The Divine Fire Part 107

"That's very clever of Robert," said he.

"No, it's only his faithfulness. What a funny thing faithfulness is.

Robert won't allow any one but Miss Harden to be mistress here. My people are interlopers, abominations of desolation. He can barely be civil to their friends. But to hers--he is as you see him. It's a good thing for me I'm her friend, or he wouldn't let me sit here and pour out tea for you."

He thought over the speech. It admitted an encouraging interpretation.

But Miss Palliser may have been more consoling than she had meant.

She rattled on in the kindness of her heart. He was grateful for her presence; it calmed his agitation and prepared him to meet Lucia with composure when she came. But Lucia did not come; and he began to have a horrible fear that at the last moment she would fail him. He refused the second cup that Kitty pressed on him, and she looked at him compa.s.sionately again. He was so used to his appearance that he had forgotten how it might strike other people. He was conscious only of Kitty's efforts to fill up agreeably these moments of suspense.

At last it ended. Lucia was in the doorway. At the sight of her his body shook and the strength in his limbs seemed to dissolve and flow downwards to the floor. His eyes never left her as she came to him with her rhythmic unembarra.s.sed motion. She greeted him as if they had met the other day; but as she took his hand she looked down at it, startled by its slenderness. He was glad that she seated herself on his right, for he felt that the violence of his heart must be audible through his emaciated ribs.

Kitty made some trivial remark, and Lucia turned to her as if her whole soul hung upon Kitty's words. Her absorption gave him time to recover himself. (It did not occur to him that that was what she had turned away for.) Her turning enabled him to look at her. He noticed that she seemed in better health than when he had seen her last, and that in sign of it her beauty was stronger, more vivid and more defined.

They said little to each other. But when Kitty had left them they drew in their chairs to the hearth with something of the glad consent of those for whom the long-desired moment has arrived. He felt that old sense of annihilated time, of return to a state that had never really lapsed; and it struck him that she, too, had that feeling. It was she who spoke first.

"Before you begin your business, tell me about yourself."

"There isn't anything to tell."

She looked as if she rather doubted the truth of that statement.

"If you don't mind, I'd rather begin about the business and get it over."

"Why, is it--is it at all unpleasant?"

He smiled. "Not in the least, not in the very least. It's about the library."

"I thought we'd agreed that that was all over and done with long ago?"

"Well, you see, it hasn't anything to do with _us_. My father--"

"Don't let us go back to that."

"I'm sorry, but we must--a little. You know my father and I had a difference of opinion?"

"I know--I know."

"Well, in the end he owned that I was right. That was when he was dying."

He wished she would not look at him; for he could not look at her. He was endeavouring to make his tale appear in the last degree natural and convincing. Up till now he had told nothing but the truth, but as he was about to enter on the path of perjury he became embarra.s.sed by the intentness of her gaze.

"You were with him?" she asked.

"Yes." He paused a moment to command a superior kind of calm. That pause wrecked him, for it gave her also time for thought. "He wanted either to pay you the money that you should have had, or to hand over the library; and I thought--"

"But the library was sold?"

He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.

"Then how," she asked, "was the library redeemed?"

He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional significance. He desired to lead her gently away from a line of thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue. "You can't call it redeemed. n.o.body redeemed it. The debt, of course, had to be paid out of my father's estate."

"In which case the library became yours?"

He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.

"It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go against my father's wishes by holding on to it."

"Can't you see that it's equally impossible for me to take it?"

"Why? Try and think of it as a simple matter of business."

He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her feminine persistence and refining fantasy. "It hasn't anything to do with you or me."

Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed him in another such dispute nine years ago.

"I am more business-like than you are. I remember perfectly well that your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the beginning."

"That needn't trouble you. It has been virtually deducted. I'm sorry to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and could not be recovered."

He had given himself away by that word "recovered." Her eyes searched him through and through to find his falsehood, as they had searched him once before to find his truth. "It is very, very good of you," she said.

"Of _me_? Am _I_ bothering you? Don't think of me except as my father's executor."

"Did you know that he wanted you to do this, or did you only think it?

Was it really his express wish?"

He looked her in the face and lied boldly and freely. "It was.

Absolutely."

And as she met that look, so luminously, so superlatively sincere, she knew that he had lied. "All the same," said she, "I can't take it.

Don't think it unfriendly of me. It isn't. In fact, don't you see it's just because we have been--we are--friends that I must refuse it? I can't take advantage of that"--she was going to say "feeling," but thought better of it.

"And don't you see by refusing you are compelling me to be dishonourable? If you were really my friend you would think more of my honour than of your own scruples. Or is that asking too much?" He felt that he had scored in this game of keen intelligences.

"No. But it would be wrong of me to let your honour be influenced by our friendship."

"Don't think of our friendship, then. It's all pure business, as brutally impersonal as you like."

"If I could only see it that way."

"I should have thought it was quite transparently and innocently clear." He had scored again. For now he had taxed her with stupidity.

"If I could persuade you that it came from my father, you wouldn't mind. You mind because you think it comes from me. Isn't that so?"

She was silent, and he knew.

"How can I persuade you? I can only repeat that I've absolutely nothing to do with it." There was but little friendliness about him now. His whole manner was full of weariness and irritation. "Why should you imagine that I had?"