The Divine Fire Part 83

"Yes. Tell him to come and see how happy I am."

"Very well."

As Edith opened the door to go, the voice in the next room stopped singing, and the young man became suddenly very still.

CHAPTER LVII

Lucia lay back in her chair, wondering, not at Edith, but at herself.

Her cousin's visit had been so far effectual that it had made her aware of the att.i.tude of her own mind. If she had been told beforehand that she could be happy in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, or within any reasonable distance of such people as Miss Bishop and Mr. Soper, the thing would have appeared to her absurd. And yet it was so. She was happy among these dreadful people, as she had not been happy at Hampstead among the cultured and refined. But when she came to examine into the nature of this happiness she found that it contained no positive element; that it consisted mainly of relief, relief from the strain of an incessant anxiety and uncertainty. That the strain had been divided between her and Horace had only made it worse, for she had had the larger share of the anxiety, he of the uncertainty. Not that he was more uncertain than in the old days at Harmouth. He was less so. But she had never been anxious then. For after all they had understood each other; and apparently it was the understanding now that failed. Yet Horace had been right when he told himself that Lucia would never imply anything, infer anything, claim anything, take anything for granted on the sanction of that understanding. She would not have hurried by a look or word the slow movements of the love which somehow he had led her to believe in. Love between man and woman to her mind was a sort of genius; and genius, as she said long ago to poor Rickman, must always have about it a divine uncertainty. Yes, love too was the wind of the divine spirit blowing where it listeth, the kindling of the divine fire. She had waited for it patiently, reverently, not altogether humbly, but with a superb possession of her soul. Better to wait for years than rush to meet it, and so be tossed by the wind and shrivelled by the fire. Then, when the crash came five years ago, though she could hardly conceive it as altering her cousin's att.i.tude, she knew that it must alter hers. The understanding had been partly a family affair; and her side of the family was now involved in debt and poverty and dishonour. When the debts were paid off, and the poverty reduced and the honour redeemed, it would be time to re-consider the understanding. But, as it was just possible that Horace, if not exactly fascinated by her debts and all the rest of it, might feel that these very things bound him, challenged him in some sort to protection, Lucia withdrew herself from the reach of the chivalrous delivering arm. She took her stand, not quite outside the circle of the cousinly relation, but on the uttermost fringe and verge of it, where she entered more and more into her own possession. They met; they wrote long letters to each other all about art and literature and philosophy, those ancient unimpa.s.sioned themes; for, if Lucia a.s.sumed nothing herself she allowed Horace to a.s.sume that whatever interested him must necessarily interest her. In short, perceiving the horrible situation in which poor Horace had been left by that premature understanding, she did everything she could to help him out of it.

And she succeeded beyond her own or Horace's expectation.

After three years' hard work, when all the debts were paid, and she was independent, Lucia thought she might now trust herself to stay with Horace in his house at Hampstead. She had stayed there already with Edith when Horace was away, but that was different. And at first all was well; that is to say, there was no anxiety and no uncertainty.

The calm and successful critic of _The Museion_ knew his own mind; and Lucia said to herself that she knew hers. The understanding between them was perfect now. They were simply first cousins; each was the other's best friend; and they could never be anything else. She stood very much nearer to the heart of the circle, in a place where it was warm and comfortable and safe. If Horace could only have let her stay there, all would have been well still. But a mature Lucia, a Lucia entirely self-possessed, calm and successful, too, in her lesser way; a Lucia without any drawbacks, and almost to his mind as uncertain as himself; a Lucia who might be carried off any day before his eyes by some one of the many brilliant young men whom it was impossible not to introduce to her, proved fatally disturbing to Horace Jewdwine. And it was then that the anxiety and uncertainty began.

They were at their height in the sixth year, when Lucia broke down and came to Hampstead to recover. Fate (not Lucia, of course; you could not think such things about Lucia) seemed anxious to precipitate matters, and Jewdwine in his soul abhorred precipitancy. Edith, too, was secretly alarmed, and Lucia could read secrets. But it was to avoid both a grossly pathetic appeal to the emotions and an appearance of collusion with the intrigues of Fate that Lucia had feigned recovery and betaken herself to Sophie in Tavistock Place, before, and (this was subtlety again), well before the return of Horace from his holiday. And if the awful reflection visited her that this step might prove to be a more importunate appeal than any, to be a positive forcing of his hand, Edith had dissipated it by showing very plainly that the appeal was to their pride and not their pity.

Lucia did not consider herself by any means an object of pity. She was happy. The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so.

As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing in straightforward uninspired vulgarity. These people knew their own minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something.

It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day; till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need to feign recovery, for recovery had come. And with it had come many benign and salutary things; the old delicious joy of giving pleasure; a new sense of the redeeming and atoning pathos of the world; all manner of sweet compunctions and tender tolerances; the divine chance, she told herself, for all the charities in which she might have failed. There had come Sophie. And there had come, at last, in spite of everything, Keith Rickman.

As for Keith Rickman, her interest in him was not only a strong personal matter, but it had been part of the cool intellectual game she had played, for Horace's distraction and her own deception; a game which Horace, with his subterfuges and suppressions, had not played fair. But when, seeking to excuse him, she began to consider the possible motives of her cousin's behaviour, Lucia was profoundly disturbed.

It had come to this: if Horace had cared for her he might have had a right to interfere. But he did not care. Therefore, no interference, she vowed, should come between her and her friendship for the poet who had honoured her by trusting her. She could not help feeling a little bitter with Horace for the harm he had done her, or rather, might have done her in Keith Rickman's eyes.

For all that she had now to make amends.

CHAPTER LVIII

Meanwhile the Beaver, like a sensible Beaver, went on calmly furnishing her house. She thoroughly approved of Keith's acquaintance with Miss Harden, as she approved of everything that gave importance to the man she was going to marry. If she had not yet given a thought to his work, except as a way (rather more uncertain and unsatisfactory than most ways) of making money, she thought a great deal of the consideration it brought him with that lady. She was prouder of Keith now than she ever had been before. But the Beaver was before all things a practical person; and she had perceived further that for Keith to make up to people like Miss Harden was one of the surest and quickest means of getting on. Hitherto she had been both distressed and annoyed by his backwardness in making up to anybody. And when Keith told her that he wanted to pay some attention to his editor's cousin, if she was a little surprised at this unusual display of smartness (for when had Keith been known to pay attention to any editors, let alone their cousins?), she accepted the explanation as entirely natural. She was wide awake now to the importance of _Metropolis_ and Mr. Jewdwine. By all means, then, let him cultivate Mr. Jewdwine's cousin. And if there had been no Mr. Jewdwine in the case, Flossie would still have smiled on the acquaintance; for it meant social advancement, a step nearer Kensington. So n.o.body was more delighted than Flossie when Miss Harden invited Keith to tea in her own room, especially as she was always included in the invitation.

It was Miss Bishop, primed with all the resources of her science, who looked upon these advances with alarm. It struck Miss Bishop that Miss Harden and Mr. Rickman were going it pretty strong. She wouldn't have liked those goings on if she'd been Flossie. You might take it from her that gentlemen never knew their own minds when there were two to choose from; and Miss Bishop hadn't a doubt that it was a toss-up between Flossie and Miss Harden. Miss Harden would be willing enough; anybody could see that. Ladies don't keep on asking gentlemen to have tea with them alone in their rooms if they're not up to something.

It was not only Miss Bishop's fatal science that led her to these conclusions, but the still more fatal prescience of love. When Flossie was once securely married to Mr. Rickman the heart of Spinks would turn to her for consolation, that she knew. It was a matter of common experience that gentlemen's hearts were thus caught on the rebound.

But if that Miss Harden carried off Rickman, there would be nothing left for Flossie but to marry Spinks, for the preservation of her trousseau and her dignity. Therefore Miss Bishop was more than ever set on Flossie's marrying Mr. Rickman.

They were turning over the trousseau, the trousseau which might play such a disastrous part in the final adjustment of Flossie's mind.

"Your dresses are orfully smart and that," said Ada; "and yet somehow they don't seem to do you justice. It would have been worth your while to go to a tip-top dressmaker, my dear. You'd have a better chance than that Miss Harden any day. No, I don't like you in that powder blue; I don't, really." Miss Bishop was nothing if not frank.

"I never go wrong about a colour," said Flossie pa.s.sionately.

"No. It isn't the colour. It's the cut. It makes her look as if she 'ad a better figure than you; and that's nonsense. You've got a bust, and she hasn't. Gentlemen don't care to look at a girl who's as flat as two boards back and front. That's what I say, it's the cut that gives her her style."

"No, it isn't. It isn't her clothes at all; it's the way she carries them. She may look as if she was well dressed; but she isn't."

"Anyhow I like that coat of hers better than yours."

"It hasn't got the new sleeves," said Flossie, fondling her powder-blue.

It was this immobile complacency of hers in the face of his own profound and sundering agitations that stirred in Rickman the first stinging of remorse. For he could see that the poor Beaver, with her blind and ineradicable instinct, was going on building--you couldn't call them castles in the air--but houses such as Beavers build, houses of mud in running water. Her ceaseless winding in and out of shops, her mad and furious buying of furniture, her wild grasping at any loose articles that came in her way, from rugs to rolling-pins, appeared to him as so many futile efforts to construct a dam. Over and over again the insane impulse came on him to seize her little hands and stop her; to tell her that it was no good, that the absurd thing could never stand, that he alone knew the strength of the stream, its sources and its currents. But he hadn't the heart to tell her, and the Beaver went on constructing her dam, without knowing that it was a dam, because she was born with the pa.s.sion thus to build.

She could not see that anything had happened, and Heaven forbid that he should let her see. He might abandon hope, but the Beaver he could not abandon. That was not to be thought of for an instant. He was too deeply pledged for that. Lest he should be in danger of forgetting, it was brought home to him a dozen times a day.

The very moment when Flossie was making that triumphant display of her wedding finery he had caught a glimpse of her (iniquitously) as he pa.s.sed her room on his way to Spinks's. She was standing, a jubilant little figure, in the line of the half-open door, shaking out and trailing before her some white, shiny, frilly thing, the sight of which made him shudder for the terror, and sigh for the pity of it.

And the girls' laughter and the banging of the door as he went by, what was it but a reminder of the proprieties and decencies that bound him? A hint that he had pledged himself thrice over by that unlawful peep?

It seemed to him that was the beginning of many unlawful glimpses, discoveries of things he ought never to have seen. Was it that he was more quick to see? Or that Flossie was less careful than she had been?

Or was it simply the result of living in this detestable boarding-house, where, morally speaking, the doors were never shut?

Propinquity, that had brought them together, had done its best for Flossie and its worst. It had revealed too little and too much. He had only to forget her for a week, to come back and see her as she really was; to wonder what he had ever seen in her. Her very prettiness offended him. Her flagrantly feminine contours, once admired, now struck him as exaggerated, as an emphasis of the charm which is most subduing when subdued. As for her mind, good Heavens! Had it taken him five years to discover that her mind was a _cul de sac_? When he came to think of it, he had to own that intellectually, conversationally even, he had advanced no farther with her than on the first day of their acquaintance. There was something compact and immovable about Flossie. In those five years he had never known her change or modify an opinion of people or of things. And yet Flossie was not stupid, or if she were her stupidity was a force; it had an invincible impetus and sweep, dragging the dead weight of character behind it. It was beginning to terrify him. In fact he was becoming painfully sensitive to everything she said or did. Her little tongue was neither sharp nor hard, and yet it hurt him every time it spoke. It did not always speak good grammar. Sometimes, in moments of flurry or excitement, an aspirate miscarried. Happily those moments were rare; for at bottom Flossie's temperament was singularly calm. Remembering his own past lapses, he felt that he was the last person to throw a stone at her; but that reflection did not prevent a shudder from going down his back every time it happened. And if her speech remained irreproachable, the offending strain ran through all her movements. He disliked the way she walked, and the way she sat down, the way she spread her skirts or gathered them, the way she carried her body and turned her head, the way her black eyes provoked a stare and then resented it, her changes of posture under observation, the perpetual movement of her hands that were always settling and resettling her hat, her hair, her veil; all the blushings and bridlings, the pruderies and impertinences of the pretty woman of her cla.s.s, he disliked them all. He more than disliked, he distrusted her air of over-strained propriety. He detected in it the first note of falseness in her character. In a thousand little things her instincts, her perceptions were at fault.

This was disagreeably borne in upon him that first Sat.u.r.day after Lucia's arrival, when he and Flossie were in the train going down to Ealing. The compartment was packed with City men (how he wished Flossie would turn her head and not her eyes if she must look at them!); and as they got in at Earl's Court, one of them, a polite person, gave up his seat to the lady. Flossie turned an unseeing eye on the polite person, and took his seat with a superb pretence of having found it herself after much search. And when Rickman said "Thanks" to the polite person her indignant glance informed him that she had expected support in her policy of repudiation.

"My dear Beaver," he said as he helped her on to the platform at Ealing, "when you take another person's seat the least you can do is to say Thank you."

"I _never_ speak to gentlemen in trains and buses. That's the way they always begin."

"Good Heavens, the poor man was only being civil."

"Thank you. I've gone about enough to know what 'is kind of civility means. I wasn't going to lay myself open to impertinence."

"I should have thought you'd gone about enough to know the difference."

Flossie said nothing. She was furious with him for his failure to defend her from the insulting advances of the City gentleman. But perhaps she would hardly have taken it so seriously, if it had not been significant to her of a still more intolerable desertion. Ada Bishop had said something to her just before they started, something that had been almost too much even for Flossie's complacency.

"I'm glad," she still heard Ada saying, "you're going to take him out all day. If I were you I shouldn't let him see too much of that Miss Harden."

There hadn't been much to take hold of in Ada's words, but Ada's manner had made them unmistakable; and from that moment a little worm had begun to gnaw at Flossie's heart.

And he, as he looked at her with that strange new sight of his that was already bringing sorrow to them both, he said to himself that he supposed it was her "going about," her sad acquaintance with unlovely manners, that had made her as she was. Only how was it that he had never noticed it before? Poor little girl; it was only last Sat.u.r.day when they had come back from looking over the house at Ealing that, drawing upon all the appropriate resources of natural history, he had called her a little vesper Vole, because she lived in a Bank and only came out of it in the evening. What Flossie called him that time didn't matter; it was her parsimony in the item of endearments that provoked him to excesses of the kind. And now the thought of those things made him furious; furious with himself; furious with Fate for throwing Flossie in his way; furious with Flossie for being there. And when he was ready to d.a.m.n her because she was a woman, he melted, and could have wept because she was a Beaver. Poor little girl; one day to be called a vesper Vole, the next to be forgotten altogether, the next to be remembered after this fashion.

And so they went on silently together, Flossie in pain because of the little worm gnawing at her heart, he thinking many things, sad and bitter and tender things, of the woman walking by his side. From time to time she looked at him as she had looked at those City gentlemen, not turning her head, but slewing the large dark of her eye into its corner. Presently she spoke.

"You don't seem to have very much to say for yourself to-day."

"To-day? I'm not given to talking very much at any time."

"Oh, come, you don't seem to have any difficulty in talking to Miss Harden. I've heard you. Wot a time you did sit yesterday. And you were up there an hour or more before I came, I know."

"Three quarters of an hour, to be strictly accurate."