Perhaps—perhaps—let it be said with hesitation and much caution—there was something not wholly unwelcome to our heroine in the idea that she could be glory's queen and all the rest of it, to any human creature, not to say any poet, just now. She felt humbled and deeply depressed. In her own eyes she was lowered by what she knew of her own heart. Her pride had received a terrible wound, almost a death wound. The little world she had made so proudly for herself had all crumbled into dust. It is not wonderful if at such a time there should be, in spite of her sense of the ridiculous and her senses generally, a certain soothing influence in the fact that there still was some one in whose eyes she appeared a person of account and even of dignity. At all events, let it be frankly said, that when the first shock and stir of the ridiculous were passed, Minola was not inclined to think more harshly than before of the poor poet who called her his patroness and his queen. As to the expense of the publication, she was a little startled at first, but that sensation very quickly passed away. She was not enough of a woman of business yet to care about the cost of anything so long as she had the money to pay. It would run her hard in her first year of independent life, to pay this much, but then she could pay it and live somehow, and it would only be a case for strict economy in the future for some time. Besides, it seemed that whether she would or not, she was likely to have much more money than she wanted or could use for any purposes of her own. Then she was further stimulated to carelessness by Mr. Heron's letter.
"If he thinks I care about money, or the cost of serving a friend, he is mistaken," she said. "His caution and his protestations are thrown away on me."
For she was much inclined to be unjust and harsh in her mind toward Heron now. He had committed, all unconsciously, a terrible offence. He had, without knowing it, made her fall in love with him. So she made the best of the whole affair, cost, dedication, glory's queen, and all; and when Mary Blanchet came to look at the precious volume, and to go into raptures over it, Minola did her very best to seem contented, and not even to suggest a criticism, or to ask what this or that meant. She reminded herself that the late Lord Lytton had written contemptuously of the "fools on fools" who "still ask what Hamlet means."
"This may be as far off from me as Hamlet from other people," she told herself. "Why confess myself a fool by asking what anything means? And in any case Mary Blanchet would not know any better than I."
By this resolve she made one woman happy.
But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred happiness. Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister could have wished him to be. The head of the poet swam in delight. He had never before been so proud and blest. He hung over his volume for hours; he could hardly get away from it. When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from its fascinations, he found himself drawn back again into its presence. He touched fondly its soft, satiny leaves as though they were the cheek of beauty; he pressed his own cheek against them; he committed all the follies which we understand and admire in the immemorial raptures of the young lover or the father of the first born.
"They must see this," he cried aloud. "They can't overlook a volume like this." "They" being, of course, that public whose opinion he had always despised—those critics whose praise he had always declared to be the worst censure to a man of true genius.
To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his breast for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That emotion came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager; but to be thus lifted to his longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and beautiful woman was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and seldom allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The emotion called up by experience was as new as the experience itself. Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of excitement he would probably, if need were, have laid down his life for Minola.
If Minola knew what strange effect had been wrought in the breast of her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money well laid out, even although she had wanted it far more than she did. "To making a man happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar entry on which a famous essay in the "Spectator" was founded. To make a man grateful for the first time is surely a nobler piece of work than to make him merely happy, and it ought fairly to cost a good deal more. Minola had made a man for the first time both grateful and happy. The work was a little expensive in this case, but what miser will say that the money was thrown away?
It is not likely, however, that Minola would have been quite so much delighted if she could have known all the feelings that her generous, improvident patronage had awakened in the poet's breast. For Mr. Blanchet knew women well, he thought; and he did not believe that mere kindness alone could have impelled Minola to such an act of bounty. Nor, making every needful allowance for the friendship between Miss Grey and his sister, did he find in that a sufficing explanation of Minola's liberality. He set himself to think over the whole matter coolly and impartially, and he could come to no other conclusion than that Miss Grey admired him. He was a handsome fellow, as he knew very well, and tall, and romantic in appearance: what could be more natural than that a poetic young woman should fall in love with him? He felt sure that he had fallen in deepest love with her, but it is doubtful whether he was yet in a condition to analyze his own excited feelings very clearly. It is certain that he was madly in love with his poems, with their gorgeous first edition, with the pride and the prospect of the whole affair; and of course likewise in love with the patroness to whom he was indebted for so much of a strange delight. But how much was love of himself and how much of Minola, he did not take time to consider.