CHAPTER XXVI
It was extraordinary; if he had given himself time to reflect on it he might even have considered it uncanny, the peace that had settled on him with regard to the Harden Library.
It remained absolutely unshaken by the growing agitation of his father's letters. Isaac wrote reproachfully, irritably, frantically, and received only the briefest, most unsatisfactory replies. "I can't tell you anything more than I have. But I wouldn't be in a hurry to make any arrangements with Pilkington, if I were you." Not the smallest reference to the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace or the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde.
Why indeed should he trouble himself? He couldn't understand his father's state of mind. He had now a positive intuition that Sir Frederick would recover in the manner of a gentleman whose motto was Invictus; an infinite assurance was conveyed by that tilted faun-like smile. He even found himself believing in his own delightful future as Miss Harden's private secretary, so entirely had he submitted to the empire of divine possibility.
Meanwhile he redoubled his attentions to the catalogue. (Could there be anything more unreasonable than that catalogue raisonné?) He had frequently got up and worked at it for an hour or two before breakfast, lifted out of bed by the bounding of his heart. But whereas he had been in the habit of leaving it at any time between nine o'clock and midnight, he now sat up with it till the small hours of the morning. This extreme devotion was necessary if he was to finish it by the twenty-seventh. It was now the fifteenth.
He had told Miss Harden that he could work better by himself, and apparently she had taken him at his word; she had left him to finish the catalogue alone. As it happened he didn't work a bit better by himself. What with speculating on the chance of her appearing, listening for her voice and her footsteps on the stairs, or the distant sound of her playing, to say nothing of his desperate efforts not to stare out of the windows when he knew her to be in the garden, Lucia absent was even more disturbing than Lucia on the spot. He tried to console himself with the reflection that she was no longer overworking herself; and herein appeared the great purity and self-abnegation of Mr. Rickman's love. Rather than see her making herself ill, he was actually manoeuvring so as not to see her at all. He kept his vigils secret, having a suspicion that if she heard of them she would insist on returning to her hideous task.
To this end he devised an ingenious system of deceit. He left off work for an hour every afternoon, alleging his need of air and exercise. He then asked permission to sit up a little later than usual by way of making good the time thus lost. He knew that by eleven the lights would be out, and Lucia and the servants all in bed. He demanded black coffee to keep him awake and the key of the side door to let himself out. All on the understanding that he would leave the house by half-past eleven or twelve at the latest. He could thus put in a good five hours extra without any one being any the wiser; and four o'clock would find Mr. Rickman stealing back to his hotel over the grey and dewy grass.
For three days and three nights love's miraculous energy sustained him. On the fourth night he was overcome by a slight fatigue, and at one o'clock he lay down on the hearth rug to sleep, registering in his brain his intention to wake punctually at two.
And for three days and three nights Lucia hardly gave a thought to Mr. Rickman. She was busy with preparations for her departure, trying to see as much of Kitty Palliser as possible, and thinking a great deal of that adorable father whom she would meet on the twenty-seventh.
Lucia's room, as Mr. Rickman knew, was in the west wing, over the south-west end of the library, and from her window she could see the pale yellow green shaft of light that Mr. Rickman's lamp flung across the lawn. The clock on the stable belfry struck the hours one by one, and Lucia, fast asleep, never knew that the shaft of light lay there until the dawn.
On the fourth night, the night of Thursday, the fifteenth, Lucia did not sleep so well. She dreamed, but her dreams were too light and transparent to veil the reality that lay on the waking side of them. Three times that night she started on her journey to Cannes, three times she missed her train, and three times she said to herself, "It's only a dream, so of course it doesn't matter." When, after prodigious efforts extending over interminable time, she found herself on Harmouth platform, shuddering in her nightgown before a whole train full of people, she was not in the least disconcerted, because of her perception of that reality behind her dream; no, not even when Mr. Rickman appeared just as she was saying to herself, "It doesn't matter. This is only the fifteenth and I don't really start till the twenty-sixth." His presence was so transparent, so insubstantial, that it didn't seem to matter either. He said, "Miss 'Arden, you've made a miscalculation. You must start this minute if you're to be there in time." His statement seemed to her to be founded on some solid reality; but when she asked him what he was doing there, he spoilt it all by saying that as private secretary he was in charge of the expedition. By that, and by something unnatural and absurd in his appearance, she knew that she was dreaming. Then, for more time than she could measure, she lay watching herself dream, with a curious sense of being able to foretell and control the fantastic procession of events.
And now she was aware of something that moved with their movement, a trouble or a terror that hovered out there, not on the waking border but in the region of reality that lay on the other side. Almost discernible behind the transparent insubstantial walls of sleep, it waited to break through them and invade her dream. For refuge from it she plunged deeper into her dream. She came out walking on a terrace of grey grass set with strange clusters of swords, sharp-pointed and double-edged. Tall grey trees shot up into a grey white sky; they were coated with sharp scales, grey and toothed like the scales of a shark's skin; and some bore yet more swords for branches, slender and waving swords; and some, branchless, were topped with heads of curled scimitars, the blades pointing downwards. All these scaly, spiky, two-edged things stood out piercing and distinct against the grey; and she knew that they were aloes and palm-trees, and that she had come to the end of her journey and was walking in the garden of the Villa des Palmes. And the thing she dreaded was still waiting a little way beyond the garden, beyond the insubstantial walls; it was looking for her, crying after her, it stretched out its arms to draw her from her sleep.
A little twilight wind came creeping over the grey grass, it covered her feet like water, it rose higher and higher above the sword points of the aloes, and she sank in it and floated, floated and sank. And now it tossed and rolled and shook the palm-trees till all their blades rattled like steel; and beyond the wind she heard the calling of the thing she feared, the thing that had hunted her from dream to dream. She feared it no longer; she too was looking and crying; all her desire was to find what she had feared; to answer it, to see it face to face. Her body was clasped tight by the arms of the wind; yet her yearning was so strong that she struggled with them and flung them from her, breaking through the bonds and barriers of sleep.
Lucia was awake and accounting for her dream. The weather had changed in the night, and a cold wind was rushing through the open window on to her bed. She had been lying with her feet uncovered, and the bed-clothes heaped on to her chest. She had been waked by the rattling of a loosened lattice in the room below. She got out of bed and looked out of the window. There was a vast movement in the sky, as if the darkness were being visibly upheaved and rolled away westwards by the wind. Over the garden was the dense grey blackness of an obliterated dawn. The trees, not yet detached from the ground of night, showed like monstrous skeletons of the whole immense body of gloom, while the violent rocking of their branches made them one with that dark and wandering tumult of cloud and wind.
The shaft of light no longer lay upon the lawn; Mr. Rickman's lamp was out; therefore, she argued, Mr. Rickman had gone; having, in the recklessness of his genius, forgotten to close the library windows.
One of the west windows creaked and crashed by turns as it swung heavily in its leaded frame. Lucia put on her dressing gown and slippers, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went down to fasten the lattice. A small swinging lamp gave light to the hall and staircase. A gleam followed her into the library; it lay in a pool behind her, its thin stream lost in the blackness of the floor. She could distinguish nothing in the room but the three dim white busts on their dusky pedestals. Behind the latticework the window panes were like chequered sheets of liquid twilight let down over the face of the night.
The wind held the open lattice backwards, and she had some difficulty in reaching the hasp. A shallow gust ran over the floor, chilling her half-naked feet. As she leaned out on the sill a great fear came over her, the fear that had always possessed her in childhood at the coming and passing of the night. As she struggled with the lattice, she had a sense of pulling it against some detaining hand. It swung slowly round and the figure of a man slid with it side-long, and stood behind it looking in. The figure seemed to lean forward out of the darkness; its face, pressed close against the panes, was vivid, as if seen in a strong daylight. She saw the flame of its red moustache and hair, the flicker of its faun-like tilted smile. Its eyes were fixed piercingly on hers.
It stood so for the space of six heart-beats. The window slipped from her hand and swung back on its hinges. The cloud was heaved from the edges of the world, and face and figure were wiped out by the great grey sweep of the dawn. Lucia (strangely as it seemed to her afterwards) was not startled by the apparition, but by the aspect of the world it had appeared in. She stood motionless, as if afraid of waking her own fear; she caught the lattice, drew it towards her and deliberately secured it by the hasp. She turned with relief from the terrible twilight of the windows to the darkness of the room. She crossed it with slow soft footsteps, lest she should give her terror the signal to pursue.
There was a slight stir on the hearth as a mound of ashes sank and broke asunder, opening its dull red heart.
Lucia turned in the direction of the sound, came forward and saw that she was not alone.
Stretched on the rug in front of the fireplace with his feet towards her lay Mr. Rickman.
Her first feeling was of relief, protection, deliverance. She stood looking at him, finding comfort in the sheer corporeality of his presence. But as she looked at him that emotion merged in concern for Mr. Rickman himself. He lay on his back in a deep sleep; one arm was flung above his head, the hand brushing back his damp hair; his forehead was beaded with the thick sweat of exhaustion. He must have been lying so for hours, having dropped off to sleep when the night was still warm. He had thrown back his coat and loosened his shirt-collar, and lay undefended from the draught that raked the floor. The window at this end of the room had been left open too, and the fire was almost dead.
Lucia looked doubtfully at the window. She knew its ways; it sagged on its hinges and was not to be shut without the grating shriek of iron upon stone. She looked, still more doubtfully, at Mr. Rickman. His face in the strange light showed white and sharp and pathetically refined.
And as she looked her heart was filled with compassion for the helpless sleeper. She moved very softly to the fireplace, where an oak chest stood open stored with wood; she gathered the embers together and laid on them a few light logs. The first log dropped through the ashes to the hearth, and Mr. Rickman heaved a deep sigh and turned on his side.
Lucia knelt there motionless, till his breathing assured her that he still slept. With swift noiseless movements she went on building up the dying fire. The wood crackled; a little flame leapt up, and Mr. Rickman opened his eyes. For a moment he kept them open, fixed in sleepy wonder on the woman who knelt beside him by the hearth. He was obscurely aware that it was Lucia Harden, but his wonder was free from the more vivid and disturbing element of surprise; for he had been dreaming about her and was still under the enchantment of his dream. Never had she seemed more beautiful to him.
Her head was bowed, her face turned from him and shaded by her hair; and with her hands she tended a dying flame. Her shawl had slipped from her shoulders, and he saw the delicate curve of her body as she knelt; it was overlaid by her hair that fell to her hips in a loose flat braid. He closed his eyes again, feigning abysmal sleep. He kept guard over his breath, over his eyelids, lest a tremor should startle her into shame-faced flight. Yet he knew that she had risen and that her face was set towards him; that she turned from him and then paused in her going; that she looked at the fire again to make sure of its burning, and at him to make sure of his sleep (so intently that she never noticed the white thing which had slipped from her shoulders as she stood upright); that she stooped to draw his coat more closely over him. He heard the flowing of her gown, and saw without seeing her feet shining as she went from him.
And his desire went after her, and the mere bodiless idea of her became a torment to his body as it had been a joy to his soul.
He took up her shawl which lay there by the hearth and looked at it; he stroked it, unfolded it, spread it out and looked at it again; he held it to his face; its whiteness and its tender texture were as flame to his sight and touch, the scarcely perceptible scent of it pierced him like a delicate pain. He gathered it up again in a heap and covered it with kisses. Then, because it made his longing for her insupportable, he flung it back, that innocent little white shawl, as if shaking off her touch and her presence.
He rose to his feet and ramped up and down the room savagely, like a wild animal in a cage. With every thought of Lucia his torment returned upon him. He tried to think of the whiteness and the beauty of her soul, and he could think of nothing but the whiteness of her face and the beauty of her bending body.
He sat down, stretched his arms on the table and laid his miserable head upon them, all among the pages of the catalogue raisonné. He had passed from his agony of desire to an agony of contrition. He felt that the very vehemence of his longing was an affront to her white unconsciousness Up till now he had not admitted that he was "in love" with Lucia; he was indeed hardly aware of it. He imagined his feeling for her to be something altogether immaterial and incorruptible. It now seemed to him that in the last few minutes he had lowered it almost to the level of the emotion inspired by Miss Poppy Grace. It was not, and it never could be, what it had been three weeks ago. Why, he could not even recall his sensations of Easter Sunday, that strange renewal of his heart's virginity his first vague imperfect vision of the dawn of love, his joy when he discerned its tender and mysterious approach. He knew that it held no rights, or held them only on the most subtle and uncertain tenure, that his soul touched the soul of Lucia Harden by the extreme tips of its wings stretched to the utmost. Still his passion for her had been, so far, satisfied by that difficult and immaterial relationship. He was bound to her by an immaterial, intangible link.
But he had put an end to that relationship; he had broken the immaterial, intangible link. It was as if he had given a body to some delicate and spiritual dream, and destroyed it in a furious embrace. And in destroying it he had destroyed everything.
Then he reflected that though this deed seemed to belong wholly to the present moment, it had in reality been done a long time before, when he first became the slave of that absurd and execrable passion for Miss Poppy Grace. Rickman the poet had believed in Love, the immortal and invincible, the highest of high divinities, and as such had celebrated him in song. But he had been unfortunate in his first actual experience of him. He had found him, not "pacing Heaven's golden floor," but staggering across Miss Grace's drawing-room, a most offensive, fifth-rate, disreputable little god. Of course he knew it wasn't the same thing, it wasn't the same thing at all. But he was bound by his past. He had forged a chain of infamous but irresistible association that degraded love in his eyes, that in his thoughts degraded her. Every hour that he had spent in the little dancer's society had its kindred with this hour. In his passion for Lucia Harden there leapt up the passion of that night—that night three weeks ago. It was then—then—that he had sinned against her.
He had not meant—he had not meant to love her—like that. And yet he perceived how all along, unremittently, imperceptibly, this passion had waylaid him and misled him and found him out. It was it that had drawn him every morning across the fields to Court House, that upheld him on his giddy perch on the library steps, that chained him to his chair at the library table and kept him sweating over that abominable catalogue till four o'clock in the morning. It had looked at him with so pure and spiritual a face that he had not recognized it. But how otherwise could he have stayed here for three weeks, fooling with that unlucky conscience of his; persuading it one minute that he had nothing to do with Miss Harden, and that her father's affairs were no business of his, the next that they were so much his business that he was bound not to betray them; while as for Miss Harden, he had so much to do with her that it was his duty to stay where he was and protect her? He had had absolutely no duty in the matter except to tell her the truth and clear out.
Telling the truth—it ought to have been easy for him who was so truthful, so passionately sincere. And yet almost anything would have been easier, for the next step to telling the truth was going away. Of course he had suffered in staying, but he would have suffered anything rather than go.
It had been so insidious. His feet had been caught in a net so fine that he had thought it woven of the hairs split by an exceedingly acute and subtle conscience. He should have stood still and snapt them one by one; but he had struggled, until he was so entangled that he could not get out. And now he perceived that the net which seemed so fine was the strong net woven by desire. All his subtle reasonings, his chivalry, his delicacy, his sincerity itself, could be reduced to this simple and contemptible element. Positively, his whole character, as he now contemplated it seemed to slip away from him and dissolve in the irresistible stream, primeval, monstrous, indestructible.
The horror of his position returned upon him, the burden of his knowledge and her ignorance. If only she knew, if only he could go to her and tell her everything, all that he knew and all that he guessed! He was still firm in his conviction that he had no moral right to his knowledge; it was a thing he almost seemed to have come by dishonestly. If Miss Harden knew nothing of her father's affairs, it was to be presumed that they had been purposely kept from her to save her pain. He had no right to tell her.
No matter, he would tell her, he would tell her this morning, and having told her, he would go away.
He got up and paced to and fro again. He stood before the open window till he had chilled himself through; then he came back and cowered over the fire. A white thing lay by the hearth at his feet, it was Lucia Harden's shawl, lying crumpled where he had thrown it. It was the sign and symbol of her presence there. It was also the proof of it.
How would she feel if she knew that he had been aware of it all the time? The fact remained that she had risked his waking; there was comfort for him in that. She had always been kind to him, and he had never had even a momentary illusion as to the source and the nature of her kindness. He had taken it, as he had taken her extreme courtesy, for the measure of the distance that divided them. It showed her secure in her detachment, her freedom from any intimate thought of him, from any thought of him at all. But in this last act of kindness it could hardly be that she had not taken him into consideration. She could hardly have been pleased if she knew he had been awake, yet she had risked his waking. Before she risked it she must have credited him with something of her own simplicity of soul.
And this was how he had repaid her.
He saw her as she had knelt by him, mending the dying fire, as she had stood looking at him, as she had stooped over him to cover him, and as she had turned away; and he saw himself, sinning as he had sinned against her in his heart.
He knew perfectly well that the average man would have felt no compunction whatever upon this head. To the average man his imagination (if he has any) is an unreal thing; to Rickman it was the most real thing about him. It was so young, and in its youth so ungovernably creative, that it flung out its ideas, as it were, alive and kicking. It was only partially true of him that his dream was divorced from reality. For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms), projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts. His imagination was in this so far spiritual that it perceived desire to be the eternal soul of the deed, and the deed to be but the perishing body of desire. From this point of view, conduct may figure as comparatively unimportant; therefore this point of view is very properly avoided by the average man.
Rickman, now reduced to the last degree of humility and contrition, picked up Lucia's shawl very gently and reverently, and folded it with care, smoothing out the horrid creases he had made in it. He took it to the other end of the room and laid it over the back of her chair, so that it might look to Robert as if his mistress had left it there.
Would he see her again that morning? That depended on the amount of work that remained for her to do. He looked over her table; her tray was empty, the slips were pinned together in bundles in the way he had taught her, Section XII, Poetry, was complete. There was nothing now to keep her in the library. And he had only ten days' work to do. He might see her once or twice perhaps on those days; but she would not sit with him, nor work with him, and when the ten days were over she would go away and he would never see her again.
Then he remembered that he had got to tell her and go away himself, at once, this very morning.
Meanwhile he sat down and worked till it was time to go back to his hotel. He worked mechanically, miserably, oppressed alike by his sense of his own villainy and of the futility of his task. He did not know how, when it was ended, he was to take up this kind of work again. He had only been kept up by his joy in her presence, and in her absence by the hope of her return. But he could not bear to look into a future in which she had no part.