CHAPTER LXXIV
Lucia was suffering from the disagreeable strain of a divided mind. To begin with she was not altogether pleased with Mr. Rickman. He had taken no notice of the friendly little letter she had written about the Elegy, her evident intention being to give him pleasure. She had written it on impulse, carried away by her ardent admiration. That was another of those passionate indiscreet things, which were followed by torments of her pride. And the torments had followed. His two months' silence had reproved her ardour, had intimated to her that he was in no mood to enter in at the door which she had closed to him three years ago. She took it that he had regarded her poor little olive branch as an audacity. And now that he had written there was not a word about the subject of her letter. He had only written because business compelled him, and his tone was not only cold, but positively austere.
But, she reflected, business after all did not compel him to come down and see her. Having reached this point she became aware that her heart was beating most uncomfortably at the bare idea of seeing him. For the first time this anticipation inspired her with anxiety and fear. Until their last meeting in Tavistock Place there had been in all their intercourse something intangible and rare, something that, though on her part it had lacked the warmth of love, she had acknowledged to be finer than any friendship. That beautiful intangible quality had perished in the stress of their final meeting. And even if it came to life again it could never be the same, or so she thought. She had perceived how much its permanence had depended on external barriers, on the social gulf, and on the dividing presence of another woman. She could not separate him from his genius; and his genius had long ago overleapt the social gulf. And now, without poor Flossie, without the safeguard of his engagement, she felt herself insecure and shelterless. More than ever since he had overleapt that barrier too.
But though Lucia had found out all these things, she had not yet found out why it was that she had been so glad to hear that Keith Rickman was going to be married, nor why she had been so passionately eager to keep him to his engagement. In any case she could not have borne to be the cause of unhappiness to another woman; and that motive was so natural that it served for all.
As things had turned out, if he had married, that, she had understood, would have been such a closing of the door as would have shut him out for ever. And now that he was knocking at the door again, now that there was no reason why, once opened, it should not remain open, she began to be afraid of what might enter in with him. She made up her mind that she would not let him in. So she sat down and wrote a cold little note to say that she was afraid she would not be able to see him next week. Could he not explain the business in writing? She took that letter to the post herself. And as each step brought her nearer to the inevitable act, the conviction grew on her that this conduct of hers was cowardly, and unworthy both of him and of herself. A refusal to see him was a confession of fear, and fear assumed the existence of the very thing his letter had ignored. It was absurd too, if he had come to see that his feeling for her was (as she persisted in believing it to be) a piece of poetic folly, an illusion of the literary imagination. She turned back and tore up that cold little note, and wrote another that said she would be very glad to see him any day next week, except Friday. There was no reason why she should have excepted Friday; but it sounded more business-like somehow.
She did not take Kitty into her confidence, and in this she failed to perceive the significance of her own secrecy. She told herself that there was no need to ask Kitty's advice, because she knew perfectly well already what Kitty's advice would be.
He came on Tuesday. Monday was too early for his self-respect, Wednesday too late for his impatience. He had looked to find everything altered in and about Court House; and he saw, almost with surprise, the same April flowers growing in the green garden, and the same beech-tree dreaming on the lawn. He recognized the black rifts in its trunk and the shining sweep of its branches overhead. The door was opened by Robert, and Robert remembered him. There was a shade more gravity in the affectionate welcome, but then Robert was nine years older. He was shown into the drawing-room, and it, too, was much as he had left it nine years ago.
Kitty Palliser was there; she rose to meet him with her irrepressible friendliness, undiminished by nine years. There was nothing cold and business-like about Kitty.
"Will you tell Miss Harden?" said she to the detached, retreating Robert. Then she held out her hand. "I am very glad to see you." But a wave of compassion rather than of gladness swept over her face as she looked at him. She made him sit down, and gave him tea. There was a marked gentleness in all her movements, unlike the hilarious lady she used to be.
The minutes went by and Lucia did not appear. He could not attend to what Kitty was saying. His eyes were fixed on the door that looked as if it were never going to open. Kitty seemed to bear tenderly with his abstraction. Once he glanced round the room, recognizing familiar objects. He had expected, after Dicky's descent on Court House, to find nothing recognizable in it. Kitty was telling him how an uncle of hers had lent them the house for a year, how he had bought it furnished, and how, but for the dismantled library and portrait gallery, it was pretty much as it had been in Miss Harden's time. So unchanged was it and its atmosphere that Rickman felt himself in the presence of a destiny no less unchanging and familiar. He had come on business as he had done nine years ago; and he felt that the events of that time must in some way repeat themselves, that when he was alone with Lucia he would say to her such things as he had said before, that there would be differences, misunderstandings, as before, and that his second coming would end in misery and separation like the first. It seemed to him that Kitty, kind Kitty, had the same perception and foreboding. Thus he interpreted her very evident compassion. She meant to console him.
"Robert remembers you," said she.
"That's very clever of Robert," said he.
"No, it's only his faithfulness. What a funny thing faithfulness is. Robert won't allow any one but Miss Harden to be mistress here. My people are interlopers, abominations of desolation. He can barely be civil to their friends. But to hers—he is as you see him. It's a good thing for me I'm her friend, or he wouldn't let me sit here and pour out tea for you."
He thought over the speech. It admitted an encouraging interpretation. But Miss Palliser may have been more consoling than she had meant.
She rattled on in the kindness of her heart. He was grateful for her presence; it calmed his agitation and prepared him to meet Lucia with composure when she came. But Lucia did not come; and he began to have a horrible fear that at the last moment she would fail him. He refused the second cup that Kitty pressed on him, and she looked at him compassionately again. He was so used to his appearance that he had forgotten how it might strike other people. He was conscious only of Kitty's efforts to fill up agreeably these moments of suspense.
At last it ended. Lucia was in the doorway. At the sight of her his body shook and the strength in his limbs seemed to dissolve and flow downwards to the floor. His eyes never left her as she came to him with her rhythmic unembarrassed motion. She greeted him as if they had met the other day; but as she took his hand she looked down at it, startled by its slenderness. He was glad that she seated herself on his right, for he felt that the violence of his heart must be audible through his emaciated ribs.
Kitty made some trivial remark, and Lucia turned to her as if her whole soul hung upon Kitty's words. Her absorption gave him time to recover himself. (It did not occur to him that that was what she had turned away for.) Her turning enabled him to look at her. He noticed that she seemed in better health than when he had seen her last, and that in sign of it her beauty was stronger, more vivid and more defined.
They said little to each other. But when Kitty had left them they drew in their chairs to the hearth with something of the glad consent of those for whom the long-desired moment has arrived. He felt that old sense of annihilated time, of return to a state that had never really lapsed; and it struck him that she, too, had that feeling. It was she who spoke first.
"Before you begin your business, tell me about yourself."
"There isn't anything to tell."
She looked as if she rather doubted the truth of that statement.
"If you don't mind, I'd rather begin about the business and get it over."
"Why, is it—is it at all unpleasant?"
He smiled. "Not in the least, not in the very least. It's about the library."
"I thought we'd agreed that that was all over and done with long ago?"
"Well, you see, it hasn't anything to do with us. My father—"
"Don't let us go back to that."
"I'm sorry, but we must—a little. You know my father and I had a difference of opinion?"
"I know—I know."
"Well, in the end he owned that I was right. That was when he was dying."
He wished she would not look at him; for he could not look at her. He was endeavouring to make his tale appear in the last degree natural and convincing. Up till now he had told nothing but the truth, but as he was about to enter on the path of perjury he became embarrassed by the intentness of her gaze.
"You were with him?" she asked.
"Yes." He paused a moment to command a superior kind of calm. That pause wrecked him, for it gave her also time for thought. "He wanted either to pay you the money that you should have had, or to hand over the library; and I thought—"
"But the library was sold?"
He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.
"Then how," she asked, "was the library redeemed?"
He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional significance. He desired to lead her gently away from a line of thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue. "You can't call it redeemed. Nobody redeemed it. The debt, of course, had to be paid out of my father's estate."
"In which case the library became yours?"
He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.
"It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go against my father's wishes by holding on to it."
"Can't you see that it's equally impossible for me to take it?"
"Why? Try and think of it as a simple matter of business."
He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her feminine persistence and refining fantasy. "It hasn't anything to do with you or me."
Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed him in another such dispute nine years ago.
"I am more business-like than you are. I remember perfectly well that your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the beginning."
"That needn't trouble you. It has been virtually deducted. I'm sorry to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and could not be recovered."
He had given himself away by that word "recovered." Her eyes searched him through and through to find his falsehood, as they had searched him once before to find his truth. "It is very, very good of you," she said.
"Of me? Am I bothering you? Don't think of me except as my father's executor."
"Did you know that he wanted you to do this, or did you only think it? Was it really his express wish?"
He looked her in the face and lied boldly and freely. "It was. Absolutely."
And as she met that look, so luminously, so superlatively sincere, she knew that he had lied. "All the same," said she, "I can't take it. Don't think it unfriendly of me. It isn't. In fact, don't you see it's just because we have been—we are—friends that I must refuse it? I can't take advantage of that"—she was going to say "feeling," but thought better of it.
"And don't you see by refusing you are compelling me to be dishonourable? If you were really my friend you would think more of my honour than of your own scruples. Or is that asking too much?" He felt that he had scored in this game of keen intelligences.
"No. But it would be wrong of me to let your honour be influenced by our friendship."
"Don't think of our friendship, then. It's all pure business, as brutally impersonal as you like."
"If I could only see it that way."
"I should have thought it was quite transparently and innocently clear." He had scored again. For now he had taxed her with stupidity. "If I could persuade you that it came from my father, you wouldn't mind. You mind because you think it comes from me. Isn't that so?"
She was silent, and he knew.
"How can I persuade you? I can only repeat that I've absolutely nothing to do with it." There was but little friendliness about him now. His whole manner was full of weariness and irritation. "Why should you imagine that I had?"
"Because it would have been so very like you."
"Then I must be lying abominably. Is that so very like me?"
"I have heard you do it before—once—twice—magnificently."
"When?"
"About this time nine years ago."
He remembered. The wonder was that she should have remembered too.
"I daresay. But what possible motive could I have for lying now?"
He had scored heavily this time. Far too heavily. There was a flame in Lucia's face which did not come from the glow of the fire, a flame that ran over her neck and forehead to the fine tips of her ears. For she thought, supposing all the time he had been telling her the simple truth? Why should she have raised that question? Why should she have taken for granted that any personal interest should have led him to do this thing? And in wondering she was ashamed. He saw her confusion, and attributed it to another cause.
"I'm only asking you to keep the two things distinct, as I do—as I must do," he said gently.
"I'll think about it, and let you know to-morrow."
"But I'm going to-night."
"Oh no, I can't let you do that. You must stay over the night. Your room is ready for you."
He protested; she insisted; and in the end she had her way, as he meant to have his way to-morrow.
He stayed, and all that evening they were very kind to him. Kitty talked gaily throughout dinner; and afterwards Lucia played to him while he rested, propped up with great cushions (she had insisted on the cushions) in her chair. Kitty, his hostess, drew back, and seemed to leave these things to Lucia as her right. He knew it was Lucia, and not Kitty, who ran up to his room to see that all was comfortable and that his fire burnt well. In everything she said and did there was a peculiar gentleness and care. It was on the same lines as Kitty's compassion, only more poignant and intense. It was, he thought, as if she knew that it was for the last time, that of all these pleasant things to-morrow would see the end. Was it kind of her to let him know what her tenderness could be when to-morrow must end it all? For he had no notion of the fear evoked by his appearance, the fear that was in both their hearts. He did not know why they looked at him with those kind glances, nor why Lucia told him that Robert was close at hand if he should want anything in the night. He slept in the room that had once been Lucia's, the room above the library, looking to the western hills. He did not know that they had given it him because it was a good room to be ill and to get well in.
Lucia and Kitty sat up late that night over the fire, and they talked of him.
Kitty began it. "Do you remember," said she, "the things we used to say about him?"
"Oh don't, Kitty; I do."
"You needn't mind; it was only I who said them."
"Yes, you said them; but I thought them."
Then she told Kitty what had brought him there and the story that he had told her. "And, Kitty, all the time I knew he lied."
"Probably. You must take it, Lucy, all the same."
"How can I take it, when I know it comes out of his own poor little waistcoat pocket?"
"You would, if you cared enough about him."
"No. It's just because I care that I can't."
"You do care, then?"
"Yes, of course I do."
"But not in the same way as he cares, Lucy."
Kitty's words sounded like a statement rather than a question, so they passed unanswered.
"It's all right, Kitty. It's all over, at last. He doesn't care a bit now, not a bit."
"Oh doesn't he! How can you be so idiotic? All over? I assure you it's only just begun."
Lucia turned her head away.
"Lucy—what are you going to do with him?"
Lucia smiled sadly. That was the question she had asked Horace ten years ago, making him responsible. And now the responsibility had been laid on her. "Kitty—did you notice how thin he is? He looks as if he'd just come through some awful illness. But I can't ask him about it."
"Rather not. You don't know whether he's had it, or whether he's going to have it."
"I wonder if you'd mind asking him to stay a week or two? It might help him to get strong."
"I doubt it."
"I don't. I think it's just what he wants. Oh, Kitty, could you—would you, if I wanted it, too?"
"You needn't ask. But what earthly good can it do?"
"If he got strong here it would be so nice to think we sent him away well. And if he's going to be ill I could look after him—"
Her use of "we" and "I" did not pass unnoticed by the observant Kitty.
"And then?"
Lucia's face, which had been overcast with care, was now radiant. "Then I should have done something for him besides making him miserable. Will you ask him, Kitty?"
"You're a fool, Lucy, and I'm another. But I'll ask him. To-morrow, though; not to-day."
She waited to see what to-morrow would bring forth, for she was certain it would bring forth something.
It brought forth glorious weather after the east wind, a warm languid day, half spring, half summer. Lucia and Kitty seemed bent on putting all idea of business out of their guest's head. In the morning they drove about the country. In the afternoon they all sat out in the south square under the windows of the morning-room, while Lucia talked to him about his tragedies. Kitty still held her invitation in reserve.
At last she left them to themselves. It was Lucia who first returned to the subject of dispute. She had some sewing in her lap which gave her the advantage of being able to talk in a calm, detached manner and without looking up. He sat near her, watching with delight the quiet movements of her hands.
"I've been thinking over what you said yesterday," said she. "I can't do what you want; but I can suggest a compromise. You seem determined on restitution. Have you forgotten that you once offered it me in another form?"
"You refused it in that form—then."
"I wouldn't refuse it now. If you could be content with that."
"Do you remember why you refused it?"
She did not answer, but a faint flush told him that she had not forgotten.
"The same objection—the same reason for objecting—holds good now."
"Not quite. I should not be wronging any one else."
"You mean the Beaver, who dotes upon immortal verse?"
She smiled a little sadly. "Yes; there's no Beaver in the question now."
"You shall have the sonnets in any case. I brought them for you in place of the Aurea Legenda, and the Neapolitan Horace and—"
She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, as if she could shut out sound with sight. "Please—please. If you go on talking about it we shall both be very tired. Don't you feel as if you'd like some tea?" She was bringing out all her feminine reserves to conquer him. But he was not going to be conquered this time. He could afford to wait; for he also had reserves.
"I'm so sorry," he said humbly. "I won't bore you any more till after tea."
And Lucia knew it was an armistice only and not peace.
At tea-time Kitty perceived that the moment was not yet propitious for her invitation. She was not even sure that it would ever come. Nor would it; for Rickman knew that his only chance lay in their imminent parting, in the last hour that must be his.
He was counting on it when the steady, resistless flow of a stream of callers cut short his calculations. It flowed between him and Lucia. They could only exchange amused or helpless glances across it now and then. At last he found a moment and approached her.
"I wanted to give you those things before I go."
"Very well. We'll go into the house in one minute."
He waited. She made a sign that said, "Come," and he followed her. She avoided the morning-room that looked on the courtyard with its throng of callers; hesitated, and opened the door into the library. He ran upstairs to fetch the manuscript, and joined her there. But for the empty bookshelves this room, too, was as he had left it.
Lucia was sitting in a window seat. He came to her and gave the poems into her open hands, and she thanked him.
"Nonsense. It's good of you to take them. But that doesn't release you from your obligations."
She laid the manuscript on the window-seat, protected by her hand. He sat there facing her, and for a moment neither spoke.
"I haven't very much time," he said at last. "I've got to catch the seven-forty."
"You haven't. We don't want you to go like this. Now you're here you must stay a fortnight at the very least."
He hung his head. He did not want her to see how immense was the temptation. He murmured some half-audible, agitated thanks, but his refusal was made quite plain. He could not give up the advantage he had counted on. "I'm afraid I must bore you again a little now. I've only got an hour."
"Don't spoil it, then. See how beautiful it is."
She rose and threw open the lattice, and they stood together for a moment looking out. It was about an hour before sunset, an April sunset, the golden consummation of the wedding of heaven and earth. He felt a delicate vibration in the air, the last tender resonance of the nuptial song. This April was not the April of the streets where the great wooing of the world goes on with violence and clangour; for the city is earth turned to stone and yields herself struggling and unwilling to the invasion of the sky. Here all the beautiful deep-bosomed land lay still, breathless in her escape from the wind to the sun. Up the western valley the earth gave all her greenness naked to the light; but the hills were dim with the divine approaches of her mystical union, washed by the undivided streams of blue and purple air that flowed to the thin spiritual verge, where earth is caught up and withdrawn behind heaven's inmost veil.
The hour was beautiful as she had said. Its beauty had clothed itself with immortality in light; yet there was in it such mortal tenderness as drew his heart after it and melted his will in longing. He turned from the window and looked at her with all his trouble in his eyes.
Lucia saw that her words had saddened him, and she sat still, devising some comfort for him in her heart.
"I don't think," he said at last, "you quite know what you are doing. I'm going to tell you something that I didn't mean to tell you. When I said I'd had nothing to do with all this, it wasn't altogether true."
"So I supposed," she murmured.
"There was a—a certain amount of trouble and difficulty about it—"
"And what did that mean?"
"It only meant that I had to work rather hard to put it right. I liked it, so you needn't think anything of that. But if you persist in your refusal all my hard work goes for nothing." He was so powerless against her tender obstinacy that he had determined to appeal to her tenderness alone. "There were about three years of it, the best three years out of my life; and you are going to fling them away and make them useless. All for a little wretched scruple. This is the only argument that will appeal to you; or I wouldn't have mentioned it."
"The best years out of your life—why were they the best?"
"Because they were the first in which I was free."
She thought of the time nine years ago when she had taken from him three days, the only days when he was free, and how she had tried to make restitution and had failed. "And whatever else I refuse," she said, "I've taken them? I can't get out of that?"
"No. If you want to be very cruel you can say I'd no business to lay you under the obligation, but you can't get out of it."
She looked away. Did she want to be very cruel? Did she want to get out of it? Might it not rather be happiness to be in it, immersed in it? Lost in it, with all her scruples and all her pride?
His voice broke and trembled into passion. "And what is it that I'm asking you to take? Something that isn't mine and is yours; something that it would be dishonourable of me to keep. But if it was mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to give you and you wouldn't have."
Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had given her, that she had not refused. His eyes followed her movements. She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.
She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body were sharper than ever. His face was more than ever serious and clean cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows, darkening their blue. He was refined almost to emaciation. And she saw other things. As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other, his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole. He changed his attitude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze. She did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she noticed them now. Perhaps she would not have seen them but for that attempt to hide them which revealed their significance. She said to herself, "He is poor; and yet he has done this." And the love that had been so long hidden, sheltered and protected by her pity, came forth, and knew itself as love. And she forgot his greatness and remembered only those pitiful human things in which he had need of her. So she surrendered.
"I will take everything—on one condition. That you will give me—what you said just now I wouldn't have." The eyes that she lifted to his were full of tears.
For one moment he did not understand. Very slowly he realized that the thing he had dreamed and despaired of, that he dared not ask for, was being divinely offered to him as a free gift. There was no moment, not even in that night of his madness, in this room nine years ago, nor in that other night in Howland Street, when he had desired it as he desired it now.
Her tears hung curved on the curved lashes of her eyes, and spilt themselves, and fell one by one on to the pages of the manuscript. He heard them fall.
Before he let himself be carried away by the sweep of her impulse and his own passion he saw that not honour but common decency forbade him to take advantage of a moment's inspired tenderness. He had already made a slight appeal ad misericordiam; but that was for her sake not his own. He realized most completely his impossible position. He had no income, and he had damaged his health so seriously that it might be long enough before he could make one; and these facts he could not possibly mention. She suspected him of poverty; but the smallest hint of his real state would have roused her infallible instinct of divination. He had felt, as her eyes rested on his emaciated body, that they could see the course of its sufferings, its starvation. He meant that she should never know what things had happened to him in Howland Street. His chivalry revolted against the brutality of capturing her tender heart by such a lacerating haul on its compassion.
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."