CHAPTER XXX
Lucia had risen and was standing in the embrasure of the south window. She had her back to the door, so that she could not see him as he came in.
He wondered how on earth he was going to get over the space between the window and the door. A sudden wave of weakness went through his body; he had horrible sensations of sinking at the middle and of giving way altogether at the knees. He had been afraid of seeing her suffer; now he knew that what he was really afraid of was her fear of seeing him. He expected to see her face set in abhorrence of his sympathy, her body shrink in anticipation of a touch on her pain.
Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had happened.
His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.
"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me—"
"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not come. Sit down, please."
She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.
He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the table. She turned so as to face him.
She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she was changed, too. Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.
"You have been ill?" she said.
And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.
She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him well at the hotel.
Decidedly she had grown older and her manner had grown older too. It suggested that it was she who was the protector; that she wished, as far as possible, to spare him in an interview which must necessarily be painful. It was as if she remembered that he at any rate was young, and that these gloomy circumstances must be highly distasteful to his youth. In that she was the same as ever; every nerve in her shrank from the pain of giving pain.
At least that was his first impression. And then (no consoling view being really open to him) he told himself he was a fool to suppose that in the circumstances she could think of him at all. He had nothing tangible to go upon. He could see through it. He could see perfectly through the smile, the self-possession, even the air of polite and leisurely interest in his illness. She dwelt on him because he was of all themes the one most indifferent to her. She was simply holding herself in, according to the indestructible instincts of her race.
He need not have been afraid of seeing her suffer; that, at any rate, he would not see. To let him see it would have been to her an extreme personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class. This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood between them, waving him away. It opened up again the impassable gulf. He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from her beyond all possibility of approach. She had not changed. She had simply reverted to her type.
Her eyes waited for him to speak. But they were not the eyes he knew, the eyes that had drawn him to confession. It was borne in upon him that this (though it might be his last moment with her) was not the moment to confess. There was a positive grossness in the idea of unburdening himself in the presence of this incommunicable grief. It was like putting in a claim for consideration as an equal sufferer. He had no right to obtrude himself upon her at all. In her calm-eyed attention there was a hint—a very delicate and gentle one—that he would do well to be impersonal, business-like, and, above all, brief.
"It was about the library that I wanted to see you, Miss Harden."
"Was it? I was just going to ask you not to do anything more to the catalogue if you have not finished it."
"I finished it ten days ago—before the twenty-seventh."
She smiled faintly. "Then you kept your promise. It doesn't matter. What I most wanted to speak to you about was the secretaryship I offered you. I'm afraid we must give it up."
"Oh—Miss Harden—" his tone expressed that he had always given it up, that it was not to be thought of for an instant. But evidently she was possessed with the idea that he had a claim upon her.
"I'm very sorry, but as things have turned out I shan't be able to keep a secretary. In fact, as you may have heard, I'm not able to keep anything hardly—not even my promises."
"Please—please don't think of it—"
"There is no use thinking of it. Still, I wanted you to know that I really meant it—I believed it could be done. Of course I don't know how much you really wanted it."
"Wanted it? I'd 'ave given half my life for a year of it."
Lucia's hand, laid lightly on the table's edge, felt a strong vibration communicated to it from Mr. Rickman's arm. She looked up, in time to see his white face quiver before he hid it with his hand.
"I'm so sorry. Did it mean so much to you?"
He smiled through his agony at the cause assigned to it. "I'm not thinking of that. What it means to me—what it always will mean is your goodness—in thinking of it. In thinking of it now."
It was his nearest approach to a sympathetic allusion.
She did not wince (perceptibly), but she ignored the allusion.
"Oh, that's nothing. You would have been of great use to me. If I thought of helping you at all, my idea was simply—how shall I put it?—to make up in some way for the harm I've done you."
"What harm have you ever done me?"
For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she explained.
"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was responsible for your illness."
He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not know that."
"I knew it, though."
"You knew it? How did you know it?"
"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to you about."
He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done, point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.
"If," she said, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's your father who is going to buy it."
He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father) that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.
It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.
Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view. Her practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human, and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to nothing less than a moral miracle. But Miss Harden would have a higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than his own, and if he considered that his father was morally bound to withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his remaining in it. Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.
"Why shouldn't he buy it?" she asked.
"Because, I'm afraid, selling it in—in that way, you won't make much money over it."
"Well—it's not a question of making money, it's a question of paying a debt."
"How much you make—or lose—of course, depends on the amount of the debt—what it was valued at."
Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet. She had the required fact at her fingers' ends and instantly produced it. "It was valued at exactly one thousand pounds."
"And it should have been valued at four. My father can't give anything like that. We ought to be able to find somebody who can. But it might take a considerable time."
"And there is no time. What do you advise me to do then?"
"Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that would be all right. If we can't, I advise you to buy it back, or a part of it, yourself. Buy back the books that make it valuable. You've got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda printed by Wynken de Worde." (He positively blushed as he consummated this final act of treachery to Rickman's.) "And heaps of others equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so. You can buy them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand. If Pilkington collars the rest he'll still be paid, and there may be something over."
She considered a moment. "Has Mr. Pilkington any idea of the value of those books?"
"I'm certain he hasn't. Only an expert could have."
"Would it be perfectly fair to him?"
"To him? Perfectly fair. You buy them at his own valuation."
"I see. I should like to do that—if—if it can be managed."
"I think it can be managed. My father isn't likely to settle with Mr. Pilkington without consulting me. If he has settled we must try and get him to withdraw."
"Oh, surely there would be no difficulty about that?"
He said nothing. It was really terrible the way she took integrity for granted. To be sure his father had a reputation with the family. He remembered how Sir Joseph used to praise him to his face as the only honest dealer in London. But Sir Joseph was in the habit of buying books, not selling them.
He rose and turned away, evading her innocent eyes.
"I hope not. I'll see Mr. Pilkington about it. By the way, here is Mr. Pilkington. Did you expect him?"
"No, I—" Her voice died away, extinguished in her horror.