All this swept through him between the falling of her ears. Last of all came the thought of what he was giving up. Was it possible that she cared for him?

It could not be. The illusion lasted only for an instant. Yet while it lasted the insane longing seized him to take her at her word and risk the consequences. For she would find out afterwards that she had never loved him; and she would disguise her feeling and he would see through her disguise. He would know. There could never be any disguise, any illusion between her and him. But at least he could take her in his arms and hold her now, while her tears fell; she would be his for this moment that was now.

He searched her face to see if indeed there had been any illusion. Through the tears that veiled her eyes he could not see whether it were love or pity that still shone in them; but because of the tears he thought it must be pity.

She went on. "You said I had taken the best years of your life—I would like to give you all mine, instead, such as it is—if you'll take it."

She said it quietly, so quietly that he thought that she had spoken so only because she did not love him.

"How can I take it—now, in this way?"

(Her tears stopped falling suddenly.)

"I admit that I made a gross appeal to your pity."

"My pity?"

"Yes, your pity." His words were curt and hard because of the terrible restraint he had to put upon himself. "I did it because it was the best argument. Otherwise it would have been abominable of me to have said those things."

"I wasn't thinking of anything you said, only of what you've done."

"I haven't done much. But tell me the truth. Whether would you rather I had done it for your sake or for mere honour's sake?"

"I would rather you had done it for honour's sake." She said it out bravely, though she knew that it was the profounder confession of her feeling. He, however, was unable to take it that way.

"I thought so," he said. "Well, that is why I did it."

"I see. I wanted to know the truth; and now I know it."

"You don't know half of it—" His passion leapt to his tongue under the torture, but he held it down. He paused, knowing that this moment in which he stood was one of those moments which have the spirit and the power of eternity, and that it was his to save or to destroy it. So admirable indeed was his control that it had taken their own significance from his words, and she read into them another meaning. Her face was white with terror because of the thing she had said; but she still looked at him without flinching. She hardly realized that he was going, that he was trying to say good-bye.

"I will take the books—if you can keep them for me a little while."

Some perfect instinct told her that this was the only way of atonement for her error. He thanked her as if they had been speaking of a trifling thing.

She rose, holding the manuscript loosely in her clasped hands, and he half thought that she was going to give it back to him. He took it from her and threw it on the window-seat, and held her hands together for an instant in his own. He looked down at them, longing to stoop and kiss them, but forebore, because of his great love for her, and let them go. He went out quickly. He had sufficient self-command to find Kitty and thank her and take his leave.

As the door closed on him Lucia heard herself calling him back, with what intention she hardly knew, unless it were to return his poems. "Keith," she said softly—"Keith." But even to her own senses it was less a name than a sound that began in a sob and ended in a sigh.

Kitty found her standing in the window-place where he had left her. "Has anything happened?" she asked.

"I asked him to marry me, Kitty, and he wouldn't. That was all."

"Are you sure you did, dear? From the look of him I should have said it was the other way about."



CHAPTER LXXV

"I don't know what to think of it, Kitty. What do you think?"

"I think you've been playing with fire, dear. With the divine fire. It's the most dangerous of all, and you've got your little fingers burnt."

"Like Horace. He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire. I'm not a critic."

"That you most certainly are not."

"Still I used to understand him; and now I can't. I can't make it out at all."

"There's only one thing," said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came. "You haven't seen him for more than three years, and you can't tell what may have happened in between. He may have got entangled with another woman."

Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed it plausible. But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention. No other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the invading idea of Keith Rickman.

Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the evidence before her. The details which would have thrown light on the situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself. All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend's mind with a new torment. Lucia had dreaded Rickman's coming; she had lost all sense of security in his presence. Still she had understood him. And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in. Was it possible that she had never really understood?

Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always felt—in one way—absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.

How was it that she had never felt it before? Never felt it in the first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone? When he had appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent as glass, incapable of reservation or disguise? It was in those days (he had told her) that he had not been—good. And yet her own vision of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then. Even in that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected him. And in the second period of their friendship, when his character was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt. And now there was no end to her doubt. She could not tell which was the instinct she should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or now. What had become of her calm and lucid insight? Of the sympathy in which they had once stood each transparent to the other.

For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was beginning to keep her awake at night). She had made it impossible for him to respect her any more. He had his ideas of what a woman should and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like, and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia's mood rose from misery to anger). She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had judged her as he judged such women. And she had brought that judgement on herself.

In an ecstasy of shame she recalled the various episodes of their acquaintance, from the time when she had first engaged him to work for her (against his will), to the present intolerable moment. There rose before her in an awful vision that night when she had found him sleeping in the library; when she had stayed and risked the chances of his waking. Well, he could not think any the worse of her for that; because he had not waked. But she had risked it. The more she thought of it the more she saw what she had risked. He would always think of her as a woman who did risky things. Edith had said she had put herself in his power. She remembered how she had come between him and the woman whom he would have married but for her; how she had invited him to sit with her when the Beaver was away. He had liked it, but he must have had his own opinion of her all the same. That was another of the risky things. And of course he had taken advantage of it. That was the very worst of all. He had loved her in his way; she had been one of a series. Flossie had come before her. And before Flossie? All that was fine in him had turned against Flossie because of the feeling she inspired. And it had turned against her.

For now, when he had got over it, had forgotten that he had ever had that feeling, when all he wanted was to go his own way and let her go hers, she had tried to force herself upon him (Lucia was unaware of her violent distortion of the facts). He had come with his simple honourable desire for reparation; and she had committed the unpardonable blunder—she had mistaken his intentions. And for the monument and crown of her dishonour, she, Lucia Harden, had proposed to him and been rejected.

Her misery endured (with some merciful intermissions) for three weeks. Then Horace Jewdwine wrote and invited himself down for the first week-end in May.

"Can he come, Kitty?" she asked wearily.

"Of course he can, dear, if you want him,"

"I don't want him; but I don't mind his coming."

Kitty said to herself, "He has an inkling; Edith has been saying things; and it has brought him to the point." Otherwise she could not account for such an abrupt adventure on the part of the deliberate Horace. It was a Wednesday; and he proposed to come on Friday. He came on Friday. Kitty's observation was on the alert; but it could detect nothing that first evening beyond a marked improvement in Horace Jewdwine. With Lucia he was sympathetic, deferential, charming. He also laid himself out, a little elaborately, to be agreeable to Kitty.

In the morning he approached Lucia with a gift, brought for her birthday ("I thought," said Lucia, "he had forgotten that I ever had a birthday"). It was an early copy of Rickman's tragedy The Triumph of Life, just published. His keen eyes watched her handling it.

"He suspects," thought Kitty, "and he's testing her."

But Lucia's equanimity survived. "Am I to read it now?"

"As you like."

She carried the book up to her own room and did not appear till lunch-time. In her absence Horace seemed a little uneasy; but he went on making himself agreeable to Kitty. "He must be pretty desperate," thought she, "if he thinks it worth while." Apparently he did think it worth while, though he allowed no sign of desperation to appear. Lucia, equally discreet, avoided ostentatious privacy. They sat out all afternoon under the beechtrees while she read, flaunting The Triumph of Life in his very eyes. He watched every movement of her face that changed as it were to the cadence of the verse. It was always so, he remembered, when she was strongly moved. At last she finished and he smiled.

"You like your birthday present?"

"Very much. But Horace, he has done what you said was impossible."

"Anybody would have said it was impossible. Modern drama in blank verse, you know—"

"Yes. It ought to have been all wrong. But because he's both a great poet and a great dramatist, it's all right, you see. Look," she said, pointing to a passage that she dared not read. "Those are human voices. Could anything be simpler and more natural? But it's blank verse because it couldn't be more perfectly expressed in prose."

"Yes, yes. I wonder how he does it."

"It would have been impossible to anybody else."

"It remains impossible. If it's ever played, it will be played because of Rickman's stage-craft and inimitable technique, not because of his blank verse."

She put the book down; took up her work, and said no more. Horace seemed to have found his answer and to be satisfied. "A fool," thought Kitty; "but he shall have his chance." So she left them alone together that evening.

But Jewdwine was very far from being satisfied, either with Lucia or himself. Lucia had refused to play to him yesterday because she had a headache; she had refused to walk with him to-day because she was tired; and to-night she would not sit up to talk to him because she had another headache. That evening he had all but succumbed to a terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her attitude, that appealed to the authority on AEsthetics. He found himself wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had kissed her his sense of propriety would have obliged him to propose to her and marry her.

He almost wished he had yielded to that temptation, done that desperate deed. It would have at least settled the question once for all.

For Jewdwine had found himself a third time at the turning of the ways. He knew where he was; but not where he was going. It had happened with Jewdwine as it had with Isaac Rickman; as it happens to every man bent on serving two masters. He had forbidden his right hand all knowledge of his left. He lived in two separate worlds. In one, lit by the high, pure light of the idea, he stood comparatively alone, cheered in his intellectual solitude by the enthusiasm of his disciples. For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred imperishable flame. Some suffered no painful disenchantment for their pilgrimage; and when the world that knew Jewdwine imparted to them its wisdom they smiled the mystic smile of the initiated. But many had become shaken in their faith. One of these, having achieved a little celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any public assistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had assured him that the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." And this had been Jewdwine's own confession and defence.

But now he had gone down into Devonshire, as Rickman had once gone before him, to find himself. He had returned to Lucia as to his own purer soul. That night Jewdwine sat up face to face with himself and all his doubts; his problem being far more complicated than before. Three years ago it might have been very simply stated. Was he or was he not going to marry his cousin Lucia? But now, while personal inclination urged him to marry her, prudence argued that he would do better to marry a certain cousin of Mr. Fulcher's. His own cousin had neither money nor position. Mr. Fulcher's cousin had both. Once married to Miss Fulcher he could buy back Court House, if the Pallisers would give it up. The Cabinet Minister's cousin was in love with him, whereas he was well aware that his own cousin was not.

But then he had never greatly desired her to be so.

Jewdwine had neither respect nor longing for Miss Fulcher's passionate love. To his fragile temperament there was something infinitely more alluring in Lucia's virginal apathy. Her indifference (which he confused with her innocence) fascinated him; her reluctance was as a challenge to his languid blood. He was equally fascinated by her indifference to the income and position that were his. He admired that immaculate purity the more because he was not himself in these ways particularly pure. He loved money and position for their own sakes and hated himself for loving them. He would have liked to have been strong enough to despise these things as Lucia had always despised them. But he did not desire that she should go on despising them, any more than he desired that her indifference should survive the marriage ceremony. He pictured with satisfaction her gradual yielding to the modest luxury he had to offer her, just as he pictured the exquisite delaying dawn of her wifely ardour.

The truth was he had lived too long with Edith. The instincts of his nature cried out (as far as anything so well-regulated could be said to cry out) in the most refined of accents for a wife, for children and a home. He had his dreams of the holy faithful spouse, a spouse with great dog-like eyes and tender breast, fit pillow for the head of a headachy, literary man. Lucia had dog-like eyes, and of her tenderness he had never had a doubt. He had never forgotten that hot June day, the year before he left Oxford, when he lay in the hammock in the green garden and Lucia ministered to him. Before that there was a blessed Long Vacation when he had over-read himself into a nervous breakdown, and Lucia had soothed his headaches with the touch of her gentle hands. For the sake of that touch he would then have borne the worst headache man ever had.

And now it seemed that it was Lucia that was always having headaches. He had, in fact, begun to entertain the very gravest anxiety about her health. Her face and figure had grown thin; they were becoming less and less like the face and figure of the ideal spouse. Poor Lucia's arms offered no reliable support for a tired man.

To his annoyance Jewdwine found that he had to breakfast alone with his hostess, because of Lucia's headache.

"Lucia doesn't seem very strong," he said to Kitty, sternly, as if it had been Kitty's fault. "Don't you see it?"

"I have seen it for some considerable time."

"She wants rousing."

And Jewdwine, who was himself feeling the need of exercise, roused her by taking her for a walk up Harcombe Hill. Half-way up she turned a white face to him, smiling sweetly, sat down on the hillside, and bent her head upon her knees. He sat beside her and waited for her recovery with punctilious patience. His face wore an expression of agonized concern. But she could see that the concern was not there altogether on her account.

"Don't be frightened, Horace, you won't have to carry me home."

He helped her to her feet, not ungently, and was very considerate in accommodating his pace to hers, and in reassuring her when she apologized for having spoilt his morning. And then it was that she thought of Keith Rickman, of his gentleness and his innumerable acts of kindness and of care; and she said to herself, "He would not be impatient with me if I were ill."

She rested in her room that afternoon and Kitty sat with her. Kitty could not stand, she said, more than a certain amount of Horace Jewdwine.

"Lucia," she asked suddenly, "if Horace Jewdwine had asked you to marry him five years ago, would you have had him?"

"I don't know. I don't really know. He's a good man."

"You mean his morals are irreproachable. It's quite easy to have irreproachable morals if you have the temperament of an iceberg that has never broken loose from its Pole. Now I call Keith Rickman a saint, because he could so easily have been the other thing."

Lucia did not respond; and Kitty left her.

Kitty's question had set her thinking. Would she have married Horace if he had asked her five years ago? Why not? Between Horace and her there was the bond of kindred and of caste. He was a scholar; he had, or he once had, a beautiful mind full of noble thoughts of the kind she most admired. With Horace she would have felt safe from many things. All his ideas and feelings, all his movements could be relied on with an absolute assurance of their propriety. Horace would never do or say anything that could offend her feminine taste. In his love (she had been certain) there would never be anything painful, passionate, disturbing. She had dreamed of a love which should be a great calm light rather than a flame. There was no sort of flame about Horace. Was Horace a good man? Yes. That is to say he was a moral man. He would have come to her clean in body and in soul. She had vowed she would never marry a certain kind of man. And yet that was the kind of man Keith Rickman had been.

She had further demanded in her husband the finish of the ages. Who was more finished than Horace? Who more consummately, irreproachably refined? And yet her heart had grown more tender over Keith Rickman and his solecisms. And now it beat faster at the very thought of him, after Horace Jewdwine.

For Horace's coming had brought her understanding of Keith Rickman and herself. She knew now what had troubled her once clear vision of him. It was when she had loved him least that she had divined him best. Hers was not the facile heart that believes because it desires. It desired because it believed; and now it doubted because its belief was set so high.

And, knowing that she loved him, she thought of that last day when he had left her, and how he had taken her hands in his and looked at them, and she remembered and wondered and had hope.

Then it occurred to her that Horace would be leaving early the next morning, and that she really ought to go down to the drawing-room and talk to him.

Again by Kitty's mercy he had been given another chance. He was softened by a mood of valediction mingled with remorse. He was even inclined to be a little sentimental. Lucia, because her vision was indifferent therefore untroubled, could not but perceive the change in him. His manner had in it something of benediction and something of entreaty; his spirit brooded over, caressed and flattered hers. He deplored the necessity for his departure. "Et ego in Arcadia"—he quoted.

"But you'll go away to-morrow and become more—more Metropolitan than ever."

"Ah, Lucia, can't you leave my poor rag alone? Do you really think so badly of it?"

"Well, I was prouder of my cousin when he had The Museion."

"I didn't ask you what you thought of me. Perhaps I'm not very proud of myself."

"I don't suppose it satisfies your ambition—I should be sorry if it did."

"My ambition? What do you think it was?"

"It was, wasn't it—To be a great critic?"

"It depends on what you call great."

"Well, you came very near it once."

"When?"

"When you were editor of The Museion."

He smiled sadly. "The editor of The Museion, Lucia, was a very little man with a very big conceit of himself. I admit he made himself pretty conspicuous. So does every leader of a forlorn hope."

"Still he led it. What does the editor of Metropolis lead?"

"Public opinion, dear. He has—although you mightn't think it—considerable power."

Lucia was silent.

"He can make—or kill—a reputation in twenty-four hours."

"Does that satisfy your ambition?"

"Yes. It satisfies my ambition. But it doesn't satisfy me."

"I was afraid it didn't."

"You needn't be afraid, dear; for you know perfectly well what would."

"Do I know? Do you know yourself, Horace?"

"Yes, Lucia," he said gently; "after ten years. You may not be proud of your cousin—"

"I used to be proud of him always—or nearly always."

"When were you proud of him?"

"When he was himself; when he was sincere."

"I ought to be very proud of my cousin; for she is pitilessly sincere."

"Horace—"

"It is so, dear. Never mind, you needn't be proud of me, if you'll only care—"

"I have always cared."

"Or is it—nearly always?"

"Well—nearly always."

"You're right. I am insincere, I was insincere when I said you needn't be proud of me. I want you, I mean you to be."

"Do you mean to give up Metropolis, then?"

"Well, no. That's asking rather too much."

"I know it is."

"Do you hate it so much, Lucia? I wish you didn't."

"I have hated it so much, Horace, that I once wished I had been a rich woman, that you might be"—she was going to say "an honourable man."

"What's wrong with it? It's a better paper than the old one. There are better men on it, and its editor's a better man."

"Is he?"

"Yes. He's a simpler, humbler person, and—I should have thought—more possible to like."

In her heart Lucia admitted that it was so. There was a charm about this later Horace Jewdwine which was wanting in that high spirit that had essayed to move the earth. He had come down from his chilly altitudes to mix with men; he had shed the superstition of omnipotence, he was aware of his own weakness and humanized by it. The man was soiled but softened by his traffic with the world. There was moreover an indescribable pathos in the contrast presented by the remains of the old self, its loftiness, its lucidity, and the vulgarity with which he had wrapped it round. Jewdwine's intellectual splendour had never been so impressive as now when it showed thus tarnished and obscured.

"At any rate," he went on, "he is infinitely less absurd. He knows his limitations. Also his mistakes. He tried to turn the republic of letters into a limited monarchy. Now he has surrendered to the omnipotence of facts."

"You mean he has lowered his standard?"

"My dear girl, what am I to do with my standard? Look at the rabble that are writing. I can't compare Tompkins with Shakespeare or Brown with Sophocles. I'm lucky if I can make out that Tompkins has surpassed Brown this year as Brown surpassed Tompkins last year; in other words, that Tompkins has surpassed himself."

"And so you go on, looking lower and lower."

"N-n-no, Lucia. I don't look lower; I look closer, I see that there is something to be said for Tompkins after all. I find subtler and subtler shades of distinction between him and Brown. I become more just, more discriminating, more humane."

"I know how fine your work is, and that's just the pity of it. You might have been a great critic if you hadn't wasted yourself on little things and little men."

"If a really big man came along, do you think I should look at them? But he doesn't come. I've waited for him ten years, Lucia, and he hasn't come."

"Oh, Horace—"

"He hasn't. Show me a big man, and I'll fall down and worship him. Only show him me."

"That's your business, isn't it, not mine? Still, I can show you one, not very far off, in fact very near."

"Too near for us to judge him perhaps. Who is he?"

"If I'm not mistaken, he's a sort of friend of yours."

"Keith Rickman? Oh—"

"Do you remember the day we first talked about him?"

He did indeed. He remembered how unwilling he had been to talk about him; and he was still more unwilling now. He wanted, and Lucia knew that he wanted, to talk about himself.

"It's ten years ago," she said. "Have you been waiting all this time to see him?"

He coloured. "I saw him before you did, Lucia. I saw him a very long way off. I was the first to see."

"Were you? Then—oh Horace, if you saw all those years ago why haven't you said so?"

"I have said so, many times."

"Whom have you said it to?"

"To you for one. To every one, I think, who knows him. They'll bear me out."

"The people who know him? What was the good of that? You should have said it to the people who don't know him—to the world."

"You mean I should have posed as a prophet?"

"I mean that what you said you might have written."

"Ah, litera scripta manet. It isn't safe to prophesy. Remember, I saw him a very long way off. Nobody had a notion there was anybody there."

"You could have given them a notion."

"I couldn't. The world, Lucia, is not like you or me. It has no imagination. It wouldn't have seen, and it wouldn't have believed. I should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing behind it. And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game. In the first place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets even when they're right."

"Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of butter."

"It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things. When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world retaliates and offers them a stone. And that stone, I need not tell you, has no butter on it."

"I see. You were afraid. You haven't the courage of your opinion."

"And I haven't much opinion of my courage. I own to being afraid."

"Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?"

"My first duty is to the public—my public; not to my friends. Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet—I think he is—but if my public doesn't want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can't insist on their hearing, can I?"

"No, Horace, after all you've told me, I don't believe you can."

"Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it."

"I'm to admire your frankness, am I? You say you're afraid. But you said just now you had such power."

"If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the role of Vates I should have lost my power. Nobody would have listened to me. I began that way, by preaching over people's heads. The Museion was a pulpit in the air. I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary transcendentalism. Nobody listened. When I condescended to come down and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened. It wouldn't have done Rickman any good if I'd pestered people with him. But when the time comes I shall speak out."

"I daresay, when the time comes—it will come too—when he has made his name with no thanks to you, then you'll be the first to say 'I told you so.' It would have been a greater thing to have helped him when he needed it."

"I did help him. He wouldn't be writing now if it wasn't for me."

"Do you see much of him?"

"Not much. It isn't my fault," he added in answer to her reproachful eyes. "He's shut himself up with Maddox in a stuffy little house at Ealing."

"Does that mean that he's very badly off?"

"Well, no; I shouldn't say so. He's got an editorship. But he isn't the sort that's made for getting on. In many things he is a fool."

"I admire his folly more than some people's wisdom."

From the look in Lucia's eyes Jewdwine was aware that his cousin no longer adored him. Did she adore Rickman?

"You're a little hard on me, I think. After all, I was the first to help him."

"And the last. Are you quite sure you helped him? How do you know you didn't hinder him? You kept him for years turning out inferior work for you, when he might have been giving us his best."

"He might—if he'd been alive to do it."

"I'm only thinking of what you might have done. The sort of thing you've done for other people—Mr. Fulcher, for instance."

Jewdwine blushed as he had never blushed before. He was not given to that form of self-betrayal.

"You said just now you could either kill a book in twenty-four hours, or make it—did you say?—immortal."

"I might have said I could keep it alive another twenty-four hours."

"You know the reputations you have made for people."

"I do know them. I've made enough of them to know. The reputations I've made will not last. The only kind that does last is the kind that makes itself. Do you seriously suppose a man like Rickman needs my help? I am a journalist, and the world that journalists are compelled to live in is very poor and small. He's in another place altogether. I couldn't dream of treating him as I treat, say, Rankin or Fulcher. The best service I could do him was to leave him alone—to keep off and give him room."

"Room to stand in?"

"No. Room to grow in, room to fight in—"

"Room to measure his length in when he falls?"

"If you like. Rickman's length will cover a considerable area."

Lucia looked at her cousin with genuine admiration. How clever, how amazingly clever he was! She knew and he knew that he had failed in generosity to Rickman; that he had been a more than cautious critic and a callous friend. She had been prepared to be nice to him if they had kept Rickman out of their conversation; but as the subject had arisen she had meant to give Horace a terribly bad quarter of an hour; she had meant to turn him inside out and make him feel very mean and pitiful and small. And somehow it hadn't come off. Instead of diminishing as he should have done, Horace had worked himself gradually up to her height, had caught flame from her flame, and now he was consuming her with her own fire. It was she who had taken, the view most degrading to the man she admired; she who would have dragged her poet down to earth and put him on a level with Rankin and Fulcher and such people. Horace would have her believe that his own outlook was the clearer and more heavenly; that he understood Rickman better; that he saw that side of him that faced eternity.

His humility, too, was pathetic and disarmed her indignation. At the same time he made it appear that this was a lifting of the veil, a glimpse of the true Jewdwine, the soul of him in its naked simplicity and sincerity. And she was left uncertain whether it were not so.

"Even so," she said gently; "think of all you will have missed."

"Missed, Lucia?"

"Yes, missed. I think, to have believed in any one's greatness—the greatness of a great poet—to have been allowed to hold in your hands the pure, priceless thing, before the world had touched it—to have seen what nobody else saw—to feel that through your first glorious sight of him he belonged to you as he never could belong to the world, that he was your own—that would be something to have lived for. It would be greatness of a kind."

He bowed his head as it were in an attitude as humble and reverent as her own. "And yet," he said, "the world does sometimes see its poet and believe in him."

"It does—when he works miracles."

"Someday he will work his miracle."

"And when the world runs after him you will follow."

"I shall not be very far behind."



CHAPTER LXXVI

He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.

They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.

By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication of The Triumph of Life. The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks. Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more. He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.

Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived passionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?

She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.

"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."

"I always said he would."

"You doubted—once."

"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."

"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."

She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.

"Where is he, Horace?"

"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the possibility of the great poet's material success.

"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining here on the tenth."

Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality, perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity—no. It rose up before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the spectacle of Horace's abasement.

Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal; and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama." There the author of the Prolegomena to AEsthetics, the apostle of the Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been his discovery in the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.

He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have said."

"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed it; but not now."

He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article, his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself. Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that he was justified in his changes of attitude. If his conscience joined with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short? Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the Prolegomena to AEsthetics? The Prolegomena to AEsthetics was not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not a prison.

But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it possible that he, the author of the Prolegomena, had ceased to care about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he, the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very imposing figure by his philosophic attitude. In London he had found that the same attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous. Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by the Prolegomena. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own damnation.



CHAPTER LXXVII

Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amusement in discussing whether the great dramatist were Maddox's discovery or Jewdwine's. With the readers of Metropolis he passed as Jewdwine's—which was all that Jewdwine wanted. With the earnest aspiring public, striving to admire Keith Rickman because they had been told they ought to, he passed as their own. The few who had known him from the first knew also that poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover themselves. Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the absurd pretension. Enough that he lived, and was known to live, with Rickman as his friend.

They shared that little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his bride. It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the religious passion of his half-Celtic soul.

The poet had trusted the honour and the judgement of his friend so far as to appoint him his literary executor. Thus Maddox became possessed of the secret of the Sonnets. And here a heavy strain was put upon his judgement and his honour. Maddox had guessed that there was a power in Rickman's life more terrible than Jewdwine, who after all had never really touched him. There was, Maddox had always known, a woman somewhere. A thousand terrors beset the devotee when he noticed that since fame had lighted upon Rickman the divinity had again begun to furnish his part (the holy part) of the temple in a manner unmistakably suggestive of mortality. Maddox shuddered as he thought of the probable destination of that upper chamber which was the holiest of all. And now this terror had become a certainty. The woman existed; he knew her name; she was a cousin of the detestable Jewdwine; the Sonnets could never be given to the world as long as she withheld her consent, and apparently she did withhold it. More than this had not been revealed to Maddox, and it was in vain that he tried to penetrate the mystery.

His efforts were not the most delicate imaginable. One evening, sitting with Rickman in that upper chamber, he entered on the subject thus—

"Seen anything of the Spinkses lately?"

"I called there last Saturday."

"How is the divine Flossie?"

"Flourishing. At least there's another baby. By the way Maddy you were grossly wrong about her there. The Beaver is absolutely devoid of the maternal instinct. She's decent to the baby, but she's positively brutal to Muriel Maud. How Spinky—He protests and there are horrid scenes; but through them all I believe the poor chap's in love with her."

"Curious illusion."

Curious indeed. It had seemed incredible to Rickman when he had seen the Beaver pushing her first-born from her knee.

"Good Heavens, Rickman, what a deliverance for you."

"I wonder if he's happy."

"Can't say; but possibly he holds his own. You see, Spinky's position is essentially sound. My theory is—"

But Rickman had no desire for a theory of marriage as propounded by Maddox. He had always considered that in these matters Maddox was a brute.

Maddox drew his own conclusions from the disgusted protest. He remembered how once, when he had warned Rickman of the love of little women, Rickman had said it was the great women who were dangerous. The lady to whom he had entrusted the immortality of his Sonnets would be one of these. As the guardian of that immortality Maddox conceived it was his duty to call on the lady and prevail on her to give them up. Under all his loyalty he had the audacity of the journalist who sticks at nothing for his own glorious end.

There was after all a certain simplicity about Maddox. He considered himself admirably equipped by nature for this delicate mission. He was, besides, familiar with what he called the "society woman," and he believed that he knew how to deal with her. Maddox always had the air of being able to push his way anywhere by the aid of his mighty shoulders. He sent in his card without a misgiving.

Lucia knew that Maddox was a friend of Keith Rickman's, and she received him with a courtesy that would have disarmed a man less singularly determined. It was only when he had stated his extraordinary purpose that her manner became such that (so he described it afterwards) it would have "set a worm's back up." And Maddox was no worm.

It was a little while before Lucia realized that this rather overpowering visitor was requesting her to "give up" certain sonnets of Keith Rickman's, written in ninety-three. "I don't quite understand. Are you asking me to give you the manuscript or to give my consent to its publication?"

"Well—both. I have to ask you because he never would do it himself."

"Why should he not?"

"Oh, well, you know his ridiculous notions of honour."

"I do indeed. I daresay some people would consider them ridiculous."

It was this speech, Maddox confessed, that first set his back up. He was irritated more by the calm assumption of proprietorship in Rickman than by the implied criticism of himself.

"Do you mind telling me," she continued, still imperturbably, "how you came to know anything about it?"

Maddox stiffened. "I am Mr. Rickman's oldest and most intimate friend, and he has done me the honour to make me his literary executor."

"Did he also give you leave to settle his affairs beforehand?"

Maddox shrugged his shoulders by way of a reply.

"If he did not," said Lucia, "there's nothing more to be said."

"Pardon me, there is a great deal more to be said. I don't know whether you have any personal reason for objecting—"

She coloured and was silent.

"If it's pride, I should have thought most women would have been prouder—" (A look from Lucia warned him that he would do well to refrain from thinking.) "Oh, well, for all I know you might have fifty good reasons. The question is, are you justified in sacrificing a work of genius to any mere personal feeling?"

He had her there, and she knew it. She was silently considering the question. Three years ago she would have had no personal feeling in the matter beyond pride in the simple dedication. Now that personal feeling had come in and had concentrated itself upon that work of genius, and made it a thing so sacred and so dear to her, she shrank with horror from the vision of publicity. Besides, it was all of Keith Rickman that was left to her. His other works were everybody's property; therefore she clung the more desperately to that one which, as he had said, belonged to nobody but her. And Mr. Maddox had no right to question her. Instead of answering him she moved her chair a little farther from him and from the light.

Now Maddox had the coldness as well as the passion of the Celt. He was not touched by Lucia's beauty, nor yet by the signs of illness or fatigue manifest in her face and all her movements. Her manner irritated him; it seemed the feminine counterpart of her cousin's insufferable apathy. He felt helpless before her immobility. But he meant to carry his point—by brute force if necessary.

But not yet. "I'm not asking you to give up a mere copy of verses. The Sonnets are unique—even for Rickman; and for one solitary lady to insist on suppressing them—well, you know, it's a large order."

This time she indeed showed some signs of animation. "How do you know they are unique? Did he show you them?"

"No, he did not. I found them among his papers when he was in hospital."

"In hospital?" She sat up and looked at him steadily and without emotion.

"Yes; I had to overhaul his things—we thought he was dying—and the Sonnets—"

"Never mind the Sonnets now, please. Tell me about his illness. What was it?"

Again that air of imperious proprietorship! "Enteric," he said bluntly, "and some other things."

"Where was he before they took him to the hospital?"

"He was—if you want to know—in a garret in a back street off Tottenham Court Road."

"What was he doing there?"

"To the best of my belief, he was starving. Do you find the room too close?"

"No, no. Go on."

Maddox went on. He was enjoying the sensation he was creating. He went on happily, piling up the agony. Since she would have it he was not reticent of detail. He related the story of the Rankins' dinner. He described with diabolically graphic touches the garret in Howland Street. "We thought he'd been drinking, you know, and all the time he was starving."

"He was starving—" she repeated slowly to herself.

"He was not doing it because he was a poet. It seems he had to pay some debt, or thought he had. The poor chap talked about it when he was delirious. Oh—let me open that window."

"Thank you. You say he was delirious. Were you with him then?"

Maddox leapt to his conclusion. Miss Lucia Harden had something to conceal. He gathered it from her sudden change of attitude, from her interrogation, from her faintness and from the throbbing terror in her voice. That was why she desired the suppression of the Sonnets.

"Were you with him?" she repeated.

"No. God forgive me!"

"Nobody was with him—before they took him to the hospital?"

"Nobody, my dear lady, whom you would call anybody. He owes his life to the charity of a drunken prostitute."

She was woman, the eternal, predestined enemy of Rickman's genius. Therefore he had determined not to spare her, but to smite her with words like sledge-hammers.

And to judge by the look of her he had succeeded. She had turned away from him to the open window. She made no sign of suffering but for the troubled rising and falling of her breast. He saw in her a woman mortally smitten, but smitten, he imagined, in her vanity.

"Have I persuaded you," he said quietly, "to give up those Sonnets?"

"You shall have a copy. If Mr. Rickman wants the original he must come for it himself."

"Thanks." Maddox had ceased to be truculent, having gained his end. His blue eyes twinkled with their old infantile devilry. "Thanks. It's awfully nice of you. But—couldn't you make it seem a little more spontaneous? You see, I don't want Rickman to know I had to ask you for them." He had a dim perception of inconsistency in his judgement of the lady; since all along he had been trusting her generosity to shelter his indiscretion.

Lucia smiled even in her anguish. "That I can well imagine. The copy shall be sent to him."

And Maddox considered himself dismissed. He wondered why she called him back to ask for the number of that house in Howland Street.

That afternoon she dragged herself there, that she might torture her eyes because they had not seen, and her heart because it had not felt.



CHAPTER LXXVIII

At Jewdwine's heart there was trouble and in his mind perfect peace. For he knew his own mind at last, though he was still a little indefinite as to the exact condition of his heart.

Three days after Maddox's extraordinary disclosures Lucia had become most obviously and inconsiderately ill; and had given her cousin Edith a great deal of trouble as well as a severe fright, till Kitty, also frightened, had carried her off to Devonshire out of the house of the Jewdwines. To Horace the working of events was on the whole beneficent. Lucia's change of attitude, her illness, her abrupt departure, though too unpleasant for his fastidious mind to dwell upon, had committed that mind irretrievably to the path of prudence.

So prudent was he, that of his saner matrimonial project the world in general took no note. Secure of the affections of Miss Fulcher, he had propitiated rumour by the fiction of his engagement to Lucia. Rumour, adding a touch of certainty to the story, had handed it on to Rickman by way of Maddox and Miss Roots. He there upon left off beautifying his house at Ealing, and agreed with Maddox that after Paris in November they should go on to Italy together, and that he would winter there for his health.

But by November there came more rumours, rumours of the breaking off of the engagement; rumours of some mysterious illness of Lucia's as the cause. They reached Rickman in the week before the date fixed for the production of The Triumph of Life in Paris. He was paying a farewell call on Miss Roots, who became inscrutable at the mention of Lucia's name. He accused her with violence of keeping the truth from him, and implored her with pathos to tell it him at once. But Miss Roots had no truth, no certain truth to tell; there were only rumours. Miss Roots knew nothing but that Lucia had been lying on her back for months; she conjectured that possibly there might be something the matter with her spine. Her mother had been delicate, and Sir Frederick, well, the less said about Sir Frederick the better. Rickman retreated, followed by Miss Roots. As for an engagement, she was not aware that there ever had been one; there was once, she admitted half-way downstairs, an understanding, probably misunderstood. He had better ask Horace Jewdwine straight out. "But," she assured him from the doorstep, "it would take an earthquake to get the truth out of him."

He flung himself into a hansom, and was one with the driver in imprecation at the never-ending, ever-increasing gradient of the hill. The delay, however, enabled him to find Jewdwine at home and alone. He was aware that the interview presented difficulties, but none deterred him.

Jewdwine, questioned as to his engagement, betrayed no surprise; for with Rickman the unusual was to be expected. He might not have condescended to answer Rickman, his obscure disciple, but he felt that some concession must be made to the illustrious dramatist.

There had been, he admitted, an understanding between him and Miss Harden. It hardly amounted to an engagement; and it had been cancelled on the score of health.

"Of her health?"

The compression of Jewdwine's lips intimated that the great poet had sinned (not for the first time) against convention.

"She is ill, then?"

"I said on the score of health. We're first cousins, and it is not always considered advisable—"

"I see. Then that's all over."

"At any rate I'm not going to take any risks."

Rickman pondered that saying for a while. "Do you mean you're not going to let her take any risks?"

Jewdwine said nothing, but endeavoured to express by his manner a certain distaste for the conversation.

("Or does he mean," thought Rickman, "that he won't risk having a delicate wife on his hands?")

"It's not as if I didn't know," he persisted, "I know she—she lies on her back and can't move. Is it her spine?"

"No."

"Or her heart?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Is it something worse?"

Jewdwine was silent.

And in the silence Rickman's mind wandered free among all imaginable horrors and forebodings. At last, out of the silence, there appeared to him one more terrible than the rest. He saw what Jewdwine must have meant. He gathered it, not from anything he had said, but from what he refused to say, from the sternness of his face, from his hesitations, his reserves. Jewdwine had created the horror for him as vividly as if he had shaped it into words.

"You needn't tell me what it is. Do you mind telling me whether it's curable or not?"

"My dear Rickman, if I knew why you are asking all these questions—"

"They must seem extraordinary. And my reason for asking them is more extraordinary still."

They measured each other with their eyes. "Then, I think," said Jewdwine quietly, "I must ask you for your reason."

"The reason is that if you're not going to marry her I am."

"That," said Jewdwine, "is by no means certain. There is not a single member of her family living except my sister and myself. Therefore I consider myself responsible. If I were her father or her brother I would not give my consent to her marrying, and I don't give it now."

"Oh. And why not?"

"For many reasons. Those that applied in my own case are sufficient."

"You only said there was a risk, and that you weren't going to take it. Now I mean to take it. You see, those fools of doctors may be mistaken. But whether they're mistaken or not, I shall marry her just the same."

"The risk, you see, involves her happiness; and judging by what I know of your temperament—"

"What do you know about my temperament?"

"You know perfectly well what I know about it."

"I know. You don't approve of my morals. I don't altogether blame you, considering that since I knew Miss Harden I very nearly married someone else. My code is so different from yours that I should have considered marrying that woman a lapse from virtue. So the intention may count against me, if you like."

"Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean. Neither of us is fit to marry Miss Harden—and I have given her up." He said it with the sublime assurance of Jewdwine, the moral man.

"Does it—does her illness—make all that difference? It makes none to me."

"Oh, well—all right—if you think you can make her happy."

"My dear Jewdwine, I don't think, I know." He smiled that smile that Jewdwine had seen once or twice before. "It may be arrogant to suppose that I'll succeed where better men might fail; still—" He rose and drew himself up to all his slender height—"in some impossible things I have succeeded."

"They are not the same things."

"No; but in both, you see, it all depends upon the man." With that he left him.

As Rickman's back turned on him, Jewdwine perceived his own final error. As once before in judging the genius he had reckoned without the man, so now, in judging the man he had reckoned without his genius.

This horrid truth came home to him in his solitude. In the interminable watches of the night Jewdwine acknowledged himself a failure; and a failure for which there was no possible excuse. He had had every conceivable advantage that a man could have. He had been born free; free from all social disabilities; free from pecuniary embarrassment; free from the passions that beset ordinary men. And he had sold himself into slavery. He had opinions; he was packed full of opinions, valuable opinions; but he had never had the courage of them. He had always been a slave to other people's opinions. Rickman had been born in slavery, and he had freed himself. When Rickman stood before him, superb in his self-mastery, he had felt himself conquered by this man, whom, as a man, he had despised. Rickman's errors had been the errors of one who risks everything, who never deliberates or counts the cost. And in their repeated rivalries he had won because he had risked everything, when he, Jewdwine, had lost because he would risk nothing.

He had lost ever since the beginning. He had meant to discover this great genius; to befriend him; to protect him with his praise; eventually to climb on his shoulders into fame. And he had not discovered him; and as for climbing on his shoulders, he had been shaken off with one shrug of them. There had been risk in passing judgement on young Rickman, and he had not taken the risk. Therefore he had failed as a critic. He had waited to found an incorruptible review. It had been a risky proceeding, and he had not taken the risk. His paper was a venal paper, sold like himself to the public he despised. Of all that had ever appeared in it, nothing would live, nothing but a few immortal trifles, signed S.K.R. He had failed pretty extensively as an editor. Last of all he had wanted to marry his cousin Lucia; but there was risk in marrying her, and he would not take the risk, and Rickman would marry her. He had failed most miserably as a man.

With that Jewdwine turned on his pillow, and consoled himself by thinking of Miss Fulcher and her love.



CHAPTER LXXIX

Lucia had been lying still all the afternoon on her couch in the drawing-room; so still that Kitty thought she had been sleeping. But Kitty was mistaken.

"Kitty, it's past five, isn't it?"

"Yes, dear; a quarter past."

"It'll be all over by this time to-morrow. Do you think he'll be very terrible?"

"No, dear. I think he'll be very kind and very gentle."

"Not if he thinks I'm shamming."

"He won't think that." ("I wish he could," said Kitty to herself.)

They were waiting for the visit of Sir Wilfrid Spence. The Harmouth doctor had desired a higher light on the mysterious illness that kept Lucia lying for ever on her back. It might have been explained, he said, if she had suffered lately some deep mental or moral shock; but Lucia had not confessed to either, and in the absence of any mental cause it would be as well, said the Harmouth doctor, to look for a physical one. The fear at the back of the Harmouth doctor's mind was sufficiently revealed by his choice of the specialist, Sir Wilfrid Spence.

"Do you think I'm shamming, Kitty? Sometimes I think I am, and sometimes I'm not quite sure. You know, if you think about your spine long enough you can imagine that it's very queer. But I haven't been thinking about my spine. It doesn't interest me. Dr. Robson would have told me if he thought I was shamming, because I asked him to. There's one thing makes me think it isn't fancy. I keep on wanting to do things. I want—you don't know how I want to go to the top of Harcombe Hill. And my ridiculous legs won't let me. And all the while, Kitty, I want to play. It's such a long time since I made my pretty music."

A long time indeed, as Kitty was thinking sadly. Lucia had not made her pretty music since that night six months ago when she had played to please Keith Rickman.

"Things keep on singing in my head, and I want to play them. It stands to reason that I would if I could. But I can't. Oh, how I do talk about myself! Kitty, there must be a fine, a heavy fine, of sixpence, every time I talk about myself."

"I shouldn't make much by it," said Kitty.

Lucia closed her eyes, and Kitty went on with the manuscript she was copying. After a silence of twenty minutes Lucia opened her eyes again. They rested longingly on Kitty at her work.

"Kitty," she said, "Do you know, I sometimes think it would be better to sell those books. I can't bear to do it when he gave them to me. But I do believe I ought to. The worst of it is I should have to ask him to do it for me."

"Don't do anything in a hurry, dear. Wait and see," said Kitty cheerfully.

It seemed to Lucia that there was nothing to wait for now. She wondered why Kitty said that, and whether it meant that they thought her worse than they liked to say and whether that was why Sir Wilfrid Spence was coming?

"Kitty," she said again, "I want you to promise me something. Supposing—it's very unlikely—but supposing after all I were to go and die—"

"I won't suppose anything of the sort. People don't go and die of nervous exhaustion. You'll probably do it fifty years hence, but that is just the reason why I won't have you harrowing my feelings this way now."

"I know I've had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that it's horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too. I only meant if I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else—you wouldn't tell him, would you?"

"Well, dear, of course I won't mention it if you wish me not to—but he'd be sure to see it in the papers."

"Kitty—you know what I mean. He couldn't see that in the papers. He couldn't see it anywhere unless you told him. And if you did, it might make him very uncomfortable, you know."

Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid Spence, was tortured by this conversation. She had half a mind to say, "You don't seem to think how uncomfortable you're making me." But she forbore. Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve. She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in Dresden. It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, "a pretty illness," and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or word.

"I shouldn't mind anything, if only I'd been with him when he was ill. But perhaps he'd rather I hadn't been there. I think it's that, you know, that I really cannot bear."

Kitty would have turned to comfort her, but for the timely entrance of Robert. He brought a letter for Lucia which Kitty welcomed as an agreeable distraction. It was from Horace Jewdwine. "Any news?" she asked presently.

"Yes. What do you think? He's going to Paris to-morrow. Then he's going on to Italy—to Alassio, with Mr. Maddox."

"Horace Jewdwine and Mr. Maddox? What next?"

"It isn't Horace that's going." She gave the letter to Kitty because she had shrunk lately from speaking of Keith Rickman by his name.

"That's a very different tale," said Kitty

"I'm so glad he's going. That was what he always wanted to do. Do you remember how I asked him to be my private secretary? Now I'm his private secretary; which is as it should be."

"You mean I am."

"Yes. Do you think you could hurry up so that he'll get them before he goes? Poor Kitty—I can't bear your having all these things to do for me."

"Why not? You'd do them for me, if it was I, not you."

"I wish it were you. I mean I wish I were doing things for you. But you haven't done them all, Kitty. I did some. I forget how many."

"You did three, darling."

"Only three? And there are nine and twenty. Still, he'll see that I began them. Kitty—do you think he'll wonder and guess why I left off?"

"Oh no, he isn't as clever as all that."

"You mustn't tell him. You're writing the letter, dear, now, aren't you? You mustn't say a word about my illness. Only tell him I'm so glad to hear he's going to Alassio with Mr. Maddox."

"I don't think any the better of him for that. Fancy going to Italy with that brute of a man!"

"He wasn't really a brute. He only said those things because he cared for him. You can't blame him for that."

"I don't blame him for that. I blame him for being a most appalling bounder."

"Do you mind not talking about him any more?"

"No dear, I don't a bit."

Lucia lay very quiet for some time before she spoke again. "They can't say now I sacrificed his genius to my pride. You will catch the post, won't you? What a plague I am, but if they're posted before seven he'll get them in the morning and he'll have time to write. Perhaps he won't be starting till the afternoon."

In the morning she again betrayed her mind's preoccupation. "He must have got them by now. Kitty, did you hear how the wind blew in the night? He'll have an awful crossing."

"Well then, let's hope he won't be very ill; but he isn't going by the Bay of Biscay, dear."

The wind blew furiously all morning, and when it dropped a little towards evening it was followed by a pelting rain.

"He's at Dover now."

"In a mackintosh," said Kitty by way of consolation. But Lucia, uncomforted, lay still, listening to the rain. It danced like a thousand devils on the gravel of the courtyard. Suddenly she sat up, raising herself by her hands.

"Kitty!" she cried. "He's coming. He is really. By the terrace. Can't you hear?"

Kitty heard nothing but the rain dancing on the courtyard. And the terrace led into it by the other wing. It was impossible that Lucia could have heard footsteps there.

"But I know, Kitty, I know. It's his walk. And he always came that way."

She slipped her feet swiftly on to the floor, and to Kitty's amazement sat up unsupported. Kitty in terror ran to her and put her arm round her, but Lucia freed herself gently from her grasp. She was trembling in all her body. Kitty herself heard footsteps in the courtyard now. They stopped suddenly and the door-bell rang.

"Do go to him, Kitty—and tell him. And send him here to me."

Kitty went, and found Keith Rickman standing in the hall. Her instinct told her that Lucia must be obeyed. And as she sent him in to her, she saw through the open door that Lucia rose to her feet, and came to him and never swayed till his arms held her.

She clung to him and he drew her closer and lifted her and carried her to her couch, murmuring things inarticulate yet so plain that even she could not misunderstand.

"I thought you were going to Paris?" she said.

"I'm not. I'm here."

She sat up and laid her hands about him, feeling his shoulders and his sleeves.

"How wet your coat is."

He kissed her and she held her face against his that was cold with the wind and rain; she took his hands and tried to warm them in her own, piteously forgetful of herself, as if it were he, not she, who needed tenderness.

"Lucy—are you very ill, darling?"

"No. I am very, very well."

He thought it was one of those things that people say when they mean that death is well. He gathered her to him as if he could hold her back from death. She looked smiling into his face.

"Keith," she said, "you didn't have a mackintosh. You must go away at once to Robert and get dry."

"Not now, Lucy. Let me stay."

"How long can you stay?"

"As long as ever you'll let me."

"Till you go to Italy?"

"Very well. Till I go to Italy."

"When are you going?"

"Not till you're well enough to go with me."

"How did you know I was ill?"

"Because I saw that Kitty had had to finish what your dear little hands had begun."

"Ah—you should have had them sooner—"

"Why should I have had them at all? Do you think I would have published them before I knew I had dedicated them to my wife?"

"Keith—dear—you mustn't talk about that yet."

She hid her face on his shoulder; he lifted it and looked at it as if it could have told him what he had to know. It told him nothing; it had not changed enough for that. It was like a beautiful picture blurred, and the sweeter for the blurring.

He laid his hand over her heart. At his touch it leapt and throbbed violently, suggesting a new terror.

"Darling, how fast your heart beats. Am I doing it harm?"

"No, it doesn't mind."

"But am I tiring it?"

"No, no, you're resting it."

She lay still a long time without speaking, till at last he carried her upstairs and delivered her into Kitty's care. At the open door of her room he saw a nurse in uniform standing ready to receive her. Her presence there was ominous of the unutterable things he feared.

"Kitty," said Lucia, when they were alone. "It looks as if I had been shamming after all. What do you think of me?"

"I think perhaps Sir Wilfrid Spence needn't come down to-morrow."

"Perhaps not. And yet it would be better to know. If there really is anything wrong I couldn't let him marry me. It would be awful. I want to be sure, Kitty, for his sake."

Kitty felt sure enough; and her certainty grew when Lucia came down the next morning. But she was unable to impart her certainty to Keith. The most he could do was to hide his anxiety from Lucia. It wanted but a day to the coming of the great specialist; and for that day they made such a brave show of happiness that they deceived both Kitty and themselves. Kitty, firm in her conviction, left them to themselves that afternoon while she went into Harmouth to announce to Lucia's doctor the miracle of her recovery.

When she had left the house a great peace fell on them. They had so much to say to each other, and so little time to say it in, when to-morrow might cut short their happiness. But Lucia was sorry for Kitty.

"Poor Kitty," said she, "she's going to marry her cousin Charlie Palliser. But that won't be the same."

"The same as what?"

"The same as my marrying you. Oh, Keith, that's one of the things I said we weren't to say. Do you know, once Kitty was angry with me. She said I was playing with fire—the divine fire. Ought I to have been afraid of it? Just a little bit in awe?"

"What? Of the divine fire? I gave it you, dearest, to play with—or to warm your little hands by."

"And now you've given it me to keep, to put my hands round it—so—and take care of it and see that it never goes out. I can do that, can't I, whatever happens?"

There was always that refrain: Whatever happens.

"I keep forgetting it doesn't really belong to me; it belongs to everybody, to the whole world. I believe I'm jealous."

"Of the British public? It doesn't really love me, Lucy, nor I it."

"Whether it does or not, you do remember that I loved you first—before anybody ever knew?"

"I do indeed."

"It is a shame to be so glad because Kitty is away."

Yet she continued to rejoice in the happiness that came of their solitude. It was Keith, not Kitty, who arranged her cushions for her and covered her feet; Keith, not Kitty, who poured out tea for her, and brought it her, and sat beside her afterwards, leaning over her and stroking her soft hair, as Kitty loved to do.

"Lucy," he said suddenly, "can you stand living with me in a horrid little house in a suburb?"

"I should love it. Dear little house."

"Maddox is in it now; but we'll turn him out. You don't know Maddox?"

She shuddered, and he drew the rug in closer about her.

"It's such a tiny house, Lucy; it would all go into this room."

"This room," said Lucy, "is much too large."

"There's only room for you and me in it."

"All the better, so long as there's room for me."

"And the walls are all lath and plaster. When Maddox is in another room I can hear him breathing."

"And when I'm in another room I shall hear you breathing; and then I shall know you're alive when I'm afraid you're not. I'm glad the walls are all lath and plaster."

"But it isn't a pretty house, Lucy."

"It will be a pretty house when I'm in it," said she, and was admitted to have had the best of the argument.

"Then, if you really don't mind, we shan't have to wait. Not a week, if you're ready to come to me."

But Lucia's face was sad. "Keith—darling—don't make plans till we know what Sir Wilfrid Spence says."

"I shall, whatever he says. But I suppose I must consult him before I take you to Alassio."

For still at his heart, under all its happiness, there lay that annihilating doubt; the doubt and the fear that had been sown there by Horace Jewdwine. He could see for himself that one of his terrors was baseless; but there remained that other more terrible possibility. None of them had dared to put it into words; but it was implied, reiterated, in the name of Sir Wilfrid Spence. He had moreover a feeling that this happiness of his was too perfect, that it must be taken away from him.

He confided his trouble to Kitty that night, sitting up over the drawing-room fire. Lucia's doctor had come and gone.

"What did he say, Kitty?"

"He says there's no need for Sir Wilfrid Spence to see her at all. He is going to wire to him not to come."

He gave a sigh of relief. Then his eyes clouded.

"No. He must come. I'd rather he came."

"But why? He isn't a nerve specialist."

He shuddered. "I know. That's why I must have him. I can't trust these local men."

"It will be horribly expensive, Keith. And it's throwing money away. Dr. Robson said so."

"That's my affair."

"Oh well, as for that, it was all arranged for."

"Nobody has any right to arrange for it but me."

"Much better arrange for a good time at Alassio."

"No. I want to be absolutely certain. You tell me she's perfectly well, and that doctor of yours swears she is, and I think it; and yet I can't believe it. I daren't."

"That's because you're not feeling very well yourself."

"I know that in some ways she is getting stronger every minute; but you see, I can't help thinking what that other man said."

"What other man?"

"Well, the Jewdwines' doctor."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing. It was Jewdwine. He told me—well—that was why their engagement was broken off. Because she wasn't strong enough to marry."

Kitty's eyes blazed. "He told you that?"

"Not exactly. He couldn't, you know. I only thought their doctor must have told him—something terrible."

"I don't suppose he told him anything of the sort."

"Oh well, you know, he didn't say so. But he let me think it."

"Yes. I know exactly how it was done. He wouldn't say anything he oughtn't to. But he'd let you think it. It was just his awful selfishness. He thought there was an off chance of poor Lucy being a sort of nervous invalid, and he wouldn't risk the bother of it. But as for their engagement, there never was any. That was another of the things he let you think. I suppose he cared for Lucy as much as he could care for anybody; but the fact is he wants to marry another woman, and he couldn't bear to see her married to another man."

"Oh, I say, you know—"

"It sounds incredible. But you don't know how utterly I distrust that man. He's false through and through. There's nothing sound in him except his intellect. I wish you'd never known him. He's been the cause of all your—your suffering, and Lucy's too. You might have been married long ago if it hadn't been for him."

"No, Kitty. I don't think that."

"You might, really. If he hadn't been in the way she would have known that she cared for you and let you know it, too. But nothing that he ever did or didn't do comes up to this."

"The truth is, Kitty, he thinks I'm rather a bad lot, you know."

"My dear Keith, he thinks that if he doesn't marry Lucy he'd rather you didn't. He certainly hit on the most effectual means of preventing it."

"Oh, did he! He doesn't know me. I shall marry her whatever Sir Wilfrid Spence says. If she's ill, all the more reason why I should look after her. I'm only afraid lest—lest—"

She knew what he thought and could not say—lest it should not be for very long.

"There are some things," he said quietly, "that can't be taken away from me."

Kitty was silent; for she knew what things they were.

"You can trust her to me, Kitty?"

"I can indeed."

And so on Sunday the great man came down.

It was over in half an hour. That half-hour Keith spent in pacing up and down the library, the place of so many dear and tender and triumphant memories. They sharpened his vision of Lucy doomed, of her sweet body delivered over to the torture.

He did not hear Kitty come in till she laid her hand upon his arm. He turned as if at the touch of destiny.

"Don't Keith, for Goodness' sake. It's all right. Only—he wants to see you."

Sir Wilfrid Spence stood in the morning-room alone. He looked very grave and grim. He had a manner, a celebrated manner that had accomplished miracles by its tremendous moral effect. It had helped to set him on his eminence and he was not going to sacrifice it now. He fixed his gaze on the poet as he entered and held him under it for the space of half a minute without speaking. He seemed, this master of the secrets of the body, to be invading despotically the province of the soul. It struck Rickman that the great specialist was passing judgement on him, to see whether in all things he were worthy of his destiny. The gaze thus prolonged became more than he could bear.

"Do you mind telling me at once what's wrong with her?"

"There isn't anything wrong with her. What fool ever told you that there was? She has been made ill with grief."

Lucia herself came to him there and led him back into the library. They sat together in the window-seat, held silent for a little while by the passing of that shadow of their fear.

"Keith," she said at last. "Is it true that you loved me when you were with me, here, ever so long ago?"

He answered her.

"And when you came to me and I was horrid to you, and when I sent you away? And when I never wrote to you, and Horace made you think I'd forgotten you? Did you love me then?"

"Yes, more than I did before, Lucy."

"But—Keith—you didn't love me when you were loving somebody else?"

"I did, more than ever then. That happened because I loved you."

"I can understand all the rest; but I can't understand that."

"I think I'd rather you didn't understand it, darling."

She sighed, puzzled over it and gave it up. "But you didn't love me when you—when I—when you wouldn't have me?"

He answered her; but not with words.

"And now," said she, "you're going to Paris to-morrow."

"Perhaps."

"You must. Perhaps they'll be calling for you."

"And perhaps I shan't be there. Do you know, Lucy, you've got violets growing among the roots of your hair?"

"I know you're going to Paris, to-morrow, to please me."

"Perhaps. And after that we're going to Alassio, and after that to Florence and Rome; all the places where your private secretary—"

"And when," said she, "is my private secretary going to take me home?"

"If his play succeeds, dear, he won't have to take you to that horrid house of his."

"Won't he? But I like it best of all."

"Why, Lucy?"

"Oh, for such a foolish reason. Because he's been in it."

"I'm afraid, darling, some of the houses he's been in—"

At that she fell to a sudden breathless sobbing, as if the life that had come back to her had spent itself again.

In his happiness he had forgotten Howland Street; or if he thought of it at all he thought of it as an enchanted spot, the stage that had brought him nearest to the place of his delight.

"Lucy, Lucy, how did you know? I never meant you to."

"Some one told me. And I—I went to see it."

"Good God!"

"I saw your room, the room they carried you out of. If I'd only known! My darling, why didn't you come to me then? Why didn't you? I had plenty. Why didn't you send for me?"

"How could I?"

"You could, you could—"

"But sweetest, I didn't even know where you were."

"Wherever I was I would have come to you. I would have taken you away."

"It was worth it, Lucy. If it hadn't been for that, I shouldn't be here now. Looking back it seems positively glorious. And whatever it was I'd go through years of it, for one hour with you here. One of those hours even when you didn't love me."

"I've always loved you, all my life long. Only I didn't know it was you. Do you remember my telling you that your dream was divorced from reality? It wasn't true. That was what was wrong with me."

"I'm afraid I wasn't always very faithful to my dream."

"Because your dream wasn't always faithful to you. And yet it was faithful."

"Lucy, do you remember the things I told you? Can you forgive me for being what I was?"

"It was before I knew you."

"Yes, but after? That was worse; it was the worst thing I ever did, because I had known you."

She wondered why he asked forgiveness of her now, of all moments; and as she wondered the light dawned on her.

"I forgive you everything. It was my fault. I should have been there, and I wasn't."

Then he knew that after all she had understood. Her love was in her eyes, in their light and in their darkness. They gathered many flames of love into that tender tragic gaze, all pitying, half maternal. Those eyes had never held for him the sad secrets of mortality. Love in them looked upon things invisible, incorruptible; divining, even as it revealed, the ultimate mystery. He saw that in her womanhood Nature was made holy, penetrated by the spirit and the fire of God. He knelt down and laid his face against her shoulder, and her arm, caressing, held him there, as if it were she who sheltered and protected.

"Keith," she whispered, "did you mean to marry me before you came this time, or after?"

"Before, oh before."

"You thought—that terrible thing had happened to me; you thought you would always have me dragging on you? And yet you came? It made no difference. You came."

"I came because I wanted to take care of you, Lucy. I wanted nothing else. That was all."

Lucia's understanding was complete.

"I knew you were like that," said she; "I always knew it."

She bent towards his hidden face and raised it to her own.

THE END