The Divine Fire Part 111

"Very much. But Horace, he has done what you said was impossible."

"Anybody would have said it was impossible. Modern drama in blank verse, you know--"

"Yes. It ought to have been all wrong. But because he's both a great poet and a great dramatist, it's all right, you see. Look," she said, pointing to a pa.s.sage that she dared not read. "Those are human voices. Could anything be simpler and more natural? But it's blank verse because it couldn't be more perfectly expressed in prose."

"Yes, yes. I wonder how he does it."

"It would have been impossible to anybody else."

"It remains impossible. If it's ever played, it will be played because of Rickman's stage-craft and inimitable technique, not because of his blank verse."

She put the book down; took up her work, and said no more. Horace seemed to have found his answer and to be satisfied. "A fool," thought Kitty; "but he shall have his chance." So she left them alone together that evening.

But Jewdwine was very far from being satisfied, either with Lucia or himself. Lucia had refused to play to him yesterday because she had a headache; she had refused to walk with him to-day because she was tired; and to-night she would not sit up to talk to him because she had another headache. That evening he had all but succ.u.mbed to a terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her att.i.tude, that appealed to the authority on aesthetics. He found himself wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had kissed her his sense of propriety would have obliged him to propose to her and marry her.

He almost wished he had yielded to that temptation, done that desperate deed. It would have at least settled the question once for all.

For Jewdwine had found himself a third time at the turning of the ways. He knew where he was; but not where he was going. It had happened with Jewdwine as it had with Isaac Rickman; as it happens to every man bent on serving two masters. He had forbidden his right hand all knowledge of his left. He lived in two separate worlds. In one, lit by the high, pure light of the idea, he stood comparatively alone, cheered in his intellectual solitude by the enthusiasm of his disciples. For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred imperishable flame. Some suffered no painful disenchantment for their pilgrimage; and when the world that knew Jewdwine imparted to them its wisdom they smiled the mystic smile of the initiated. But many had become shaken in their faith. One of these, having achieved a little celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any public a.s.sistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had a.s.sured him that the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." And this had been Jewdwine's own confession and defence.

But now he had gone down into Devonshire, as Rickman had once gone before him, to find himself. He had returned to Lucia as to his own purer soul. That night Jewdwine sat up face to face with himself and all his doubts; his problem being far more complicated than before.

Three years ago it might have been very simply stated. Was he or was he not going to marry his cousin Lucia? But now, while personal inclination urged him to marry her, prudence argued that he would do better to marry a certain cousin of Mr. Fulcher's. His own cousin had neither money nor position. Mr. Fulcher's cousin had both. Once married to Miss Fulcher he could buy back Court House, if the Pallisers would give it up. The Cabinet Minister's cousin was in love with him, whereas he was well aware that his own cousin was not.

But then he had never greatly desired her to be so.

Jewdwine had neither respect nor longing for Miss Fulcher's pa.s.sionate love. To his fragile temperament there was something infinitely more alluring in Lucia's virginal apathy. Her indifference (which he confused with her innocence) fascinated him; her reluctance was as a challenge to his languid blood. He was equally fascinated by her indifference to the income and position that were his. He admired that immaculate purity the more because he was not himself in these ways particularly pure. He loved money and position for their own sakes and hated himself for loving them. He would have liked to have been strong enough to despise these things as Lucia had always despised them. But he did not desire that she should go on despising them, any more than he desired that her indifference should survive the marriage ceremony. He pictured with satisfaction her gradual yielding to the modest luxury he had to offer her, just as he pictured the exquisite delaying dawn of her wifely ardour.

The truth was he had lived too long with Edith. The instincts of his nature cried out (as far as anything so well-regulated could be said to cry out) in the most refined of accents for a wife, for children and a home. He had his dreams of the holy faithful spouse, a spouse with great dog-like eyes and tender breast, fit pillow for the head of a headachy, literary man. Lucia had dog-like eyes, and of her tenderness he had never had a doubt. He had never forgotten that hot June day, the year before he left Oxford, when he lay in the hammock in the green garden and Lucia ministered to him. Before that there was a blessed Long Vacation when he had over-read himself into a nervous breakdown, and Lucia had soothed his headaches with the touch of her gentle hands. For the sake of that touch he would then have borne the worst headache man ever had.

And now it seemed that it was Lucia that was always having headaches.

He had, in fact, begun to entertain the very gravest anxiety about her health. Her face and figure had grown thin; they were becoming less and less like the face and figure of the ideal spouse. Poor Lucia's arms offered no reliable support for a tired man.

To his annoyance Jewdwine found that he had to breakfast alone with his hostess, because of Lucia's headache.

"Lucia doesn't seem very strong," he said to Kitty, sternly, as if it had been Kitty's fault. "Don't you see it?"

"I have seen it for some considerable time."

"She wants rousing."

And Jewdwine, who was himself feeling the need of exercise, roused her by taking her for a walk up Harcombe Hill. Half-way up she turned a white face to him, smiling sweetly, sat down on the hillside, and bent her head upon her knees. He sat beside her and waited for her recovery with punctilious patience. His face wore an expression of agonized concern. But she could see that the concern was not there altogether on her account.

"Don't be frightened, Horace, you won't have to carry me home."

He helped her to her feet, not ungently, and was very considerate in accommodating his pace to hers, and in rea.s.suring her when she apologized for having spoilt his morning. And then it was that she thought of Keith Rickman, of his gentleness and his innumerable acts of kindness and of care; and she said to herself, "_He_ would not be impatient with me if I were ill."

She rested in her room that afternoon and Kitty sat with her. Kitty could not stand, she said, more than a certain amount of Horace Jewdwine.

"Lucia," she asked suddenly, "if Horace Jewdwine had asked you to marry him five years ago, would you have had him?"

"I don't know. I don't really know. He's a good man."

"You mean his morals are irreproachable. It's quite easy to have irreproachable morals if you have the temperament of an iceberg that has never broken loose from its Pole. Now I call Keith Rickman a saint, because he could so easily have been the other thing."

Lucia did not respond; and Kitty left her.

Kitty's question had set her thinking. Would she have married Horace if he had asked her five years ago? Why not? Between Horace and her there was the bond of kindred and of caste. He was a scholar; he had, or he once had, a beautiful mind full of n.o.ble thoughts of the kind she most admired. With Horace she would have felt safe from many things. All his ideas and feelings, all his movements could be relied on with an absolute a.s.surance of their propriety. Horace would never do or say anything that could offend her feminine taste. In his love (she had been certain) there would never be anything painful, pa.s.sionate, disturbing. She had dreamed of a love which should be a great calm light rather than a flame. There was no sort of flame about Horace. _Was_ Horace a good man? Yes. That is to say he was a moral man. He would have come to her clean in body and in soul. She had vowed she would never marry a certain kind of man. And yet that was the kind of man Keith Rickman had been.

She had further demanded in her husband the finish of the ages. Who was more finished than Horace? Who more consummately, irreproachably refined? And yet her heart had grown more tender over Keith Rickman and his solecisms. And now it beat faster at the very thought of him, after Horace Jewdwine.

For Horace's coming had brought her understanding of Keith Rickman and herself. She knew now what had troubled her once clear vision of him.

It was when she had loved him least that she had divined him best.

Hers was not the facile heart that believes because it desires. It desired because it believed; and now it doubted because its belief was set so high.

And, knowing that she loved him, she thought of that last day when he had left her, and how he had taken her hands in his and looked at them, and she remembered and wondered and had hope.

Then it occurred to her that Horace would be leaving early the next morning, and that she really ought to go down to the drawing-room and talk to him.

Again by Kitty's mercy he had been given another chance. He was softened by a mood of valediction mingled with remorse. He was even inclined to be a little sentimental. Lucia, because her vision was indifferent therefore untroubled, could not but perceive the change in him. His manner had in it something of benediction and something of entreaty; his spirit brooded over, caressed and flattered hers. He deplored the necessity for his departure. "_Et ego in Arcadia_"--he quoted.

"But you'll go away to-morrow and become more--more Metropolitan than ever."

"Ah, Lucia, can't you leave my poor rag alone? Do you really think so badly of it?"

"Well, I was prouder of my cousin when he had _The Museion_."

"I didn't ask you what you thought of _me_. Perhaps I'm not very proud of myself."

"I don't suppose it satisfies your ambition--I should be sorry if it did."

"My _ambition_? What do you think it was?"

"It was, wasn't it--To be a great critic?"

"It depends on what you call great."

"Well, you came very near it once."

"When?"

"When you were editor of _The Museion_."

He smiled sadly. "The editor of _The Museion_, Lucia, was a very little man with a very big conceit of himself. I admit he made himself pretty conspicuous. So does every leader of a forlorn hope."

"Still he led it. What does the editor of _Metropolis_ lead?"

"Public opinion, dear. He has--although you mightn't think it--considerable power."

Lucia was silent.