as Rickman, and they found themselves alone at the dinner-table.
"Glori-orious air this," said Mr. Pilkington. "I don't know how you feel, young 'un, but there's a voice that tells me I shall dine."
Mr. Pilkington was not deceived by that prophetic voice. He dined with appetite undiminished by his companion's gloom. From time to time he rallied him on his coyness under the fascinations of beef-steak, lager beer, apricots and Devonshire cream.
"Well, Razors," he said at last, "and wot do you think of the Harden Library?"
Rickman was discreet. "Oh, it isn't bad for a private show. Sir Frederick doesn't seem to have been much of a collector."
"Wasn't he, though! In his own line he was a pretty considerable collector, quite a what d'you call 'em—virtuoso."
"Not very much virtue about him, I imagine."
"Well, whatever there may have been, in ten years that joker went through his capital as if it had been a paper hoop. Slap through it and out at the other side, on his feet, grinning at you."
"How did he manage it?"
"Cards—horses—women—everything you can name," said Dicky, "that's amusing, and at the same time expensive. They're precious slow down here in the country; but get 'em up to town, and there's nothing like 'em for going the pace, when theydogo it."
"His velocity must have been something tremendous, to judge by the smash." Rickman was looking at the financial agent with an expression which some people might have been inclined to resent, but Dicky's gaiety was proof against criticism.
"What did he die of?" Rickman asked slowly.
"What a beastly question to ask at dinner. He died, like most people, of his way of living. If Freddy Harden had had opportunities equal to his talents he would have smashed up ten years ago. Talent wasn't the word for it, it was genius—genius."
"I see. And when you come across a poor struggling devil with a gift like that, you long to be kind to him, don't you? To bring him forward, to remove every obstacle to his career?"
"Well, yes, I suppose I did run Harden for all he was worth. Queer fish, Harden. He used to rave like a lunatic about his daughter; but I don't suppose he spent a fiver on her in his life. It's pretty rough on her, this business. But Loocher'll do. She's got cheek enough for half a dozen." Dicky chuckled at the memory of his discomfiture. "I like it. I like a girl with some bounce in her. Trust her to fall on her little tootsies anywhere you drop her."
"I can't say you've made the falling very easy for her."
Dicky's bright face clouded. "Wot the devil has that got to do with me? I've donemylevel best. Why, I could have cleaned them out years ago, if I'd chosen. Now, just to show you what sort of fellow Freddy Harden was—last time I ever saw him, poor chap, he told me that girl of his was a regular musical genius, just a little more technique, you know, and she'd beat Paderewski into a cocked hat. She was wonderful. That's the way he piled it on, and it may have been all true; he could have made a fortune, fiddling, if he hadn't been as proud as Satan and as lazy as a wombat. Well, I said, if that was so, I'd take her up and run her as a pro.—for friendship, mind you. I liked Freddy, and I was orf'ly sorry for him. She could pay me if she pulled it off; if not, she could let it stand over till the day of judgement."
Rickman flushed. "Did you know anything of Miss Harden, then?"
"Not I. Never set eyes on her. She might have been as ugly as sin for all I knew. I risked that."
"What did Sir Frederick say to your generous proposal?"
Dicky's face became luminous at the recollection. "He said he'd see me d—d first. But I meant it. I'd do it to-morrow if she asked me prettily."
"Have you any notion how she'll be left after all this?"
"Yes. There's the house, and her mother's money. Freddy couldn't get at that. When it's all settled up she can't be so badly off, I fancy. Still it's a beastly back-hander in the face, poor girl. By Jove, she does stand up to it in form, too. Too d——d well bred to let you know she's hit. You wouldn't think she'd be plucky, to look at her, would you? It's queer how the breeding comes out in a woman."
Rickman held himself in with difficulty. When pearls are cast before swine you look for depreciation as a matter of course; you would be infinitely more revolted if, instead of trampling them under their feet, the animals insisted on wearing them in their snouts. So Pilkington rootling in Miss Harden's affairs; Pilkington posing as Miss Harden's adviser; Pilkington adorning his obscene conversation with Miss Harden's name, was to Rickman an infinitely more abominable beast than Pilkington behaving according to his nature. But to quarrel with Pilkington on this head would have provoked the vulgarest of comments, and for Miss Harden's sake he restrained himself.
Dicky remained unconscious. "I'm glad you put me up to offering some of those books back. It goes against me to sell them, but what the devil am I to do?"
"Ican't tell you."
"I shan't collar all this furniture, either. I'll buy in some of it and return it. The decent thing would be to give her back poor Freddy's portrait."
He passed his hand over a bunch of bananas,—he selected one, pinched it, smelt it, put it down and took another.
"It's a pity it's a Watts, that portrait," he murmured dreamily. He seemed to be wrestling with himself; and apparently he overcame. When he had eaten his banana his face was flushed and almost firm.
"I'll not take it. He sticks in my throat, does Freddy."
Rickman left the table. If he had disliked Dicky when he was callous, he loathed him when he was kind.
He threw open the window, and sat on the ledge. The breeze had died down and the heat in the little hotel was stifling. Across the passage glasses clinked in the bar, sounding a suitable accompaniment to the voice of Dicky. From time to time bursts of laughter came from the billiard-room overhead. Outside there, in the night, the sea smothered these jarring human notes with its own majestic tumult. Rickman, giving up his sickened senses to the night and the sea, was fortunate enough to miss a great deal that Pilkington was saying.
For Dicky, still seated at the table, talked on. He had mingled soda with whisky, and as he drank it, the veil of our earthly life lifted for Dicky, and there was revealed to him the underlying verity, the fabric of the world. In other words, Dicky had arrived at the inspired moment of the evening, and was chanting the Hymn of Finance.
"Look," said Dicky, "at the Power it gives you. Now all you writing chaps, you know, you're not in it, you're not in it at all. You're simply 'opping and dodging round the outside—you 'aven't a chance of really seeing the show. Whereas—look atme. I go and take my seat plump down in the middle of the stage box. I've got my ear to the heart of 'Umanity and my 'and on its pulse. I've got a grip of realities. You say you want to por-tray life. Very well, por-tray it. When all's said and done you've only got a picture. And wot's a picture, if it's ever so lifelike? You 'aven't got a bit nearer to the real thing. I tell you, you aren't in it with me. I'd have been a writer myself if I'd thought it was good enough. I began that way; but as to going back to it, you might just as well expect me to go back to kissing a woman's photo when I can put my arm round her waist."
And Dicky, gracefully descending on the wings of his metaphor, alighted on Miss Poppy Grace. But to Rickman the figure of Poppy, once an obsession, was now as indistinct as the figure of Dicky seen through a cloud of tobacco smoke. He was roused by a more direct appeal, and what seemed to him a violent change of theme.
"Did you notice what rum eyes Miss Harden's got? They haven't taught her how to use 'em, though. Hi, Ricky! Aren't you going to join us in a drink?"
"No, I'm not." His tone implied that he was not going to join Pilkington in anything.
"You seem a bit cut up on Miss Harden's account."
"If you mean that I think she's been most infernally treated, I do."
"H'm. Well, I will say the wind is not exactly tempered to that shorn lamb. But it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Queer how things are mixed up in this world. You wouldn't think there was much connexion between Miss Harden and Miss Poppy Grace, would you? Well, wot's Loocher's loss is Popsie's gain; if that's any consolation."
"I certainly don't see the connexion."
"No? I say, can't you shut the window? That d——d sea makes such a noise I can't hear myself speak. I was going to say I'd some notion of running Poppy on her own before long. And I think—IthinkI can do it out of this haul, before she signs another contract. Of course, we expect you and your friends to back us."
Dicky's voice came slightly muffled from the depths of his long tumbler.
Rickman turned round. "What did you say about Bacchus?" He had turned in anger, but at the spectacle presented by Pilkington he laughed aloud in the insolence of his youth.
"Shut that window, can't you? I say, if you can get at any of the papers and give them the tip—"
"Well?" Rickman's hand closed fiercely over the top of a soda-water syphon. Pilkington followed the movement with an innocent, but by no means unobservant eye.
Only the other day they had been rivals for the favour of Miss Poppy Grace, which seemed to be very evenly divided between them. If Rickman had her heart, he—Pilkington—held her by the power of the purse. Jealous he might be, but jealousy counted for little in the great mind of Pilkington. Human passions were the stuff he worked in. Where they raged highest it was his to ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm. If in Poppy's case they raged too high, his position as creditor gave him a tight grip of young Rickman. On the other hand, Rickman was now a full-fledged Junior Journalist, and Pilkington, amid the wreck of morals and the crash of creeds, had preserved a simple childlike faith in the omnipotence of the press. So, if it was madness for Rickman to irritate Pilkington, it was not altogether expedient for Pilkington to irritate him.
"Look here, Razors," said he, "you needn't go shying any syphons about. There's nothing behind this show but business. What I do for Miss Grace I do for cold cash. See? Of course, I take an interest in the girl—"
"Interest at something like a hundred and fifty per cent., I suppose?"
"That's about the figure—With your permission, I'll remove that fizz-gig out of your way—What do you think of it—my idea, I mean?"
"I think there's a d——d lot more interest than principle in it."
"You young goat! I'm out of it. Honour bright. So if you feel inclined to slog away and boom the lady, there's no reason why you shouldn't."
"Is there any reason why I should?" inquired Rickman with treacherous severity. So immense was his calm that Dicky was taken in by it and blundered.
"Well, yes," said he, "in that case, we might consider our little account settled."
"Our little account, Dicky, will be run up on the wrong side of the paper if you don't take care."
"Wot d'you mean?"
"I mean that when you've got a particularly filthy job on hand, it's as well to keep away from people who are not fond of dirt. At any rate, I advise you not to come too near me."
Dicky for the first time that evening looked uncomfortable. It occurred to Dicky that whisky and soda was not the very best drink to talk business on.
"I've noticed, Rickman," said he, "that since you've been living down in the country, you don't seem able to understand a joke."
But Rickman had got his legs on the other side of the window ledge, and as Dicky approached him he slid down on to the esplanade and slipped into the night.