OLIVER. Good Lord!
ISOBEL (in the same quiet voice). The friend was left—with the body of the poet—and all that great monument which the dead man had raised for himself. The poet had no friends but this one; no relations of whom he had ever spoken or who claimed him now. He was dead, and it was left to his friend to see that he won now that immortality for which he had given his life.... His friend betrayed him.
SEPTIMA. I say!
WILLIAM. I won’t believe it! It’s monstrous!
MARION. I don’t understand.
ISOBEL (wearily). One can see the temptation. There he was, this young man of talent, of great ambition, and there were these works of genius lying at his feet, waiting to be picked up—and fathered by him. I suppose that, like every other temptation, it came suddenly. He writes out some of the verses, scribbled down anyhow by the poet in his mad hurry, and sends [228]them to a publisher; one can imagine the publisher’s natural acceptance of the friend as the true author, the friend’s awkwardness in undeceiving him, and then his sudden determination to make the most of the opportunity given him.... Oh, one can imagine many things—but what remains? Always and always this. That Oliver Blayds was not a poet; that he did not write the works attributed to him; and that he betrayed his friend. (She stops and then says in an ordinary matter-of-fact voice) That was why I thought that he ought not to be buried in the Abbey.
OLIVER. Good Lord!
WILLIAM (sharply). Is this true, Isobel?
ISOBEL. It isn’t the sort of story that I should make up.
MARION. I don’t understand. (To WILLIAM) What is it? I don’t understand.