The Divine Fire Part 110

(Her tears stopped falling suddenly.)

"I admit that I made a gross appeal to your pity."

"My pity?"

"Yes, your pity." His words were curt and hard because of the terrible restraint he had to put upon himself. "I did it because it was the best argument. Otherwise it would have been abominable of me to have said those things."

"I wasn't thinking of anything you said, only of what you've done."

"I haven't done much. But tell me the truth. Whether would you rather I had done it for your sake or for mere honour's sake?"

"I would rather you had done it for honour's sake." She said it out bravely, though she knew that it was the profounder confession of her feeling. He, however, was unable to take it that way.

"I thought so," he said. "Well, that _is_ why I did it."

"I see. I wanted to know the truth; and now I know it."

"You don't know half of it--" His pa.s.sion leapt to his tongue under the torture, but he held it down. He paused, knowing that this moment in which he stood was one of those moments which have the spirit and the power of eternity, and that it was his to save or to destroy it.

So admirable indeed was his control that it had taken their own significance from his words, and she read into them another meaning.

Her face was white with terror because of the thing she had said; but she still looked at him without flinching. She hardly realized that he was going, that he was trying to say good-bye.

"I will take the books--if you can keep them for me a little while."

Some perfect instinct told her that this was the only way of atonement for her error. He thanked her as if they had been speaking of a trifling thing.

She rose, holding the ma.n.u.script loosely in her clasped hands, and he half thought that she was going to give it back to him. He took it from her and threw it on the window-seat, and held her hands together for an instant in his own. He looked down at them, longing to stoop and kiss them, but forebore, because of his great love for her, and let them go. He went out quickly. He had sufficient self-command to find Kitty and thank her and take his leave.

As the door closed on him Lucia heard herself calling him back, with what intention she hardly knew, unless it were to return his poems.

"Keith," she said softly--"Keith." But even to her own senses it was less a name than a sound that began in a sob and ended in a sigh.

Kitty found her standing in the window-place where he had left her.

"Has anything happened?" she asked.

"I asked him to marry me, Kitty, and he wouldn't. That was all."

"Are you sure you did, dear? From the look of him I should have said it was the other way about."

CHAPTER LXXV

"I don't know what to think of it, Kitty. What do you think?"

"I think you've been playing with fire, dear. With the divine fire.

It's the most dangerous of all, and you've got your little fingers burnt."

"Like Horace. He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire.

I'm not a critic."

"That you most certainly are not."

"Still I used to understand him; and now I can't. I can't make it out at all."

"There's only one thing," said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came.

"You haven't seen him for more than three years, and you can't tell what may have happened in between. He _may_ have got entangled with another woman."

Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed it plausible. But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention. No other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the invading idea of Keith Rickman.

Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the evidence before her. The details which would have thrown light on the situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself.

All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend's mind with a new torment. Lucia had dreaded Rickman's coming; she had lost all sense of security in his presence. Still she had understood him. And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in. Was it possible that she had never really understood?

Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always felt--in one way--absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.

How was it that she had never felt it before? Never felt it in the first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone? When he had appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent as gla.s.s, incapable of reservation or disguise? It was in those days (he had told her) that he had not been--good. And yet her own vision of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then. Even in that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected him. And in the second period of their friendship, when his character was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt. And now there was no end to her doubt. She could not tell which was the instinct she should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or now. What had become of her calm and lucid insight? Of the sympathy in which they had once stood each transparent to the other.

For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was beginning to keep her awake at night). She had made it impossible for him to respect her any more. He had his ideas of what a woman should and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like, and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia's mood rose from misery to anger). She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had judged her as he judged such women. And she had brought that judgement on herself.

In an ecstasy of shame she recalled the various episodes of their acquaintance, from the time when she had first engaged him to work for her (against his will), to the present intolerable moment. There rose before her in an awful vision that night when she had found him sleeping in the library; when she had stayed and risked the chances of his waking. Well, he could not think any the worse of her for that; because he had not waked. But she had risked it. The more she thought of it the more she saw what she had risked. He would always think of her as a woman who did risky things. Edith had said she had put herself in his power. She remembered how she had come between him and the woman whom he would have married but for her; how she had invited him to sit with her when the Beaver was away. He had liked it, but he must have had his own opinion of her all the same. That was another of the risky things. And of course he had taken advantage of it. That was the very worst of all. He had loved her in his way; she had been one of a series. Flossie had come before her. And before Flossie? All that was fine in him had turned against Flossie because of the feeling she inspired. And it had turned against her.

For now, when he had got over it, had forgotten that he had ever had that feeling, when all he wanted was to go his own way and let her go hers, she had tried to force herself upon him (Lucia was unaware of her violent distortion of the facts). He had come with his simple honourable desire for reparation; and she had committed _the_ unpardonable blunder--she had mistaken his intentions. And for the monument and crown of her dishonour, she, Lucia Harden, had proposed to him and been rejected.

Her misery endured (with some merciful intermissions) for three weeks.

Then Horace Jewdwine wrote and invited himself down for the first week-end in May.

"_Can_ he come, Kitty?" she asked wearily.

"Of course he can, dear, if you want him,"

"I don't want him; but I don't mind his coming."

Kitty said to herself, "He has an inkling; Edith has been saying things; and it has brought him to the point." Otherwise she could not account for such an abrupt adventure on the part of the deliberate Horace. It was a Wednesday; and he proposed to come on Friday. He came on Friday. Kitty's observation was on the alert; but it could detect nothing that first evening beyond a marked improvement in Horace Jewdwine. With Lucia he was sympathetic, deferential, charming.

He also laid himself out, a little elaborately, to be agreeable to Kitty.

In the morning he approached Lucia with a gift, brought for her birthday ("I thought," said Lucia, "he had forgotten that I ever had a birthday"). It was an early copy of Rickman's tragedy _The Triumph of Life_, just published. His keen eyes watched her handling it.

"He suspects," thought Kitty, "and he's testing her."

But Lucia's equanimity survived. "Am I to read it now?"

"As you like."

She carried the book up to her own room and did not appear till lunch-time. In her absence Horace seemed a little uneasy; but he went on making himself agreeable to Kitty. "He must be pretty desperate,"

thought she, "if he thinks it worth while." Apparently he did think it worth while, though he allowed no sign of desperation to appear.

Lucia, equally discreet, avoided ostentatious privacy. They sat out all afternoon under the beechtrees while she read, flaunting _The Triumph of Life_ in his very eyes. He watched every movement of her face that changed as it were to the cadence of the verse. It was always so, he remembered, when she was strongly moved. At last she finished and he smiled.

"You like your birthday present?"