CHAPTER LVI
It was impossible that Rickman's intimacy with Miss Harden should pass unnoticed by the other boarders. But it was well understood by Miss Roots, by Flossie and by all of them, that any attentions he paid to her were paid strictly to his editor's cousin. And if there was the least little shade of duplicity in this explanation, his conscience held him so far guiltless, seeing that he had adopted it more on Lucia's account than his own. Incidentally, however, he was not displeased that it had apparently satisfied Flossie.
But if Flossie felt no uneasiness at the approaches of Mr. Rickman and Miss Harden, the news that Lucia was staying under the same roof with the impossible young poet could hardly be received with complacency by her relations. It threw Edith Jewdwine into an agony of alarm. Horace as yet knew nothing about it; for he was abroad. Even Edith had heard nothing until her return from her autumn holiday in Wales, when a letter from Lucia informed her that she would be staying for the next week or two with Sophie Roots in Tavistock Place. Edith was utterly unprepared for her cousin's change of plans. She had not asked Lucia to go with her to Wales; for Lucia's last idea had been to spend September and October in Devonshire with Kitty Palliser. Edith, eager for her holiday, had not stopped to see whether the arrangements with Kitty were completed; and Lucia, aware of Edith's impatience, had omitted to mention that they were not. But what made Lucia's move so particularly trying to Edith was the circumstance that relations between them had latterly been a little strained; and when Edith searched her heart she found that for this unhappy tension it was she and not Lucia who had been to blame.
And now (while Lucia was resting calmly on Mr. Rickman's sofa), in the grave and beautiful drawing-room of the old brown house at Hampstead a refined and fastidious little lady walked up and down in a state of high nervous excitement. That little lady bore in her slight way a remarkable resemblance to her brother Horace. It was Horace in petticoats, diminutive and dark. There was the same clearness, the same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy mouth. Bat the flame of Edith's small steel black eyes revealed a creature of more ardour and more energy.
At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to entertain. For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always been as fastidious and refined as she could wish. The house and the drawing-room were mainly the cause of it. Before Horace became editor of The Museion, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment kept up with difficulty on a narrow income. In a drawing-room seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and (after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a preoccupied and superlatively married man. From this position, compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of culture and refinement as head of the great editor's house. She held a sort of salon, to which her brother's reputation attracted many figures if possible more distinguished than his own. She found herself the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious to stand well with Horace Jewdwine. With a dignity positively marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three years in that long drawing-room. She laid down the law grandiloquently to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with superb compliments those who had achieved. Happily for Edith those gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.
And then, in the very flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came. Lucia, with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm. And the little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia! To Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it, but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to satisfy that instinct of hers which was so fatal and so blind. And Horace, who to Edith's great relief had freed himself from this most undesirable attachment, who for three years had presented every appearance of judicious apathy, Horace, perceiving that men's eyes (and women's too) loved to follow and to rest upon his cousin, discovering all over again on his own account the mysterious genius of her fascination, had ended by bowing down and worshipping too. His adoration was the more profound (and in Edith's shrewd opinion more dangerous), because he kept it to himself; because it pledged him to nothing in the eyes of Lucia and the world.
But the eyes of the world, especially of the journalistic world, are exceedingly sharp; and if Lucia had not been charming in herself those literary ladies and gentlemen would have found her so, as the lady whom Horace Jewdwine was presumably about to marry. It was Hanson, Hanson of the Courier, who sent the rumour round, "La reine est morte, vive la reine." The superb despotic Edith saw herself not only deserted, but deposed; left with neither court nor kingdom; declining from the palace of royalty to the cottage of the private gentlewoman, and maintaining her imperious refinement on a revenue absurdly disproportioned to that end. Not that as yet there had been any suggestion of Edith's abdication. As yet Lucia had only spent her winter holidays at Hampstead. But when, at the end of the present summer, Lucia suddenly and unexpectedly broke down and her salary ceased with her strength, it became a question of providing her with a home for three months at the very least. Even then, the revolution was delayed; for Horace had gone abroad in the autumn. But with every month that Edith remained in power she loved power more; and in her heart she had been considering how, without scandal to the world, or annoyance to Horace, or offence to Lucia, she could put her rival delicately aside. She had long been on the look-out for easy posts for Lucia, for posts in rich and aristocratic families in the provinces, or better still for ladies in want of charming travelling companions.
But now, better, a thousand times better, that Edith should have been forced to abdicate than that Lucia should have taken herself out of the way in this fashion; a fashion so hideously suggestive of social suicide; that she should be living within four miles of her fastidious and refined relations in a fifth-rate boarding-house inhabitated by goodness knows whom. If only that had been all! Of course it was intolerable to think of Lucia mixing with the sort of people whom nobody but Goodness ever does know; but, after all, she wouldn't mix with them; she hadn't had time to; and if instantly removed from the place of contamination she might yet be presented to society again without spot or taint. But it was not all. Out of the many hundred base abodes of Bloomsbury Lucia had picked out the one house she ought to have avoided, the one address which for five years her cousin Horace had been endeavouring to conceal from her; it being the address of the one disreputable, the one impossible person of his acquaintance. Rickman had appeared, as strange people sometimes did, at Edith's court; an appearance easily explained and justified by the fact that he was a genius of whom Horace Jewdwine hoped great things. But he had never been suffered in that salon when Lucia had been there. Horace had taken untold pains, he had even lied frequently and elaborately, to prevent Lucia's encountering, were it only by accident, that one impossible person; and here she was living, actually living in the same house with him. Even if Rickman could be trusted to efface himself (which wasn't very likely; for if there is anything more irrepressible than a cockney vulgarian it is a poet; and Rickman was both!), could they, could anybody trust Lucia and her idiotic impulse to be kind? To be kind at any cost. She never calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating reflection for Miss Jewdwine. Poor as she was, she thought nothing of paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable lodging, when she might—she ought—to have been living with her relations free of all expense. But there was the sting, the unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay anything, rather than stop another week in Hampstead. And Edith knew that it was she who had made Lucia feel like that; she who had driven her to this deplorable step. Not by anything done, or said, or even implied; but by things not done, things not said, things darkly or passionately thought. For Lucia, with her terrible gift of intuition, must somehow have known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person's thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. Nobody can help their thoughts; and there was something positively indecent in the uncanny insight that divined them. All the same, Edith, confronted with the consequences of these movements of the unfettered brain, was stung with compunction and considerable shame. Horace would be furious when he knew; more furious with Edith than Lucia. Therefore Edith was furious with Sophia Roots, the cause of this disaster, who must have known that even if Lucia was too weak-minded to refuse her most improper invitation, that invitation ought never to have been given. Edith had her pride, the pride of all the Jewdwines and the Hardens; and her private grievances gave way before a family catastrophe. She did not want Lucia at Hampstead; but at all cost to herself Lucia must be brought back to her cousin's house before anybody knew that she had ever left it. It was even better that Horace should marry her than that they should risk the scandal of a mesalliance, or even-a passing acquaintance with a man like Rickman. She would go and fetch Lucia now, this very evening.
She went as fast as a hansom could take her, and was shown up into Rickman's room where she had the good luck to find Lucia alone. Lucia was too tired to go out very much; and at that moment of her cousin's entrance she was resting on Mr. Rickman's sofa. As the poor poet had been so careful to remove the more telling tokens of his occupation, Edith did not see that it was Mr. Rickman's room; and she was a little surprised to find Sophia Roots so comfortably, not to say luxuriously lodged.
She lost no time in delivering her soul, lest Sophia should pop in upon them.
"Lu-chee-a," she said with emphasis, "I think you ought to have told me."
"Told you what?"
"Why, that you hadn't anywhere to go to, instead of coming here."
"But I didn't come here because I hadn't anywhere to go to. I came because I wanted to see something of Sophie after all these years."
"You could have seen Sophie at Hampstead. I would have asked her to stay with you if I'd known you wanted her."
"That would have been very nice of you. But I'm afraid she wouldn't have come. You see she can't leave her work at the Museum—ever, poor thing."
"Oh. Then you don't see so much of Sophie after all?"
"Not as much as I should like. But I must be somewhere; and I'm perfectly happy here."
As she rose to make tea for Edith (at the poet's table, and with the poet's brass kettle), she looked, to Edith's critical eyes, most suspiciously at home. Edith's eyes, alert for literature, roamed over the bookcases before they settled on the tea-pot (the poet's tea-pot); but it was the tea-pot that brought her to her point. Did Lucia mix with the other boarders after all?
"This isn't a bad room," she said. "I suppose you have all your meals up here?"
"Only tea and breakfast."
"But, my dear girl, where do you lunch and dine?"
"Downstairs, in the dining-room."
"With all the other boarders?"
Lucia smiled. "Yes, all of them. You see we can't very well turn any of them out."
"Really, Lucia, before you do things like this you might stop to consider how your friends must feel about it."
"Why should they feel anything? It's all right, Edith, really it is."
"Right for you to take your meals with these dreadful people? You can't say they're not dreadful, Lucia; for they are."
"They're not half so dreadful as you might suppose. In fact you've no idea how nice they can be, some of them. Indeed I don't know one of them that isn't kind and considerate and polite in some way. Yes, polite. They're all inconceivably polite. And do you know, they all want me to stay on; and I've half a mind to stay."
"Oh, no, my dear, you're not going to stay. I've come to carry you off the very minute we've finished tea. Sophia should have known better than to bring you here."
"Poor little Sophie. If she can stand it, I might."
"That doesn't follow at all. And if you can stand it, your relations can't. So make up your mind that you're going back with me."
"It's extremely kind of you; but I should hurt Sophie's feelings terribly if I went. Why should I go?"
"Because it isn't a fit place for you to be in. To begin with, I don't suppose they feed you properly."
"You can't say I look the worse for it."
No, certainly she couldn't; for Lucia looked better than she had done for many months. In the fine air of Hampstead she had been white and languid and depressed; here in Bloomsbury she had a faint colour, and in spite of her fatigue, looked almost vigorous. What was more, her face bore out her own account of herself. She had said she was perfectly happy, and she looked it.
A horrible idea occurred to Edith. But she did not mean to speak of Rickman till she had got Lucia safe at Hampstead.
"Besides," said Lucia simply, "I'm staying for the best of all possible reasons; because I want to."
"Well, if it's pleasant for you, you forget that it's anything but pleasant for Horace and me. Horace—if you care what he thinks—would be exceedingly annoyed if he knew about it."
"Isn't he just a little unreasonable?"
"He is not. Is it nice for him to know that you prefer living with these people to staying in his house?"
"What would he say if he knew that one of these people lent us this room?"
The words and the smile that accompanied them challenged Edith to speak; and speak she must. But she could not bring herself to utter the abominable name. "And was that on Sophie's account or yours?"
"On both our accounts; and it was beautifully done."
"Oh, if it was done beautifully there's no doubt on whose account it was done. I should have thought you were the last person, Lucia, to put yourself under such an obligation."
"There was no obligation. It was kinder to Mr. Rickman to take his room than refuse it, that was all."
Lucia had no difficulty whatever in bringing out the name. And that, if Edith's perceptions had not been dulled by horror, would have struck her as a favourable sign.
"Young Rickman!" Edith's astonishment was a master stroke in all that it ignored and in all that it implied of the impossibility of that person. "Your notions of kindness are more than I can understand. Whatever possessed you to take his room? If he'd offered it fifty times!"
"But it wasn't wanted."
Edith relaxed the tension of her indignant body and sank back in her chair (or rather, Mr. Rickman's chair) with an immense relief. "You mean he isn't in the house at present?"
"Oh yes, he's in the house, I'm glad to say. Neither Sophie nor I could stand very much of the house without him."
That admission, instead of rousing Edith to renewed indignation, appeared to crush her. "Lucia," she murmured, "you are hopeless."
Another cup of tea, however, revived the spirit of remonstrance.
"I know you don't see it, Lucia, but you are laying yourself under an obligation of the worst sort; the sort that puts a woman more than anything in a man's power."
Lucia ignored the baser implication (so like Lucia). "I'm under so many obligations to Mr. Rickman already, that one more hardly counts." She hastened to appease the dumb distress now visible on her cousin's face. "I don't mean money obligations; though there's that, too—Horace knows all about it. I don't know if I can explain—" She laid her hands in her lap and looked at Edith and beyond her, with liquid and untroubled eyes; not seeing her, but seeing things very far off, invisible from Edith's point of view; which things she must endeavour, if possible, to make her see. "The kind of obligations I mean are so difficult to describe, because there's nothing to take hold of. Only, when you've once made a man believe in you and trust you, so that he comes to you ever afterwards expecting nothing but wonderful discernment, and irreproachable tact, and—and an almost impalpable delicacy of treatment, and you know that you failed in all these things just when he needed them most, you do feel some obligations. There's the obligation to make up for your blunders; the obligation to think about him in a certain way because no other way does justice to his idea of you; the obligation to show him the same consideration he showed to you; the obligation to take a simple kindness from him as he would have taken it from you—"
"My dear Lucia, you forget that a man may accept many things from a woman that she cannot possibly accept from him."
"Yes, but they are quite another set of things. They don't come into it at all. That's where you make the mistake, Edith. I've got—for my own sake—to behave to that man as finely as he behaved to me. I owe him a sort of spiritual redress. I always shall owe it him; but I'm doing something towards it now." She said to herself, "I am a fool to try to explain it to her. She'll never understand. I wish Kitty were here. She would have understood in a minute."
Edith did not understand. She thought that Lucia's perceptions in this matter were blunt, when they were only superlatively fine.
"All this," said she, "implies an amount of intimacy that I was not aware of."
"Intimacy? Yes, I suppose it is intimacy, of a sort."
"And how it could have happened with a man like that—"
"A man like what?"
"Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn't dream of allowing you to meet, even in his own house."
"Horace? You talk about my being under an obligation. It was he who helped to put me under it."
"And how?"
"By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave him a thought—when he had been so magnificent. There were a thousand things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an opportunity and he never gave it me. He can't blame me if I take it now."
"If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible reasons. He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could have any idea of. I don't know what he is now, but he was, at one time, thoroughly disreputable."
"Whatever did he do?"
"Do? He did everything. He drank; he ran after the worst sort of women—he mixes now with the lowest class of journalists in town; he lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the next house to this."
Lucia's face quivered like a pale flame.
"I don't believe it. I don't believe it for a moment."
"It's absurd to say you don't believe what everybody knows, and what anybody here can tell you."
"I never heard a word against him here. Ask Sophie She's known him for five years. Besides, I know him. That's enough."
"Lucy, when you once get hold of an idea you're blind to everything outside it."
"I take after my family in that. But no, I'm not blind. He may have gone wrong once, at some time—but never, no, I'm sure of it, since I knew him."
"Still, when a man has once lived that sort of life, the coarseness must remain."
"Coarseness? There isn't any refinement, any gentleness he isn't capable of. He's fine through and through. Stay and meet him, Edith, and see for yourself."
"I have met him."
"And yet you can't see?"
"I've seen all I want to see."
"Don't, Edith—"
There was a sound of feet running swiftly up the stair; the door of the adjoining room opened and shut, and a man's voice was heard singing. These sounds conveyed to Edith a frightful sense of the nearness and intimacy of the young man, and of the horror of Lucia's position. As she listened she held her cousin by her two hands in a dumb agony of entreaty.
"Horace is coming back," she whispered.
"No, Edith, it's no good. I'm going to stay till Kitty takes me."
Edith wondered whether, after all, Lucia was so very fastidious and refined; whether, indeed, in taking after her family, she did not take after the least estimable of the Hardens. There was a wild strain in them; their women had been known to do queer things, unaccountable, disagreeable, disreputable things; and Lucia was Sir Frederick's daughter. Somehow that young voice singing in the next room rubbed this impression into her. She stiffened and drew back.
"And am I to tell Horace, then, that you are happy here?"
"Yes. Tell him to come and see how happy I am."
"Very well."
As Edith opened the door to go, the voice in the next room stopped singing, and the young man became suddenly very still.