It was done and V. Lydiat, a climbing star, shed a faint beam over the world. For the editor wrote back eagerly. He knew he had found a new flavour. “Your work impresses me as extremely original. I am anxious to see more of it. I need hardly say I accept it for the magazine and I shall hope to hear from you again before long.” A cheque followed.
No need to dwell on Beatrice Veronica’s feelings, mixed beyond disentanglement. She was not astonished that the work should be recognized as good, but—V. Lydiat! What had happened to her and how? Strange tales are told to-day of sudden brain-stimulations and complexes. Was she the happy victim of such an adventure, and if so, would it be recurrent? How should she know? What should she do? She felt herself moving in worlds not realized, and could not in the least decide the simple question of whether it was honest to accept commendation for a thing she felt in her very soul she had not done and could not do.
But then, who? What was V. Lydiat?
He, she, or it, came from starrier spheres than hers. Wings plumed its shoulders, while hers were merely becomingly draped in seasonable materials. She knew that the visitor was a subtler spirit, dwelling beyond the mysteries, saturated with the colour and desire of dead ages which can never die—an authentic voice, hailed at once by the few, to be blown at last on the winds of the soul which, wandering the world, let fall here and there the seeds of amaranth and asphodel.
Yes—V. Lydiat was entirely beyond her.
But you will understand that, though Beatrice Veronica could not enter into the secret places, it was a most wonderful thing to be amanuensis and business manager. To her fell the letters from editors and publishers, the correspondence which rained in from the ends of the earth, protesting gratitude, praise, entreaties for counsel in all things from routes to religions. These latter were the most difficult, for it would have taken V. Lydiat to answer them adequately. But Beatrice Veronica did the best she could, and her life moved onward aureoled and haloed.
She learned at last the rules of the game. V. Lydiat’s ethereal approach could only be secured by the wand of a fountain pen. She must sit thus armed with a fair sheet before her and wait, fixing her mind on some idle point of light or persistent trembling of leaves, and suddenly the world would pass miraculously from her and she would awake in another—an amazing world, most beautiful, brimming with romance, lit by suns of gallant men and moons of loveliest women. The great jewels of the Orient shed starry splendours, and ghostly creeping figures pursued them through jungles and mountain passes. Strange magics lurked in the dark and drew the soul along the Way of Wonder.
The strangest experience. It began always in the same way. The blue Canadian sky, the hyacinth gleam of the sea through oak and pine dissolved in unrealities of mist, and sultry Oriental skies, yellow as a lion’s eyes or the brazen boom of a gong, beat their fierce sunlight downward as from an inverted bowl. And then—then, she knew V. Lydiat was at hand. But never with companionship. It was a despot and entered in, with flags flying, to the annihilation of Beatrice Veronica. She wrote like a thing driven on a wind, and woke to find it done. The possession obliterated her, and when she could collect her routed forces it was gone.
So time went on and V. Lydiat’s fame was established and Beatrice Veronica wore it as a woman too poor to appear at Court with fitting magnificence shines in borrowed jewels and trembles to wear them.
One night in the moonlit warmth, with the vast Princesses of the Dark hidden in the ambush of breathless trees, she sat in the high veranda of her little house with the broad vista through pines to the sea.