He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.
They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.
By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication of The Triumph of Life. The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks. Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more. He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.
Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived passionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?
She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.
"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."
"I always said he would."
"You doubted—once."
"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."
"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."