The Divine Fire Part 78

"Quite true."

"I was so glad to hear that, too."

"Thanks." There was a slight spasm in his throat. That thick difficult word stuck in it and choked him for the moment.

"I hope I shall meet your wife some day."

"You have met her." Lucia looked puzzled and he smiled, a little sadly for a bridegroom. "You sat next her at dinner. She's here somewhere."

Lucia turned her head to where Flossie was sitting by a table, sitting very upright, with her little air of strained propriety.

"Is it--is it that pretty lady? Do you think I might go up and speak to her? I would so like to know her."

"I'll bring her to you. There's rather a crowd just now in the other room."

He went to her, hardly knowing how he went.

"Flossie," he said, "I want to introduce you to Miss Harden."

Flossie's eyes brightened with surprise and pleasure; for she had learnt from Mrs. Downey that the visitor was the daughter of Sir Frederick Harden; and Lucia's distinction subdued her from afar.

Keith, being aware of nothing but Lucia, failed to perceive, as he otherwise might have done, that he had risen in Flossie's opinion by his evident intimacy with Miss Harden. She came blushing and smiling and a little awkward, steered by Keith. But for all her awkwardness she had never looked prettier than at that moment of her approach.

If Keith had wanted to know precisely where he stood in the order of Lucia's intimacies, he might have learnt it from her reception of Miss Walker. By it he might have measured, too, the height of her belief in him, the depth of her ignorance. She who had divined him was ready to take his unknown betrothed on trust; to credit her, not with vast intellect, perhaps (what did that matter?), but certainly with some rare and lovely quality of soul. He loved her; that was enough. Lucia deduced the quality from the love, not the love from the quality. His pretty lady must be lovable since he loved her. He had noticed long ago that Lucia's face had a way of growing more beautiful in the act of admiration; as if it actually absorbed the loveliness it loved to look upon. And now, as she made a place for Flossie at her side, it wore that look of wonder, ardent yet restrained, that look of shy and tentative delight with which five years ago she had approached his _Helen_. It was as if she had said to herself, "He always brought his best to show me. Five years ago he brought me his dream, to read and care for. Now he brings me the real thing, to read and care for too."

She was evidently preparing to read Flossie as if she had been a new and beautiful poem.

He was unaware of all this; unaware of everything except the mingled beat.i.tude and torture of the moment. He sat leaning forward, staring over his clasped hands at Lucia's feet, where he longed to fall down and worship. He heard her telling Flossie how glad she was to meet her; how unexpected was her finding of him here, after fire years; how five years ago she had known him in Devonshire; and so on. But in his ears the music of her voice detached itself wholly from the meaning of her words. Thus he missed the a.s.surance which, if he had only listened intelligently, they might have had for him; the a.s.surance of an indestructible friendship that welcomed and enfolded his pretty lady for his sake.

But whatever her almost joyous acceptance of the pretty lady promised for the future, it could not be said that, conversationally, Lucia was getting on very fast with Flossie in the present; and Rickman's abstraction did not make things easier. Therefore she was a little relieved when Miss Roots joined them, and Rickman, startled into consciousness, got up and left the room. He feared that lady's sympathy and shrewdness. Nothing could be hidden from her clever eyes.

And now, perceiving that the conversation flagged, Miss Roots endeavoured to support it.

"Have you seen _Metropolis_?" she asked in her tired voice.

Lucia shook her head. "I don't know that I want to see it."

"You'd better not say so before Miss Walker."

"Oh, never mind me," said Miss Walker. "I haven't been yet. Is it good?"

"Some people seem to think so. It depends."

"Yes; there's such a difference in the way they put them on the stage, too."

Miss Roots' face relaxed, and her fatigued intelligence awoke.

"Who's on in it?" asked Flossie, happy and unconscious; and the spirit of mischief seized upon Miss Roots.

"I can't tell you. I'm not well posted in these things. But I think you'd better not ask Mr. Rickman to take you to see _Metropolis_."

Flossie was mystified, and a little indignant. If the play was so improper, why had Miss Roots taken for granted that she had seen it?

"That wasn't at all nice of her, was it?" said Lucia, smiling as Miss Roots went away. Her look was a healing touch laid on Flossie's wounded vanity. "That's the sort of little trap she used to lay for me."

"I suppose you mean she was rotting me. I always know when other people are rotting. But that's the worst of her; you never can tell, and she makes you look so ignorant, doesn't she?"

"She makes me _feel_ ignorant, but that's another thing."

"But whatever did she mean just now?"

"Just now she meant that you knew all about _Metropolis_."

"Why should I? Do _you_ know anything about it?"

"Not much; though it is my cousin's paper. But as Mr. Rickman writes for it, you see--"

"Well, how was I to know that? He's always writing for something; and he'd never think of coming to _me_ every time. I never talk shop to him, and he never talks shop to me. Of course he told me that he'd got on to some better paying thing," she added, anxious to show that she was not shut out from the secrets of his heart; "but when you said _Metropolis_ I didn't take it in."

Lucia made no further attempt to converse. She said good-night and followed Sophie Roots to her tiny room.

"That was rather dreadful," she said to herself. "I wonder--" But if she did not linger long over her wondering neither did she stop to find out why she was so pa.s.sionately anxious to think well of the woman who was to be Keith Rickman's wife, and why it was such a relief to her to be angry with Sophie for teasing the poor child.

CHAPTER LV

He asked himself how it was that he had had no premonition of the thing that was about to happen to him; that the supreme moment should have come upon him so casually and with so light a step; that he went to meet it in a mood so commonplace and unprepared? (Good Heavens! He remembered that he had been eating pea soup at the time, and wishing it were artichoke.)

Had he not known that she would come back again, and in just that way?

Had he not looked for her coming five years ago? And what were five years, after all? How was it that he had heard no summons of the golden and reverberant hour?

And what was he going to do with it, or it with him, now that it had come? That was a question that he preferred to leave unanswered for the present.

It seemed that Lucia was going to stay for a week as Miss Roots'

guest; and it was Mrs. Downey's hope that she would be with them for a much longer period on her own account. This hope Rickman judged to be altogether baseless; she would never be able to bear the place for more than a week. He inquired of Miss Roots early the next morning on this subject; and at the same time he found out from her what Lucia had been doing in the last five years. She had not been (as Jewdwine had allowed him to suppose) abroad all the time with Kitty Palliser.

She had only lived with Miss Palliser in the holidays. The rest of the year, of the five years, she had been working for her living as music mistress in a Women's College somewhere in the south of England. To his gesture of horror Miss Roots replied that this was by no means the hideous destiny he conceived it to be.

"But--for _her_--" he exclaimed.

"And why not for her?" Miss Roots, B.A., retorted, stung by his undisguised repugnance. If Lucia _had_ got her post merely by interest (which Miss Roots seemed to consider as something of a blot on her career) at the end of her first year she had the pick of the students waiting for her. Unfortunately Lucia had never been strong; and this summer her health had completely broken down.

At that he shuddered, and turned abruptly away. Miss Roots looked at him and wondered why. When he approached her again it was to offer her, with every delicacy and hesitation, the loan of his study for the time of Miss Harden's visit. This was not an easy thing to do; but he was helped by several inspirations. The room, he said, was simply standing empty all day. He had hardly any use for it now. He would be kept busy at the office up to the time of his marriage. And he thought it would be a little more comfortable for Miss Harden than the public drawing-room.

"I want," he said (lying with a certain splendour), "to pay some attention to her. You see, she's my editor's cousin--"

Miss Roots turned on him a large look that took him in, his monstrous mendacity and all. But she nodded as much as to say that the explanation pa.s.sed.