Chapter XLIV…

Chapter XLIV

Jewdwine made up for the coldness of his published utterances by the fervour of his secret counsel. His advice to Rickman was, "Beware of the friendship of little men."

This Rickman understood to be a reflection on Maddox's position in the world of letters. He did not care a rap about Maddox's position; but there were moments when it was borne in upon him that Maddox was a bigger man even than Horace Jewdwine, that his reckless manner poorly disguised a deeper insight and a sounder judgement. His work on The Planet proved it every day. And though for himself he could have desired a somewhat discreeter champion, he had the highest opinion of his friend's courage in standing up for him when there was absolutely nothing to be gained by it. He had every reason therefore to be attached to Maddox.

But it was true enough that he knew too many little men; men who were at home in that house of bondage from which he was for ever longing to escape; men whom he had met as he had described, sitting contentedly on the dirty back-stairs of Fleet Street; men who in rubbing shoulders with each other in that crowded thoroughfare had had to allow for a great deal of what Maddox called wear and tear. Those little men had remained invincibly, imperturbably friendly. They knew perfectly well that he thought them little men, and they delighted in their great man all the same, more than ever, in fact, since his new suit of morals provided them with a subject of eternal jest. For Maddox was but human, and he had found Rickman's phrase too pregnant with humour to be lost. They were sometimes very funny, those Junior Journalists, especially on a Saturday night. But Rickman was not interested in the unseemly obstacle race they dignified by the name of a career, and he did not care to mix too freely with young men so little concerned about removing the dirt and sweat of it. He clung to Maddox and Rankin as the strongest and the cleanest of them all. But even they had inspirations that left him cold, and they thought many things large and important that were too small for him to see. He would have died rather than let either of them know what he was doing now. He saw with dismay that they suspected him of doing something, that their suspicions excited them most horribly, that they were watching him; and he had told Maddox that what he desired most was peace and quietness.

He found it in the Secret Chamber of the Muse, where he shut himself up when his work with them was done. In there, his days and nights were as the days and nights of God. There he forecast the schemes of dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic. And as his genius foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist's vision of the world. This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden chain that bound Lucia's name to his whether she would or no. They recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification.

For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia's image was no longer one and indivisible. He had come to think of her as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh. One carried that garment a little more conspicuously than the other; it was by her beauty that she pierced him with the pain of longing; and not by her beauty only, but by the marks of suffering that in his memory still obscured it. She came before him, and her tragic eyes reproached him with the intolerable pathos of her fate, making him suffer too, through his exceeding pity. And yet his longing had not been consumed by pity, but had mingled with it as flame in flame. Long after he had parted from her, his senses ached as they recalled the exquisite movements of her body. He had only to shut his eyes, and he was aware of the little ripple of her shoulders and the delicate swaying of her hips. To lie awake in the dark was to see her kneeling at his side, to feel the fragrance of her thick braid of hair flattened and warmed by her sleep, and the light touch of her hands as they covered him. And before that memory his shame still burnt deeper than his desire.

But this Lucia had no desire for him and no pity. Her countenance, seen even in dreams, expressed a calm but immutable repugnance. No wonder, for she was only acquainted with the pitiably inadequate sample of him introduced to her as Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He was aware that she belonged exclusively not only to Jewdwine's class, but to Jewdwine himself in some way (a way unspeakably disagreeable to contemplate). If he was not to think of her as enduring the abominations of poverty, he must think of her as married to Jewdwine. Married to Jewdwine, she would make an end of his friendship as she had made an end of his peace of mind. There had been moments, at the first, when he had felt a fierce and unforgiving rage against her for the annoyance that she caused him.

But now, dividing the host of turbulent and tormenting memories, there appeared a different Lucia, an invincible but intimate presence that brought with it a sense of deliverance and consolation. It was Lucia herself that saved him from Lucia. Her eyes were full of discernment and of an infinite tenderness and compassion. They kindled in him the desire that fulfils itself in its own utterance.

That this Lucia was not wholly the creature of his imagination he was assured by his memory of certain passages in his life at Harmouth, a memory that had all the vividness and insistence of the other. It was the Lucia he had known before the other Lucia, the Lucia who had divined and would divine him still. In a way she was more real than the other, more real than flesh and blood, even as that part of him by which he apprehended her was more real than the rest. From her he was not and could not be divided; they belonged to each other, and by no possibility could he think of this Lucia as married to Jewdwine, or of his friendship for Jewdwine as in anyway affected by her. He was hers by right of her perfect comprehension of him; for such comprehension was of the nature of possession. It was also an assurance of her forgiveness, if indeed she had anything to forgive. He had not wronged her; it was the other Lucia he had wronged. In all this he never once thought of her as his inspiration. She would not have desired him to think of her so, being both too humble and too proud to claim any part in the genius she divined. But she could not repudiate all connection with it, because it was in the moments when his genius was most dominant that he had this untroubled assurance of her presence.

And there in the Secret Chamber he bound her to him by an indestructible chain, the chain of the Nine and Twenty Sonnets.

The question was what should he do with it now that it was made? To dedicate twenty-nine sonnets to Lucia was one thing, to print them was another. If it was inevitable that he should thus reveal himself after the manner of poets, it was also inevitable that she should regard a public declaration as an insult rather than an honour. And he himself shrank from exposing so sacred a thing to the pollution and violence of publicity. Therefore he took each sonnet as it was written, and hid it in a drawer. But he was not without prescience of their ultimate value, and after all this method of disposal seemed to him somehow unsatisfactory. So he determined that he would leave the manuscript to Lucia in his will, to be afterwards dealt with as she judged best, whether she chose to publish or to burn. In the former case the proceeds might be regarded as partial payment of a debt.

And so two years passed and it was Spring again.

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Chapter XLV

There are many ways of achieving distinction, but few are more effectual than a steady habit of punctuality. By this you may shine even in the appalling gloom of the underground railway. Among all the women who wait every morning for the City trains at Gower Street Station, there was none more conspicuously punctual than Miss Flossie Walker. The early clerk who travelled citywards was always sure of seeing that little figure on the same spot at the same moment, provided he himself were punctual and kept a sharp look-out. This you may be sure he took good care to do. To look at Flossie once was to look again and yet again. And he was fortunate indeed if his route lay between Moorgate Street Station and the Bank, for then he had the pleasure of seeing her sharply threading her way among the traffic, if that can be said of anything so soft and round as Flossie.

If Flossie's figure was small and round, her face was somewhat large, a perfect oval moulded in the subtlest curves, smooth and white moreover, with a tinge of ivory sallow towards the roots of her black hair. Wonderful hair was Flossie's. In those days she parted it in the middle and waved it symmetrically on either side of her low forehead; she brought it over her ears, covering all but the tips and the delicate pink lobes; she coiled it at the back in an elaborate spiral and twisted it into innumerable little curls about the nape of her neck. Unfortunately that neck was rather short; but she wore low collars which made the most of it. And then Flossie's features were so very correct. She had a correct little nose, neither straight nor aquiline, but a distracting mixture of both, and a correct little mouth, so correct and so small that you wondered how it managed to display so many white teeth in one diminutive smile. Flossie's eyes were not as her mouth; they were large, full-lidded, long-lashed, and blacker than her hair. No wonder if the poor clerk who passed her on her way to and fro in the City rejoiced as they looked up at him. She might be going to her work as he to his, but what with her bright eyes and her blue ribbons, she looked the very genius of holiday as she went.

At first she was a little subdued and awed by the Bank, and by her own position in it. But when this feeling wore off, the plump girl rolled into her place with a delicious abandonment. Flossie was one of fifty girls who sat, row after row, at long flat desks covered with green cloth. A soft monotonous light was reflected from the cream-coloured walls against which Flossie's head stood out with striking effect, like some modern study in black and morbid white. You would have picked her out among the fifty at once. Hers was the lightest of light labour, the delicate handling of thousands of cancelled notes--airy, insubstantial things, as it were the ghosts of bank-notes, released from the gross conditions of the currency. Towards the middle of the morning Flossie would be immersed in a pale agitated sea of bank-notes. The air would be full of light sounds, always the sharp brisk rustling of the notes, and now and then a human undertone, or towards lunch time, a breath that was like a sigh. A place to grow light-headed in if you began to think about it. Happily no thought was required beyond the intelligence that lives in sensitive finger-tips. It was almost mechanical labour, and for that Flossie had more than a taste, she had a positive genius. It was mechanical labour idealized and reduced to a fine art, an art in which the personality of the artist counted. The work displayed to perfection the prettiness of Flossie's hands, from the rapid play of her fingers in sifting, and their little fluttering, hovering movements in arranging, to the exquisitely soft touches of the palms when she gathered all her sheaves of notes into one sheaf, shaking, caressing, coaxing the rough edges into line. Flossie worked with the rhythm and precision of a machine; and yet humanly, self-consciously, almost coquettishly, as under the master's eye.

But all this was of yesterday. To-day Flossie was different. She was not quite so precise, so punctual as she had been. Something had gone wrong with the bright little mechanism. It worked erratically, now under protest, and now with spurts of terrifying activity. The fine fly-wheels of thought had set off whirring on their own account and had got mixed up with the rest of the machinery. Flossie had begun to philosophise, to annoy destiny with questions. There was time for that in the afternoon when the worst of the sorting was done. She was in the stage of doubt so attractive in philosophers and women, asking herself: Is knowledge possible? And if so, what do I know? She was aware that there are certain insurpassable limits to human knowledge; all the same, woman-like, she raised herself on tip-toe, and tried to peep over the boundaries. What did she know? She knew that somebody pitied her, because, poor little woman, she had to earn her own living like a man. Well, she would not have to do that if he--if he--Yes, and if he didn't? And how was she to know? And yet, and yet she had an idea. Anybody may have an idea. Then the long desks became the green tables where Flossie gambled with fate; trying--trying--trying to force the invisible hand.

For with Flossie it was spring-time too. Under the little clerk's correctness and demureness there ran and mingled with her blood the warm undercurrent of a dream. The dream had come to her many springs ago; and as Flossie grew plumper and rosier it grew plump and rosy too. To be married (to a person hitherto unspecified in fancy, whose features remained a blur or a blank), to be the mistress of a dear little house (the house stood out very clear in Flossie's fancy), and the mother of a dear little girl (a figure ever present to her, complete in socks and shoes and all the delicious details of its dress). Compared with that vision of Flossie's, no dream was ever so soft, so rosy and so young.

And now in the Spring-time all her being moved softly under the current of the dream. Flossie's fancy did not associate it consciously with Keith Rickman (she would have blushed if the association had been made apparent to her); the Spring did that for her, mingling with her blood.

Meanwhile, as Flossie dreamed, the same hour every week-day morning Rickman was awakened by the same sounds, the click of the door-latch in the bedroom overhead and the patter of a girl's feet on the stairs. He knew it was Miss Flossie Walker going down to early breakfast. And when he heard it, he turned in his bed on the side farthest from the window and sighed. Such a deep unhappy sigh.

Lucia had delivered him from Lucia, but there were other troubles from which she could not save him. Not, in the warm spring days, from the newly awakened trouble of his youth; not, in the sleepless summer nights, from the brief but recurrent tyranny of sense, and not from the incessant hunger of the heart. Though it was she who had created that hunger in him, it was not (at five and twenty) to be satisfied by the mere image of her, however vividly present to him. He was only five and twenty, and the spring had come with its piercing sweetness, its irresistible delicate lure, to the great stirring, melting, and unbinding of his manhood. He could be faithful to Lucia for ever in his soul; but there were moments in this season when he was aware of a distinct cleavage between his soul and his senses.

It seemed to him that Miss Flossie Walker lay in wait for him in just those moments, with the secret but infallible instinct of the creatures whom the Spring touches to its own uses. He could not blame her. Flossie was innocent, being but the unconscious handmaid of the Spring.

It was not because Lucia was forever absent and Flossie forever on the spot. At first he was unaware of the danger that lurked for him in Flossie's ways, because his soul in its love for Lucia was so utterly secure. At first the sighs were all on Flossie's account; poor Flossie, who had to be up so early while he settled himself for another luxurious slumber. At first he only pitied Flossie. He thought of her at odd moments as a poor little girl (rather pretty) who worked too hard and never had any fun to speak of; but the rest of the time he never thought of her at all.

And in the early days of their acquaintance, Miss Flossie Walker (then only an apprentice to a firm of type-writers in Holborn) was very much to be pitied. He could remember how she had come (a little while before that memorable Bank holiday) to Mrs. Downey's boarding-house, a plump but rather anaemic maiden, black-haired, and demure. He had begun by talking to her at table, because she sat next to him, and he had ended, if there ever is an end to these things, by taking her to matinées, picture-galleries, restaurants, and the British Museum. The girl was so young, so confiding, and so obviously respectable, that he was careful to keep to the most guileless of middle-class entertainments. A few weeks of this existence brought shy smiles and a lively play of dimples on Flossie's face. She grew plumper still, less anaemic, though hardly less demure. A few months, and Flossie's beauty flowered and expanded, she began to dress as became it, entering into rivalry with Miss Ada Bishop, until it dawned on him that Flossie was really, in her own place and way, a very engaging little creature.

About this time Flossie's circumstances had improved as much as her appearance. Her father had been a clerk in the Bank of England, and on his death she obtained a post there as a sorter. That position gave Flossie both dignity and independence; it meant light work and hours which brought hope with them every day towards three o'clock. Under these circumstances Flossie's beauty went on flowering and expanding, till she became more than ever a thing of danger and disaster.

Her intimacy with Mr. Rickman, which had lapsed lately, owing to his increasing passion for solitude and separation, revived suddenly in the spring of ninety-five. It happened in this manner. With the spring, Mrs. Downey's was once more agitated by the hope of the Bank holiday, and Mr. Spinks inquired of Rickman if he were going out of town for Easter. (Rickman was incautiously dining that evening at the general table.) But Rickman wasn't going out of town. He said he thought of going somewhere up the river. He had also thought, though he did not say so, that in fulfilment of an ancient promise he would take Miss Flossie to the play on Saturday afternoon. Yet when it came to the point he had some diffidence in asking her. She might not think it proper.

It was Mr. Soper who precipitated his resolve. He wanted to know if Rickman had made up a party for the River, and 'ad any companion?

No. He hadn't made up a party. Thanks, awfully. He was going by Himself.

Mr. Soper didn't think now that was a very enjoyable way of spendin' a Bank holiday.

He put it that if it was Rickman's intention to hire a row-boat, it wouldn't be at all a bad idea if he, Soper, and Mr. Spinks, say, were to join.

As Soper's incredible suggestion sank into him, the expression of Rickman's face was pitiable to see. It was then that casually, as if the idea had only just occurred to him, he wondered whether Miss Walker would by any chance care for a matinée ticket for the play? He was anxious to give his offer an uncertain and impromptu character, suggesting that Miss Walker must be torn between her many engagements, and have matinée tickets in large numbers up the sleeve of her charming blouse.

Flossie was so shy that when you spoke to her she never answered all at once; so shy that when she spoke to you she never turned her head to look at you, but left you to judge of the effect you made on her by the corners of her mouth and eyes. So now he had to look very carefully at her to see whether she were saying yes or no. Casually again (as if this course were not necessarily involved in acceptance) he inquired whether he might have the pleasure of taking her.

Miss Bishop looked another way. Her loose mouth hung desirous. (Miss Bishop's face was flagrantly frank, devoid of all repose. None of these people had any repose about them except Flossie.) Flossie was dubious and demure. Was he quite sure it was a pleasure? He protested that in a world where few things were certain, that, at any rate, admitted of no doubt. Flossie deliberated whether this further step were or were not a departure from her ideal of propriety. And it was not until he showed signs of retracting his proposal that she intimated her consent. But as for pleasure, if Flossie were pleased she did not allow it to appear. And although her heart beat excitedly under her blue blouse, it was on the side that was not next to Mr. Rickman.

Then Miss Roots began to talk of incomprehensible things excitedly. So excitedly, that she had, for the moment, quite a colour. And while they talked, all the other boarders turned in their places and watched Mr. Rickman as if he had been some wonderful enchanter; Mr. Soper alone emphasizing by an attitude his entire aloofness from the general interest.

And all the time Miss Roots was talking, Flossie, without saying a word, contrived to seize upon the disengaged portion of his mind. He wondered what she was thinking about.

She was thinking, first, that it really paid to put on your best blouse every evening. Next, that it wasn't worth while if he would keep on talking to the lady on his right. Then that she couldn't decide the point until she knew where he was going on Sunday.

That she never knew; but she went to the play with him on Saturday, and on many Saturdays after that. There was nobody so gay that spring as Flossie.

Coming fresh to Flossie after a long estrangement, Rickman couldn't recognize her from his old account of her as a poor little girl who worked too hard and never had any fun to speak of. In so describing her, no doubt he had been influenced by the melancholy of his earlier mood. But there were other reasons why he still insisted on regarding her in this pathetic light. It provided him with several very agreeable sensations, and the most agreeable of all was the voluptuous passion of pity. It kept him detached, always in the superior position of a benefactor. Benefactor, indeed! He was in a fair way of becoming Flossie's deity, her Providence, the mystic source of theatre-tickets and joy. No really brave man ever shrinks from the dangers of apotheosis, when the process involves no loss of personal dignity. And apart from the gratification of his natural healthy vanity, Rickman's heart was touched by the thought that the little thing turned to him instinctively for all her innocent pleasures.

Then all at once the innocent pleasures ceased. They ceased just as Flossie's palpitating heart told her that she was really making an impression on this singularly unimpressionable young man. She knew it by the sudden softening of his voice as he spoke to her, by the curious brilliant dilation of his eyes as they followed her about the room. For after much easy practice on Mr. Spinks she knew precisely by what movements and what glances she could best produce these interesting effects. And yet nothing could be farther from Flossie's fancy than flirtation. The little clerk was nothing if not practical, even under the tender impulse of her dream.

Flossie was determined that whatever else she failed in she would not fail in her woman's trade. She would have considered herself disgraced by such bankruptcy. Not that she feared it. Nature had started her with a sufficient capital of fascination, and at Mrs. Downey's she had, so to speak, established a connection. And now it seemed there had come a period of depression. It still rained tickets, more tickets than ever, but there was no Mr. Rickman to escort her to the concert or the play; Mr. Rickman always had another engagement, never specified. No Mr. Rickman to take her into the suburbs on a Sunday; Mr. Rickman was off, goodness knew where, scouring the country on his bicycle. No Mr. Rickman to talk to her at dinner; Mr. Rickman took all his meals in his own room now. For these and all other delinquencies his invariable excuse was that he was busy; and Flossie, mind you, was sharp enough to see through that.

No. Mr. Rickman had changed, suddenly, unaccountably, without a moment's warning. First of all, the other boarders noticed that he had become most frightfully irritable in his temper. He had not been over polite to any of them lately, but to her he was insufferably rude, most ungentlemanly, she called it. He would pretend not to see her if by any chance she looked his way, not to hear her if by any chance she spoke to him. Once (they were quite alone) he had broken off in the middle of an exciting conversation and rushed out of the room, out of the house. She saw him over the balcony railings, walking up and down the street like a lunatic, with his hands thrust down into his pockets and no hat on. And he was not only ungentlemanly but positively unkind. If they met on the stairs (somehow they did this very often) he would draw himself up flat against the wall as if he was afraid of the frill of her dress touching him. If she came into the drawing-room he would walk out of it; or if he stayed, it was only to sit staring at her (poor innocent little Flossie, who was so pretty) with an ugly scowl on his face. There were times when poor innocent little Flossie said to herself that she positively believed he hated her. And she was so innocent that she couldn't think what she had done to make him hate her.

She was right about the hatred. An indignant anger was certainly what he felt when he first realized that she had power to make him feel at all. Her prettiness tormented him; therefore he hated her, and everything about her. He hated the sound of her little tongue upraised among the boarders, and of her little feet running up and down the stairs. He hated every glance of her black eyes and every attitude and movement of her plump little body. More than all he hated the touch of her soft arms as they stirred against him at the tightly packed dinner-table. Therefore he avoided the dinner-table, and the drawing-room; he avoided as far as possible the house, filled as it was with the disastrous presence. He fatigued himself with excesses of walking and cycling, in the hope that when he flung himself into his bed at midnight he would be too tired to feel. And sometimes he was.

At last poor Flossie, weary of conjecture, unbent so far as to seek counsel of Miss Bishop. For Miss Bishop gave you to understand that on the subject of "gentlemen" there was nothing that she did not know. It was a little humiliating, for only a month ago Flossie had said to her in strictest confidence, "I feel it in my bones, Ada, that he's going to come forward this spring."

Ada laughed coarsely, but not unkindly, at the tale of her perplexity. Ada had every reason to be sympathetic; for Mr. Rickman once securely attached, Mr. Spinks would be lonely, unappropriated, free. "Don't you worry," said she, "he's all right."

"All right? Can't you see how frightfully rude he is to me?"

"I should think I did see it. A jolly lot you know about gentlemen. You've nothing to go on when they're so everlastingly polite, but when they turn mad like that all of a sudden, you may be sure they're coming to the point. To tell you the truth, I didn't use to think you'd very much chance, Flossie; but when I saw him walk out of the room the other day, I said to myself, 'She's got 'im!'"

"I wish I knew. I don't want it hanging on for ever."

"It won't. If he doesn't propose in May, he will in June, when you've got a new dress and a new hat."

Flossie shook her head despairingly. "I wonder," said she, "what I'd really better do. I think sometimes I'd better go away."

"Well, sometimes that does fetch them; and then, again, sometimes it doesn't. It's risky. Some girls," she added reflectively, "try doing their hair another way; but I wouldn't, if I was you. That's risky, too. If they're really fond of you, as often as not it only puts them off."

"Then what am I to do?"

"If you take my advice," said Miss Bishop, "you'll not do anything. You'll just go on the same as before, as if you hadn't noticed anything out of the way."

And Flossie went on just the same as before, with the result that every morning Mr. Rickman sighed more and more heavily as he heard the early patter of those feet upon the floor.

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Chapter XLVI

Flossie had been working with one eye on the clock all afternoon. At the closing hour she went out into Lothbury with the other girls; but instead of going up Moorgate Street as usual, she turned out of Prince's Street to her right, and thence made her way westward as quickly as she could for the crowd. It was September, a day when it was good to be out of doors at that hour. The sunlight filtered into the dusty thoroughfare from the west, on her left the sprawling mounted legends over the shops were so many gold blazons on an endless field of grey; on her right, a little way ahead, the tall plane-tree in Wood Street hung out its green leaves over Cheapside like a signal. Thither Flossie was bound.

As she sidled out of the throng into the quiet little lane, Mr. Rickman came forward, raising his hat. He had been waiting under the plane-tree for twenty minutes, and was now beguiling his sylvan solitude with a cigarette. Two years had worked a considerable change in his appearance. His face had grown graver and clearer cut. He had lost his hectic look and had more the air of a man of the world than of a young poet about town. To Flossie's admiration and delight he wore an irreproachable frock-coat and shining linen; she interpreted these changes as corresponding with the improvement in his prospects, and judged that the profession of literature was answering fairly well.

They shook hands seriously, as if they attached importance to these trifles. "Am I dreadfully late?" she asked.

"Dreadfully." He smiled with one corner of his mouth, holding his cigarette firmly in the other, while he took from her the little cape she carried over her arm.

"I expect I've kept you waiting a good bit?" A keen observer of Flossie's face might have detected in it a faintly triumphant appreciation of the fact. "I'm awfully sorry I got behind-hand and had to stay till I'd finished up."

"Never mind, Flossie, it don't matter. At any rate it's worth it." The words implied that Mr. Rickman's time was valuable, otherwise he would not have given it to Flossie. "Where shall we go, and what shall we do?"

"I don't much care."

"Shall we have tea somewhere while we're making up our minds?"

"Well--I wouldn't mind. I hadn't time to get any at the Bank."

"All right. Come along." And they plunged into Cheapside again, he breasting the stream, making a passage for her. They found a favourite confectioner's in St. Paul's Churchyard, where they had sometimes gone before. He noticed that she took her seat with rather a weary air.

"Floss, you must come for a walk on the Embankment. You look as if you didn't get out enough. Why will you go up and down in that abominable underground? You're awfully white, you know."

"I never had a red face."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Nothing, I shall be better when I've had my tea."

She had her tea, which after a proper protest on her part was paid for by Rickman. Then they turned into the cathedral gardens, where it was still pleasant under the trees. Thus approached from the north-east, the building rose up before them in detached incoherent masses, the curve of its great dome broken by the line of the north transept seen obliquely from below. It turned a forbidding face citywards, a face of sallow stone blackened by immemorial grime, while the north-west columns of the portico shone almost white against the nearer gloom.

"It's clever of it to look so beautiful," murmured Rickman, "when it's so infernally ugly." He stood for a few minutes, lost in admiration of its eccentricity. Thus interested, he was not aware that his own expression had grown somewhat abstracted, impersonal and cold.

"I call that silly," said Flossie, looking at him out of the corner of her black eyes. Had he come there to pay attention--to the Cathedral?

"Do you? Why?"

"Because--I suppose you wouldn't say I was beautiful if I were--well, downright ugly?"

"I might, Flossie, if your ugliness was as characteristic, as suggestive as this."

Flossie shrugged her shoulders (not, he thought, a pretty action in a lady with so short a neck). To her St. Paul's was about as beautiful as the Bank and infinitely less "suggestive." Mr. Rickman interpreted her apathy as fatigue and looked about for a lonely seat. They found one under the angle of the transept.

"Let's sit down here," he said; "better not exert ourselves violently so soon after tea."

"For all the tea I've had, it wouldn't matter," said Flossie as if resenting an ignoble implication. Rickman laughed a little uncomfortably and blushed. Perhaps she had hardly given him the right to concern himself with these intimate matters. Yet from the very first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself in minute cares for her physical well-being. They sat for a while in silence. A man passed them smoking; he turned his head to look back at the girl, and the flying ash from his cigarette lighted on her dress.

"Confound the brute!" said Rickman, trying to brush away the obnoxious powder with a touch which would have been more effectual if it had been less of a caress. She shivered slightly, and he put her cape gently about her shoulders. A curious garment, Flossie's cape, made of some thin grey-blue stuff, with gold braid on the collar, cheap, pretty and a little vulgar.

"There's not much warmth in that thing," he said, feeling it with his fingers.

"I don't want to be warm, thank you, a day like this," she retorted, pushing back the cape. For, though it was no longer spring, Flossie's dream tugged at her heartstrings. There was a dull anger against him in her heart. At that moment Flossie could have fought savagely for her dream.

What could have made her so irritable, poor little girl? She didn't look well; or--perhaps it was her work. He was sorry for all women who worked. And Flossie--she was such an utter woman. That touch of exaggeration in the curves of her soft figure made her irresistibly, superlatively feminine. To be sure, as he had hinted in that unguarded moment, her beauty was of the kind that suggests nothing more interesting than itself. Yet there were times when it had power over him, when he was helpless and stupid before it. And now, as he leaned back looking at her, his intellect seemed to melt away gradually and merge in dreamy sense. They sat for a while, still without speaking; then he suddenly bent forward, gazing into her eyes.

"What is it, Flossie? Tell me."

Flossie turned away her face from the excited face approaching it.

"Tell me."

"It's nothing. Can't you see I'm only tired. I've 'ad a hard day."

"I thought you never had hard days at the Bank?"

"No. No more we do--not to speak of."

"Then it's something you don't like to speak of. I say--have the other women been worrying you?"

"No, I should think not indeed. Catch any one trying that on with me!"

"Then I can't see what it can be."

"I daresay you can't. You don't know what it is! It's not much, but it's the same thing day after day, day after day, till I'm sick and tired of it all! I don't see any end to it either."

"I'm so sorry, Floss," said Rickman in a queer thick voice. She had turned her face towards him now, and its expression was inscrutable--to him. To another man it would have said that it was all very well for him to be sorry; he could put a stop to it soon enough if he liked.

"Oh--you needn't be sorry."

"Why not? Do you think I don't care?"

Immense play of expression on Flossie's face. She bit her lip; and that meant that he might care no end, or he mightn't care a rap, how was she to know? She smiled a bitter smile as much as to say that she didn't know, neither did she greatly care. Then her lips quivered, which meant that if by any chance he did care, it was a cruel shame to leave a poor girl in the dark.

"Care? About the Bank?" she said at last. "You needn't. I shan't stand it much longer. I shall fling it up some of these days; see if I don't."

"Would that be wise?"

"I don't know whether it's wise or not. I know I can't go on like this for ever."

"Yes, but would anything else be better, or even half as good? You didn't get much fun out of that last place, you know."

"Well, for all the fun I get out of that old Bank, I might as well be in a ladies' boarding school. If I thought it would end in anything--but it won't."

"How do you know? It may end in your marrying a big fat manager."

"Don't be silly."

"Supposing you knew it would end some day, not necessarily in marrying the manager, would you mind going on with it?"

She looked away from him, and tears formed under her eyelashes, the vague light tears that never fall. "There's no use my talking of flinging it up. I'm fixed there for good."

"Who knows?" said Rickman; and if Flossie's eyes had been candid they would have said, "You ought to know, if anybody does." Whatever they said, it made him shudder, with fear, with shame, but no, not with hatred. "Poor Flossie," he said gently; and there was a pause during which Flossie looked more demure than ever after her little outburst. She had seen the look in his eyes that foreboded flight.

He rose abruptly. "Do you know, I'm awfully sorry, but I've got an appointment at half past five to meet a fellow in Fleet Street."

The fellow was Maddox, but the appointment, he had made it that very minute, which was the twenty-fifth minute past five.

They went their ways; he to Fleet Street, and she home. Maddox did not turn up to the appointment and Rickman had to keep it with himself. As the result of the interview he determined to try the effect of a little timely absence. He did not attempt to conceal from himself that he was really most Horribly afraid; his state of mind or rather body (for the disorder was purely physical) was such that he positively dared not remain in the same house with Flossie another day. What he needed was change of air and scene. He approached Mrs. Downey with a shame-faced air, and a tale of how he was seedy and thought if he could get away for a week it would set him up. It seemed to him that Mrs. Downey's manner conveyed the most perfect comprehension of his condition. He did not care; he was brought so low that he could almost have confided in Mrs. Downey. "Mark my words," said the wise woman to the drawing-room. "He'll be back again before the week's up." And as usual, little Flossie marked them.

He walked out to Hampstead that very evening and engaged rooms there by the week, on the understanding that he might require them for a month or more. He did not certainly know how long the cure would take.

Hampstead is a charming and salubrious suburb, and Jewdwine was really very decent to him while he was there, but in four days he had had more of the cure than he wanted. Or was it that he didn't want to be cured? Anyway a week was enough to prove that the flight to Hampstead was a mistake. He had now an opportunity of observing Miss Flossie from a judicious distance, with the result that her image was seen through a tender wash of atmosphere at the precise moment when it acquired relief. He began to miss her morning greetings, the soft touch of her hand when they said good-night, and the voice that seemed to be always saying, "How orf'ly good of you," "Thanks orf'ly, Mr. Rickman, I've had a lovely day." He hadn't given her many lovely days lately, poor little girl.

At the end of the week, coming up from Fleet Street, instead of making straight for the Hampstead Road as he ought to have done, he found himself turning aside in the direction of Tavistock Place. The excuse that he made to himself was that he wanted a book that he had left behind at Mrs. Downey's. Now it was not in the least likely that he had left it in the dining-room, nor yet in the drawing-room, but it was in those places that he thought of looking first. Not finding what he wanted, he went on dejectedly to the second floor, feeling that he must fulfil the quest that justified his presence. And there in his study, in, yes, in it, as far in as anybody could get, by the bookcase next the window, Flossie was sitting; and sitting (if you could believe it) on the floor; sitting and moving her hands along the shelves as familiarly as you please. Good Heavens! if she wasn't busy dusting his books!

Flossie didn't see him, for she had her back to the door; and he stood there on the threshold for a second, just looking at her. She wore a loose dark-blue overall evidently intended to wrap her up and conceal her. But so far from concealing her, the overall, tucked in and smoothed out, and altogether adorably moulded by her crouching attitude, betrayed the full but tender outline of her body. Her face, all but the white curve of her cheek and forehead, was hidden from him, but he could see the ivory bistre at the nape of her bowed neck, with the delicate black tendrils of her curls clustering above it. Her throat, as she stooped over her task, was puckered and gathered, like some incredibly soft stuff, in little folds under her chin. He drew in his breath with a sighing sound which to Flossie was the first intimation of his presence.

To say that Flossie rose to her feet would be a misleading description of her method. She held on to the edge of a bookshelf by the tips of her fingers and drew herself up from the floor, slowly, as it were by some mysterious unfolding process, not ungraceful. She turned on him the wide half-mischievous, half-frightened eyes of a child caught this time in some superb enormity.

"Flossie," he said with an affectation of severity, "what have you been doing?"

She produced her duster gingerly. "You can see," said she, "only I didn't mean you to catch me at it." She knelt down by the fireplace and gave her duster a little flick up the chimney. "I never, never in all my life saw such a lot of dust. I can't think how you've gone on living with it."

He smiled. "No more can I, Flossie. I don't know how I did it."

"Well, you haven't got to do it, now. It's all perfectly sweet and clean."

"It's all perfectly sweet, I know that, dear." She turned towards the door but not without a dissatisfied look back at the bookcase she had left. "Aren't you going to let me thank you?"

"You needn't. I was only helping Mrs. Downey."

"Oh--"

"She's been having a grand turn-out while you were away."

"The deuce she has--"

"Oh you needn't be frightened. Nobody's touched your precious books but me. I wouldn't let them."

"Why wouldn't you let them?"

"Be-cause--Oh, I say, it's six o'clock; are you going to stay?"

"Perhaps. Why?"

"Because I'd only one more shelf to dust and then I'd 'ave finished. I--I'm in rather a hurry."

"Why won't you stay and dust it now?"

"Well--you know--" She took one step inside the room timidly, then another, and stood still.

"Is it me you're afraid of? I'll sit outside, on the stairs, if you'd rather."

"How silly!" She removed an invisible atom of dust from a chair as she spoke, as much as to say she was inspired solely by the instinct of order.

The diminutive smile played about the corners of her mouth. "Miss Roots said I'd better not meddle with your books."

"Did she? Then Miss Roots is a beast."

"She seemed to think I didn't know how to dust them."

"Perhaps she's right. I say, suppose you let me see."

And Flossie, willingly cajoled, began again, and, as he saw with horror, on his hoarded relics of the Harden library. "No, Flossie," he said, with a queer change in his voice. "Not those." But Flossie's fingers moved along their tops with a delicacy born of the incessant manipulation of bank notes. All the same, she did do it wrong, for she dusted towards the backs instead of away from them. But he hadn't the heart to correct her. He watched a moment; then he pretended to be looking for the book he had pretended he wanted to find, then he sat down and pretended to write a letter whilst Flossie went on dusting, skilfully, delicately. She even managed to get through ten volumes of his own Bekker's Plato without damage to the beautiful but perishing Russia leather. That made it all the more singular that the back of the eleventh volume should come off suddenly with a rip.

She gave a little cry of dismay. He looked up, and she came to him holding the book in one hand and its back in the other. She really was a little frightened. "Look," she said, "I didn't think it would have gone and done like that."

"Oh, I say, Flossie--"

"I'm orf'ly sorry." Her mouth dropped, not unbecomingly; her eyes were so liquid that he could have sworn they had tears in them. She looked more than ever like an unhappy child, standing beside him in her long straight overall. "And I wouldn't let anybody look at them but me."

"Why wouldn't you? I've asked you that before, Flossie--why wouldn't you?" He took the book and its mutilated fragment from her, and held both her hands in his.

"Because I knew you were fond enough of them."

"And is there anything I wasn't fond enough of--do you think?"

"I don't think; I know."

"No, you know nothing, you know nothing at all about anything. What did you think?"

"I thought you hated me."

"Hated you?"

"Yes. Hated me like poison."

He put his arms about her, gathering her to him! He drew her head down over his heart. "I hate you like this--and this--and this," he said, kissing in turn her forehead, her eyelids and her mouth. He held her at arm's length and gazed at her as if he wondered whether they were the same woman, the Flossie he had once known, and this Flossie that he had kissed. Then he led her to the sofa, and drew her down by his side, and held her hands to keep her there. And yet he felt that it was he who was being led; he who was being drawn, he who was being held--over the brink of the immeasurable, inexpiable folly. In all this his genius remained alone and apart, unmoved by anything he did or said, as if it knew that through it all the golden chain still held.

Her mouth quivered. "If you didn't hate me, why were you so rude to me, then?" was the first thing she said.

"Because I loved you when I didn't want to love you, and it was more than I could stand. And because--because I didn't know it. But you knew it," he said almost savagely. It seemed to him that his tongue refused the guidance of his brain.

"I'm sure I didn't know anything of the sort." Her mouth quivered again; but this time it was with a smile.

"Why not? Because I didn't say so in a lot of stupid words? You are literal. But surely you understood? Not just at first, of course; I didn't care a bit at first; I didn't care till long after."

"Long after what?" Flossie was thinking of Miss Poppy Grace on the balcony next door.

"Never mind what."

Flossie knew all about Miss Poppy Grace, and she didn't mind at all.

"Would I be here now if I didn't love you?" He still had to persuade himself that this was love. It seemed incredible.

"Rubbish--you know you only came to look at those silly old books," said Flossie, nodding contemptuously towards the bookcase.

"Did you imagine I was in love with them? And think of all the things we've done together. Didn't you know? Didn't you feel it coming on?"

"I know you've been orf'ly good--orf'ly. But as for anything else, I'm sure I never thought of it."

"Then think of it now. Or--does that mean that you don't care for me?"

There was an awful pause. Then Flossie said very indistinctly, so indistinctly that he had to lean his face to hers to catch the words, "No, of course it doesn't." Her voice cleared suddenly. "But if you didn't hate me, why did you go away?"

"I went away because I was ill."

"And are you any better?"

"Yes, I think I'm better. I think I'm nearly all right now. I might say I'll undertake never to be ill again, at least, not if you'll marry me."

At these words his genius turned and looked at him with eyes ominous and aghast. He had a vision of another woman kneeling beside a hearth as her hands tended a dying fire. And he hardly saw the woman at his side as he drew her to him and kissed her again because of the pain at his heart. And Flossie wondered why in that moment he did not look at her.

He was looking now. And as he looked his genius hid his face.

"You knew that was what I wanted?"

She shook her head slowly. "What does that mean? That you didn't know? Or that you won't? But you will, Flossie?"

As he drew her to him a second time the old terror woke in his heart; but only for a moment. For this time Flossie kissed him of her own accord, with a kiss, not passionate like his own, but sweet and fugitive. It was like a reminder of the transience of the thing he sought, a challenge rousing him to assert its immortality.

He put her from him, and stooped over his own outstretched arms and clasped hands; staring stupidly at the floor. When he spoke again it was hardly, incisively, as a man speaks the truth he hates. "Do you know what this means? It means waiting."

"Waiting?"

"Yes. I'm not a bit well off, you know; I couldn't give you the sort of home you ought to have just yet. I'd no business to say anything about it; but somehow I thought you'd rather know. And of course I've no business to ask you, but--will you wait?"

"Well--if we must, we must."

"And if it means working at that beastly Bank for another year, do you think you can keep it up so long?"

"I'll try to."

She leaned towards him, and they sat there, holding each other's hands, looking into each other's eyes, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, but the beating of their own riotous hearts.

It was love as nature loves to have it. It was also what men call honest love. But in the days when he had loved dishonestly, he had never slipped from Poppy Grace's side with such a sense of misery and solitude and shame.

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Chapter XLVII

The game was over and Flossie had won. She had forced Fate's hand, or rather, Mr Rickman's. Not by any coarse premeditated methods; Flossie was too subtly feminine for that. She had trusted rather to the inspiration of the moment, and when her beautiful womanly emotions gave her the opening she had simply followed it, that was all. And could anything have been more correct? She had not "given herself away" once by word or look. With true maidenly modesty she had hidden her own feelings until she was perfectly sure of Mr. Rickman's. There was nothing--nothing to make her feel ashamed when she looked back upon that day; a reflection from which she derived much consolation afterwards.

It gave her courage to fly downstairs to Mrs. Downey's private room where that lady sat doing her accounts, to lean over the back of Mrs. Downey's chair and to whisper into her ear, "I've been dusting Mr. Rickman's books, He caught me at it."

Mrs. Downey could not have shown more excitement if Flossie had told her that the kitchen boiler had burst. "Flossie! My goodness, whatever did he say?"

"He didn't mind one bit. Only--you won't tell him you told me not to touch them, will you, Mrs. Downey?" She brought her soft blushing cheek close to Mrs. Downey's and the warmth of it told her tale.

And Mrs. Downey promised not to tell, pardoning the subterfuge for love's sake, which excuses all. "Has he gone, Flossie?" she inquired anxiously.

"No. He's not going. He's come back for good."

"There! Didn't I say he would!"

"And what d'you think," said Flossie, sitting down and spreading her plump arm on the secretary all over the accounts. "He's done it. He did it up there."

Mrs. Downey stared, and Flossie nodded as much as to say "Fact!"

"You don't mean to say so?"

"Nobody's more surprised than myself."

The rest was kisses and congratulations, wholly magnanimous on Mrs. Downey's part; for the announcement of Flossie's engagement cost her one of the gayest, most desirable, and most remunerative of her brilliant circle. Mr. Spinks (regarded by himself and everybody else as permanent) gave notice and vanished from that hour, carrying with him the hopes of Miss Ada Bishop. Meanwhile Flossie (hitherto regarded from a merely decorative point of view) became a person of considerable importance in the boarding-house. It was not merely that she was an engaged young lady; for, as Miss Bishop pointed out to her with some natural asperity, anybody can be engaged; but she had now the privilege, denied to any other boarder, of going in and out of Mr. Rickman's study. She said that she went in to tidy it; but strange to say, the more Flossie tidied it the more hopeless it became. Mr. Rickman's study was never what you might call a really tidy room; but at any rate there had always been a certain repose about it. And now you could not well imagine a more unrestful place, a place more suggestive of hurry and disorder, of an utter lack of the leisure in which ideas ripen and grow great.

The table had become a troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr. Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the waters. He had once profanely said that God's world was a chaos he had got to work on. Now it was his world that was chaos. A tempestuous chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were. Rickman's genius, like Nature, destroyed in order that it might create; yet it seemed to him that nowadays the destruction was out of all proportion to the creation. He sighed as he gazed at the piteous fragments that represented six months' labour; fragments that wept blood; the torn and mutilated limbs of living thoughts; with here and there huge torsos of blank verse, lopped and hewn in the omnipotent fury of a god at war with his world; mixed up with undeveloped and ethereal shapes, the embryos of dreams.

And yet it was not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays that his best thoughts came to him, the beautiful shy thoughts that must be delicately courted. And now his free evenings and his Sundays were given up to the courting of Flossie. And even on a week-day this was what would happen. He would rush home early from Fleet Street and settle down for two hours' work before dinner. Then a little timid knock would be heard at the door, and Flossie would come in bringing him a cup of tea. He couldn't just swill it down like a pig and send the dear little thing away. He had to let her sit and see him drink it, slowly, as if he thoroughly enjoyed it. Or he would come in (as on that blessed evening six months ago) and find Flossie dusting books; standing perhaps on two tottering hassocks and a chair, at an altitude perilous to so plump a person. And Flossie had to be lifted down from the hassocks and punished with hard kisses, and told not to do it again. And Flossie would do it again. So that a great deal of time was lost in this way. And with the touch of those soft little arms about his neck demoralization would set in for the evening.

And then there was Flossie's education to be attended to; and that took more time than anything. It meant that, as the November days drew in, he had to read or talk to Flossie as she sat in his armchair with her dear little feet on his fender, and her dear little hands mending his socks and shirts and things. They might have been married for years, only they weren't; that was what made it so exciting. Flossie's hands were always mending or making something (generally something to wear), and it was rather strange that it never occurred to such a busy person that other people might be busy too. He tried to break it to her. He told her (like a brute) that he thought all his things must be mended now, and that perhaps for another week he would be better without any tea. And Flossie (very naturally offended) didn't put her dear little nose in at his door for two weeks. And for all you could get through in that time it was hardly worth while offending her.

But he was very far wrong in supposing that Flossie never thought about his work. She had been thinking a great deal about it lately. One cold bright Sunday morning in November she tapped at his door and walked in dressed for the open air. "Aren't you coming for a walk," she said, "this lovely day?"

"Too busy." To signify his annoyance, or to keep himself from temptation, he bent closer over the article he was writing for The Museion. She came and stood beside him, watching him as he worked, still with his air of passionate preoccupation. Presently he found himself drawn against his will into the following conversation.

"How long does it take you to do one of those things?"

"It depends."

"Depends on what?"

"Oh, on the amount of trouble I take over it."

"And do they pay you any more for taking trouble?"

"No, Flossie. I'm sorry to say they frequently pay me less."

"Then why on earth do you do it?"

This question seemed to him so curious that it caused him to look up, beholding for the first time the plump figure clothed entirely in a new suit of brown, and wearing on its head a fascinating hat made of something that resembled fur. He tried to look at it with disapproval, while his mind dealt independently with the amazing question put to him.

"Well, Flossie, if you really care anything about style--"

"Style?" She stroked down the front of her jacket with a delicious movement of her little hands. "Don't you like it?"

He smiled. "I adore it. It makes you look like a dear little brown Beaver, as you are." "The Beaver" was only one of the many names he had for her; it was suggested irresistibly by her plumpness, her singularly practical intelligence, and her secretive ways.

"Then what do you mean by style?" asked the Beaver in a challenging tone that forced him to lay down his pen.

"What do I mean by style?" He explained, moved by the mad lust for mystification which seizes a man in the presence of adorable simplicity. "I don't mean anything in the least resembling a Beaver's coat (there really isn't any style about a Beaver's coat). And if you want me to say it's the clothing of your thoughts, I won't. The less clothing they have the better. It can't be treated as a Beaver treats its coats. You can put it on and off (I was putting it on when you came in and interrupted me); and you can mend it, and brush it up a bit; but you can't measure it, or make it to order, and when it wears out you can't get another where you got the first. Style isn't the clothing, it's the body of your thoughts, my Beaver; and in a slap-up, A 1 style, the style of the masters, my style, you can't tell the body from the soul."

"If you'd said you couldn't tell the body from the skirt it would sound like sense."

That remark was (for the Beaver) really so witty that he leaned back in his chair and laughed at it. But the Beaver was in no laughing humour. "Look here," she said, "you say that if you write those stylish things that take up such a lot of time, they only pay you less for them."

"Well?"

"Well, is it fair of you to go on writing them?"

"Fair of me? My dear child, why not?"

"Be-cause, if I buy stylish things I have to pay for them. And I've been buying them long enough, just to please you."

"I don't follow. But I suppose a Beaver has to reason backwards; because, you know, all its intelligence is in its tail."

"Gracious, Keith! You are a silly."

"I am not alone in my opinion. It's the opinion of some very eminent zoologists." He drew her gently on his knee; raised her veil and looked into her eyes. They were (as he had often had occasion to notice) of so deep and black a black that the iris was indistinguishable from the pupil, and this blackness limited the range of their expression. They could only tell you what Flossie was feeling, never what she was thinking; for thought requires a translucent medium, and the light of Flossie's eyes was all on the surface. On the other hand, the turns and movements of her body were always a sufficient indication of the attitude of her mind. At the present moment, sitting on Keith's knee, her pose was not one of pure complacency. But holding her there, that little brown Beaver, his own unyielding virile body deliciously aware of the strange, incredible softness of hers, he wondered whether it were possible for him to feel anything but tender to a creature so strangely and pathetically made. Positively she seemed to melt and grow softer by sheer contact; and presently she smiled a sweet diminutive smile that didn't uncover more than two of her little white teeth.

"Oh, what a shame it is to treat a Beaver so!" said he.

"When are you going to take me for a nice walk?" said she. "Any time before Christmas?"

"Perhaps. But you mustn't build on it."

"I don't see that I can build on anything at this rate."

"I suppose a Beaver can't be happy unless it's always building? That's why some people say it hasn't any intelligence at all. They won't even allow that it can build. They think its architectural talent is all a delusion and a sham; because it builds in season and out of season. Keep it in your study, and it will make a moat round the hearthrug with tobacco pouches and manuscripts and boots--whatever it can lay its hands on. It will even take the ideas out of a man's head, if it can't find anything better. Is there any logic in an animal that can do that?" And if Flossie did not understand the drift of these remarks at least she seemed to understand the kisses that punctuated them.

But before very long he obtained more light on the Beaver's logic, and owned that it was singularly sound. They managed to put in a great many nice walks between that Sunday and Christmas. Whenever he could spare time Rickman made a point of meeting Flossie at the end of her day's work. He generally waited at the corner where the long windowless wall of the Bank stretches along Prince's Street, iron and implacable. It was too cold now to sit under the shadow of St. Paul's. Sometimes they would walk home along Holborn, sometimes they would go down Ludgate Hill and thence on to the Embankment. It was certainly better for Flossie to be out of doors than in the dingy drawing-room in Tavistock Place. They could talk freely in the less crowded thorough-fares; and it was surprising the things they still found to say to each other all about nothing. Every trace of Flossie's depression had vanished; she walked with a brisk step, she chatted gaily, she laughed the happiest laughter at the poorest jokes. All was going well; and why, oh why could he not let well alone?

They were walking on the Embankment one day, and she, for such a correct little person, was mad with mirth, when he broke out. "Flossie, you little lunatic! You might be going to marry a stock-broker instead of a journalist."

"I'm going to marry a very rich man--for me."

"For you, darling? A devilish poor one, I'm afraid."

"Oh don't! We've said enough about that."

"Yes, but I haven't told you everything. Do you know, I might have been fairly well off by now, if I'd only chosen."

Now there was no need whatever for him to make that revelation. He was driven to it by vanity. He wanted to make an impression. He wanted Flossie to see him in all his moral beauty.

"How was that?" she asked with interest.

"I can't tell you much about it. It was something to do with business. I got an offer of a thumping big partnership three years ago--and I refused it."

He had made an impression. Flossie turned on him a look of wonder, a look uncertain and inscrutable. "What did you do that for?"

"I did it because it was right. I didn't like the business."

"That's not quite the same thing, is it?"

"Not always. It happened to be in this case."

"Why, what sort of business was it?"

"It wasn't scavenging, and it wasn't burglary--exactly. It was--" he hesitated--"only the second-hand book-trade."

"I know--they make a lot of money that way."

"They make too much for my taste sometimes. Besides--"

"Besides what?" They had turned into an embrasure of the parapet to discuss this question. They stood close together looking over the river.

"It isn't my trade. I'm only a blooming journalist."

"You don't make so very much out of that, do you? Is that the reason why we have to wait?"

"I'm afraid so. But I hope I shall be something more than a journalist some day."

"You like writing, don't you?"

"Yes, Flossie; I shouldn't be much good at it, if I didn't."

"I see." She was looking eastwards away from him, and her expression had changed; but it was still inscrutable. And yet by the turning of her head, he saw her mind moving towards a conclusion; but it was impossible to say whether she reached it by the slow process of induction, or by woman's rapid intuition. Anyhow she had reached it. Presently she spoke again. "Could you still get that thing, that partnership any time--if you tried?"

"Any time. But I'm not going to try."

She turned round abruptly with an air of almost fierce determination. "Well, if I get an offer of a good place, I shan't refuse it. I shall leave the Bank." She spoke as if so desperate a step would be followed by the instantaneous collapse of that institution.

He was surprised to find how uneasy this threat always made him. The proverbial safety of the Bank had impressed him in more ways than one. And Flossie's post there had other obvious advantages. It brought her into contact with women of a better class than her own, with small refinements, and conventions which were not conspicuous at Mrs. Downey's.

"Let me implore you not to do that. Heaven knows, I hate you having to earn your own living at all, but I'd rather you did it that way than any other."

"Why, what difference would it make to you, I should like to know?"

"It makes all the difference if I know you're doing easy work, not slaving yourself to death as some girls do. It is an easy berth. And--and I like the look of those girls I saw you with to-day. They were nice. I'd rather think of you working with them than sitting in some horrible office like a man. Promise me you won't go looking out for anything else."

"All right. I promise."

"No, but--on your honour?"

"Honour bright. There! Anything for a quiet life."

They turned on to the street again. Rickman looked at his watch. "Look here, we're both late for dinner--supposing we go and dine somewhere and do a theatre after, eh?"

"Oh no--we mustn't." All the same Flossie's eyes brightened, for she dearly loved the play.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't think perhaps you ought to."

"You mean I can't afford it?"

"Well--"

"Oh, I fancy even a journalist's income will run to that."

It did run to that and to a hansom afterwards, though Flossie protested, dragging at his arm.

"I'd rather walk," said she, "indeed I would."

"Nonsense. Come, bundle in."

"Please--please let me walk." He helped her in and closed the apron sharply. He was annoyed. That was the second time she had insisted on his poverty. He thought she had a little too much the air of preparing herself to be a poor man's wife. Of course it was pretty of her; but he thought it would have been prettier still if she had let it alone.

Now Flossie had never thought of him as a poor man before to-night; but somehow the idea of the good income he might have had and hadn't made him appear poor by comparison. She lay back in the hansom meditating. "If you could only write a play like that, Keith, what a lot of money you'd make."

"Shouldn't I? But then, you see, I couldn't write a play like that."

"Rubbish. I don't believe that author--what d'you call him?--is so very much cleverer than you."

"Thanks." He bowed ironically.

"Well, I mean it. And look how they clapped him--why, they made as much fuss about him as any of the actors. I say, wouldn't you like to hear them calling 'Author! Author!'? And then clapping!"

"H'm!"

"Oh, wouldn't you love it just; you needn't pretend! Look there, I declare I've split my glove." (That meant, as Flossie had calculated, a new pair that she should not have to pay for.)

"If you clapped me I would, Flossie. I should need all the consolation I could get if I'd written as bad a play."

"Well, if that was a bad play, I'd like to see a good one."

"I'll take you to a good one some day."

"Soon?"

"Well, I'm afraid not very soon." He smiled; for the play he thought of taking her to was not yet written; would never be written if many of his evenings were like this. But to Flossie, meditating, his words bore only one interpretation--that Keith was really very much worse off than she had taken him to be.

As they lingered on the doorstep in Tavistock Place, a young man approached them in a deprecating manner from the other side of the street, and took off his hat to Flossie.

"Hallo, Spinks!" said Rickman.

"That you, Razors?" said Spinks.

"It is. What are you doing here?"

"Oh nothing. I was in the neighbourhood, and I thought I'd have a look at the old place."

"Come in, will you? (If they don't come, Flossie, I shall have to use my latch-key.")

"Not to-night, thanks, it's a bit too late. I'd better be going." But he did not go.

"I hope," said Flossie politely, "you're comfortable where you are now?"

"Oh, very comfortable, very comfortable indeed." Yet his voice had a melancholy sound, and under the gas-light his face (a face not specially designed for pathos) looked limp and utterly dejected.

"I think, Keith," said Flossie, "you'd better ring again." Ringing was a concession to propriety that Flossie insisted on and he approved. He rang again; and Mrs. Downey in a beautiful wrapper herself opened the door. At the sight of Spinks she gave a joyful exclamation and invited him into the hall. They left him there.

"What's up?" asked Rickman as they parted on his landing.

"Who with? Sidney? I can't tell you--really."

"I wonder why he left."

"I can't tell you that, either." They said good-night at the foot of the stairs, and she kissed him laughing. And the two men heard it echoing in their dreams, that mysterious laughter of woman, which is as the ripple over the face of the deep.

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Chapter XLVIII

Isaac Rickman stood in his front shop at the close of a slack winter day. He looked about him with a gaze uncheered by the contemplation of his plate-glass and mahogany; and as he looked he gathered his beard into a serious meditative hand, not as of old, but with a certain agitation in the gesture.

Isaac was suffering from depression; so was the book-trade. Every year the pulse of business beat more feebly, and in the present year, eighteen ninety-six, it was almost standing still. Isaac had seen the little booksellers one by one go under, but their failure put no heart into him; and now the wave of depression was swallowing him up too. He had not got the grip of the London book-trade; he would never build any more Gin Palaces of Art; he had not yet freed himself from the power of Pilkington; and more than all his depression the mortgage of the Harden Library weighed heavily on his soul. The Public in which he trusted had grown tricky; and he found that even capital and incomparable personal audacity are powerless against the malignity of events.

For his own part Isaac dated his decline from the hour of his son's defection. He had not been brought to this pass by any rashness in speculation, or by any flaw whatever in his original scheme. But his original scheme had taken for granted Keith's collaboration. He had calculated to a nicety what it would cost him to build up his fortunes; and all these calculations had been based on the union of his own borrowed capital with Keith's brilliant brains. And Keith with unimaginable perfidy had removed himself and his brilliant brains at the crisis of the start. Isaac thought he had estimated pretty accurately the value of his son's contribution; but it was only in the actual experiment of separation that he realized the difference it had made.

The immediate effect of the blow was to paralyse the second-hand department. As far as new books went Isaac was fairly safe. If the Public was tricky he was generally up to its tricks. But with second-hand books you never knew where you were, not unless you had made a special study of the subject. Owing to his defective education he had always been helpless in the second-hand shop; liable at any moment to be over-reached by one of those innocent, lantern-jawed student fellows who go poking their noses everywhere.

And in buying he was still more at a disadvantage. He had grown nervous in the auction-room; he never knew what to do there, and when he did it, it was generally wrong. He would let himself be outbidden where Keith would have carried all before him by a superb if reckless persistence.

But if business was at its worst in the second-hand department, in the front shop there was a sense of a sadder and more personal desolation. Rickman's was no longer sought after. It had ceased to be the rendezvous of affable young men from Fleet Street and the Temple. The customers who came nowadays were of another sort, and the tone of the business was changing for the worse. The spirit, that something illuminating, intimate, and immortal, had perished from the place.

At first Isaac had not been able to take its departure seriously. He had never really grasped the ground of that disagreement with his son; he had put it all down to "some nonsense about a woman"; and certain hints dropped by Pilkington supported him in that belief. Keith, he had said to himself, would come back when his belly pinched him. Every day he looked to see him crawling through the big swinging doors on that empty belly. When he did it, Isaac meant to take him back instantly, unquestioned, unreproved and unreproached. His triumph would be so complete that he could afford that magnanimity. But Keith had not come back; he had never put his nose inside the shop from that day to this. He called to see his father now and again on a Sunday (for Isaac no longer refused to admit him into his house); and then, as if in obedience to the holy conventions that ruled in the little villa at Ilford in Essex, no allusion was made to the business that had driven them apart. In the same spirit Isaac sternly refrained from inquiring into the state of Keith's finances; but from his personal appearance he gathered that, if Keith returned to the shop, it would not be hunger that would send him there. And if the young man's manner had not suggested the unlikelihood of his return, a hint to that effect was conveyed by his clothes. They were the symbols of prosperity, nay more, of a social advance that there could be no going back upon. Isaac had only to look at him to realize his separation. The thing was monstrous, incomprehensible, but certain. But it was in Keith's gaze (the gaze which he could never meet, so disturbing was it in its luminous sincerity) that he read the signs of a more profound and spiritual desertion.

Isaac stood pondering these things in the front shop, at the hour of closing. As he moved drearily away, the lights were turned out one by one behind him, the great iron shutters went up with a clang, and it was dark in Rickman's.

That evening, instead of hailing a Liverpool Street 'bus, he crossed the Strand and walked up Bow Street, and so into Bloomsbury. It was the first time for four years that he had called in Tavistock Place. He used to go up alone to the boarding-house drawing-room, and wait there till Keith appeared and took him into his bedroom on the second floor. Now his name brought an obsequious smile to the maid's face; she attended him upstairs and ushered him with ceremony into a luxurious library. Keith was writing at a table strewn with manuscripts, and he did not look up all at once. The lamp-light fell on his fair head and boyish face, and Isaac's heart yearned towards his son. He held out his hand and smiled after his fashion, but said no word.

The grip of the eager young hand gave him hope.

Keith drew up two chairs to the fire. The chairs were very deep, very large, very low, comfortable beyond Isaac's dreams of comfort. Keith lay back in his, graceful in his abandoned attitude; Isaac sat up very straight and stiff, crushing in his knees the soft felt hat that made him look for ever like a Methodist parson.

His eyes rested heavily on the littered table. "Well," he said, "how long have you been at it?"

"Oh, ever since nine in the morning--"

(Longer hours than he had in the shop); "--and--I've two more hours to put through still." (And yet he had received him gladly.)

"It doesn't look quite as easy as making catalogues."

"It isn't."

Isaac had found the opening he desired. "I should think all this literary work was rather a 'eavy strain."

"It does make you feel a bit muzzy sometimes, when you're at it from morning to night."

"Is the game worth the candle? Is it worth it? Have you made your fortune at it?"

"Not yet."

"Well--I gave you three years."

Keith smiled. "What did you give me them for? To make my fortune in?"

"To learn common-sense in."

Keith laughed. "It wasn't enough for that. You should have given me three hundred, at the very least!"

The laugh was discouraging, and Isaac felt that he was on the wrong tack.

"I'd give you as many as you like, if I could afford to wait. But I consider I've waited long enough already."

"What were you waiting for?"

"For you to come back--"

Keith's face was radiant with innocent inquiry.

"--To come back into the business."

The light of innocence died out of the face as suddenly as it had kindled.

"My dear father, I shall never come back. I thought I'd made that very clear to you."

"You never made it clear--your behaviour to me. Not but what I 'ad an idea, which perhaps I need not name. I've never asked what there was at the bottom of that foolish business, and I've never blamed you for it. If it made you act badly to me, I've reason to believe it kept you out of worse mischief."

Keith felt a queer tightening at the heart. He understood that his father was referring darkly to Lucia Harden. He was surprised to find that even this remote and shadowy allusion was more than he could bear. He must call him off that trail; and the best way of doing it was to announce his engagement.

"As you seem to be rather mixed, father, I ought to tell you that I'm engaged to be married. Have been for the last eighteen months."

"Married?" Isaac's face was tense with anxiety; for he could not tell what this news meant for him; whether it would remove his son farther from him, or bring him, beyond all expectation, near.

"May I ask who the lady is? Any of your fine friends in Devonshire?"

Keith was silent, tongue-tied with presentiment of the coming blow. It came.

"I needn't ask. It's that--that Miss 'Arden. I've heard of her."

"As it happens it's somebody you haven't heard of. You may have seen her, though--Miss Flossie Walker."

"No. I've never seen her, not to my knowledge. How long have you known her?"

"Ever since I came here. She's one of the boarders."

"Ah-h. Has she any means?"

"None."

Isaac's heart leapt high.

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?"

"How can I, when I haven't seen the lady?"

"You would, if you had seen her."

"And when is it to be? Like most young people, you're a bit impatient, I suppose?"

Keith betrayed the extremity of his impatience by a painful flush. This subject of his marriage was not to be approached without a certain shame.

"I suppose so; and like most young people we shall have to wait."

Isaac's eyes narrowed and blinked in the manner of a man uncertain of his focus; as it happened, he was just beginning to see.

"Ah--that's what's wearing you out, is it?"

"I'm beginning to get a bit sick of it, I own."

"What's she like to look at it, this young lady? Is she pretty?"

"Very."

A queer hungry look came over the boy's face. Isaac had seen that look there once or twice before. His lips widened in a rigid smile; he had to moisten them before they would stretch. He was profoundly moved by Keith's disclosure, by the thought of that imperishable and untameable desire. It held for him the promise of his own continuance. It stirred in him the strange fury of his fatherhood, a fatherhood destructive and malign, that feeds on the life of children. As he looked at his son his sickly frame trembled before that embodiment of passion and vigour and immortal youth. He longed to possess himself of these things, of the superb young intellect, of the abounding life, to possess himself and live.

And he would possess them. Providence was on his side. Providence had guided him. He could not have chosen his moment better; he had come at a crisis in Keith's life. He knew the boy's nature; after all, he would be brought back to him by hunger, the invincible, implacable hunger of the flesh.

"Your mother was pretty. But she lost her looks before I could marry her. I had to wait for her; so I know what you're going through. But I fancy waiting comes harder on you than it did on me."

"It does," said Keith savagely. "Every day I think I'll marry to-morrow and risk it. But," he added in a gentler tone, "that might come hard on her."

"You could marry to-morrow, if you'd accept the proposal I came to make to you."

Keith gave a keen look at his father. He had been touched by the bent figure, the wasted face; the evident signs of sickness and suffering. He had resolved to be very tender with him. But not even pity could blind him to the detestable cunning of that move. It revolted him. He had not yet realized that the old man was fighting for his life.

"I'm not open to any proposals," he said coldly. "I've chosen my profession, and I mean to stick to it."

"That's all very well; but you should 'ave a solid standby, over and above."

"Literature doesn't leave much room for anything over and above."

"That's where you're making a mistake. Wot you want is variety of occupation. There's no reason why you shouldn't combine literature with a more profitable business."

"I can't make it combine with any business at all."

"Well, I can understand your being proud of your profession."

"Can you understand my profession being proud of me?"

Isaac smiled. Yes, he could well understand it.

"And," said he, "I can understand your objection to the shop."

"I haven't any objection to the shop."

"Well--then there's no reason why we shouldn't come to an agreement. If I don't mind owning that I can't get on without your help, you might allow that you'd get on a bit better with mine."

"Why, aren't you getting on, father?"

"Well, considering that my second-'and business depended on you entirely--and that that's where the profits are to be made nowadays--That's where I'm 'andicapped. I can't operate without knowledge; and from hour to hour I've never any seecurity that I'm not being cheated."

Isaac would gladly have recalled that word. Keith met it with silence, a silence more significant than any speech; charged as it was with reminiscence and reproof.

"Now, what I propose--"

"Please don't propose anything. I--I--I can't do what you want."

Keith positively stammered in his nervous agitation.

"Wait till you hear what I want. I'm not going to ask you to make catalogues, or stand behind the counter, or," he added almost humbly, "to do anything a gentleman doesn't do." He looked round the room. The materials of the furnishing were cheap; but Keith had appeased his sense of beauty in the simplicity of the forms and the broad harmony of the colours. Isaac was impressed and a little disheartened by the refinement of his surroundings, a refinement that might be fatal to his enterprise. "You shall 'ave your own private room fitted up on the first floor, with a writing table, and a swivel chair. You needn't come into contact with customers at all. All I want is to 'ave you on the spot to refer to. I want you to give me the use of those brains of yours. Practically you'd be a sleeping partner; but we should 'alve profits from the first."

"Thanks--thanks" (his voice seemed to choke him)--"it's awfully good and--and generous of you. But I can't."

"Why not?"

"I've about fifteen reasons. One's enough. I don't like the business, and I won't have anything to do with it."

"You--don't--like--the business?" said Isaac, with the air of considering an entirely new proposition.

"No. I don't like it."

"I am going to raise the tone of the business. That's wot I want you for. To raise the tone of the business."

"I should have to raise the tone of the British public first."

"Well--an intelligent bookseller has a good deal of influence with customers; and you with your reputation, there's nothing you couldn't do. You could make the business anything you chose. In a few years we should be at the very head of the trade. I don't deny that the house has been going down. There's been considerable depression. Still, I should be in a very different position now, Keith, if you hadn't left me. And in the second-hand department--your department--there are still enormous--e_nor_mous--profits to be made."

"That's precisely why I object to my department, as you call it. I don't approve of those enormous profits."

"Now look 'ere. Let's have a quiet talk. We never have 'ad, for you were always so violent. If you'd stated your objections to me in a quiet reasonable manner, there'd never have been any misunderstanding. Supposing you explain why you object to those profits."

"I object, because in nine cases out of ten they're got by trading on another person's ignorance."

"Of course they are. Why not? If he's ignorant, it's only fair he should pay for his ignorance; and if I'm an expert, it's fair I should get an expert's profits. It's all a question of buying and selling. He can't sell what he hasn't got; and I can't sell what I haven't got. Supposing I've got knowledge that he hasn't--if I can't make a profit out of that, what can I make a profit out of?"

"I can't say. My own experience of the business was unfortunate. It struck me, if you remember, that some of your profits meant uncommonly sharp practice."

"Talk of ignorance! Really, for a clever fellow, Keith, you talk a deal of folly. There's sharp practice in every trade--in your own trade, if it comes to that. Supposing you write a silly book, and some of your friends boom it high and low, and the Public buys it for a work of genius--well--aren't you making a profit out of other people's ignorance? Of course you are."

"I haven't made much profit that way--yet."

"Because you're unbusiness-like. Well. I'm perfectly willing to believe your objections are conscientious. But look at it another way. I'm a God-fearing, religious-minded man" (unconsciously he caressed his soft hat, the hat of a Methodist parson, as he spoke), "is it likely I'd continue in any business I couldn't reconcile to my conscience?"

"I've no doubt you've reconciled it to your conscience. That's hardly a reason why I should reconcile it to mine."

"That means that you'll let me be ruined for want of a little advice which I'd 'ave paid you well for?"

"If my advice is all you want, you can have it any day for nothing."

"Wot you get for nothing is worth just about wot you get it for. No. Mine was a fair business proposal, and either you come into it or you stay out."

"Most decidedly I prefer--to stay out."

"Then," said Isaac suddenly, "I shall have to give up the shop."

"I'm most awfully sorry."

"There's no good your being sorry if you won't help me."

"I would help you--if I could."

"If you could!" He paused. Prudence plucked him by the sleeve, whispering that never while he lived must he breathe the word Insolvency; but a wilder instinct urged him to disclosure. "Why--it rests with you to keep me out of the Bankruptcy Court."

Keith said nothing. He had held out against the appeal to his appetites; it was harder to withstand this call on his finer feelings. But if the immediate effect of the news was to shock and distress him, the next instant he was struggling with a shameful reflection. For all his shame it was impossible not to suspect his father of some deeper, more complicated ruse.

Isaac sat very still, turning on his son a look of concentrated resentment. Keith's youth was hateful to him now; it withheld pitilessly, implacably, the life that it was in its hands to give. Meanwhile Keith wrestled with his suspicion and overcame it.

"Look here, father, I'll do what I can. I'll come round to-morrow and look into things for you, if that's any good."

The instant he had made the offer he was aware of its futility. It was not for his business capacity that he was valued; and he never had been permitted to interfere with the finances of the shop. The suggestion roused his father to a passion that partook of terror.

"Look into things?" He rose trembling. "You mind your own business. I can look into things myself. There'd 'ave been no need to look into them at all if you 'adn't robbed and deceived me. Robbed and deceived me, I said. You took your education--which I gave you to put into my business--you took it out of the business, and set up with it on your own account. And I tell you you might as well 'ave made off with a few thousands out of my till. Robbing's wot you've been guilty of in the sight of God; and you can come and talk to me about your conscience. I don't understand your kind of conscience--Keith." There was still a touch of appeal in his utterance of his son's name.

"Perhaps not," said Keith sorrowfully. "I don't understand it myself."

He walked with his father to Holborn, silently, through the drizzling rain. He held an umbrella over him, while they waited, still silently, for the Liverpool Street omnibus. He noticed with some anxiety that the old man walked queerly, shuffling and trailing his left foot, that he had difficulty in mounting the step of the omnibus, and was got into his seat only after much heaving and harrying on the part of the conductor. His face and attitude, as he sank crouching into his seat, were those of a man returning from the funeral of his last hope.

And in Keith's heart there was sorrow, too, as for something dead and departed.

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Chapter XLIX

If, much to Rickman's regret, Flossie did not take kindly to Miss Roots, very soon after her engagement she discovered her bosom friend in Miss Ada Bishop. The friendship was not founded, as are so many feminine attachments, upon fantasy or caprice, but rested securely on the enduring commonplace. If Flossie respected Ada because of her knowledge of dress, and her remarkable insight into the ways of gentlemen, Ada admired Flossie because of the engagement, which, after all, was not (like some girls' engagements) an airy possibility or a fiction, but an accomplished fact.

This attachment, together with the firm possession of Keith, helped to tide Flossie over the tedium of waiting. Only one thing was wanting to complete her happiness, and even that the thoughtful gods provided.

About six o'clock one evening, as Rickman was going out of the house, he was thrust violently back into the passage by some one coming in. It was young Spinks; and the luggage that he carried in his hand gave a frightful impetus to his entry. At the sight of Rickman he let go a hat-box, an umbrella and a portmanteau, and laid hold of him by both hands.

"Razors--what luck! I say, I've gone and done it. Chucked them--hooked it. Stood it eighteen months--couldn't stand it any longer. On my soul I couldn't. But it's all right--I'll explain."

"Explain what? To whom, you God-forsaken lunatic?"

"Sh--sh--sh! To you. For Heaven's syke don't talk so loud. They'll hear you. You haven't got a train you want to catch, or an appointment, have you?"

"I haven't got a train, but I have got an appointment."

"You might spare a fellow five minutes, ten minutes, can't you? I shan't keep you more than ten at the outside. There's something I must tell you; but I can't do it here. And not there!" As Rickman opened the dining-room door Spinks drew back with a gesture of abhorrence. He then made a dash for the adjoining room; but retired precipitately backwards. "Oh damn! That's somebody's bedroom, now. How could I tell?"

"Look here, if you're going to make an ass of yourself, you'd better come up to my room and do it quietly."

"Thanks, I've got a room somewhere; but I don't know which it is yet."

Rickman could only think that the youth had broken his habit of sobriety. He closed the study door discreetly, lit the lamp and took a good look at him. He fancied he caught a suggestion of melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the lines of his high angular nose. But there was no sign of intoxication in Sidney's clear grey eye, nor trace of wasting emotion in his smooth shaven cheek. Under the searching lamp-light he looked almost as fresh, as pink, as callow, as he had done four years ago. He dropped helplessly into a low chair. Rickman took a seat opposite him and waited. While not under the direct stimulus of nervous excitement, young Spinks had some difficulty in finding utterance. At last he spoke.

"I say, you must think I've acted in a very queer way."

"Queer isn't the word for it. It's astounding."

"D'you really think so? You mean I 'adn't any rights--it--it wasn't fair to you--to come back as I've done?"

"Well, I don't know about its being very fair; it certainly wasn't very safe."

"Safe? Safe? Ah--I was afraid you'd think that. Won't you let me explain?"

"Certainly. I should like to know your reasons for running into me like a giddy locomotive."

"Well, but I can't explain anything if you go on rotting like that."

"All right. Only look sharp. I've got to meet a fellow in Baker Street at seven. If you'll get under weigh we might finish off the explanation outside, if you're going back that way."

"Going back. Oh Lord--don't you know that I've come back here to stay. I've got a room--"

"Oh, that's the explanation, is it?"

"No, that's the thing I've got to explain. I thought you'd think I'd acted dishonourably in--in following her like this. But I couldn't stand it over there without her. I tried, but on my soul I couldn't. I shall be all right if I can only see her sometimes, at meals and--and so forth. I shan't say a word. I haven't said a word. I don't even think she knows; and if she did--So it's perfectly safe, you know, Rickman, it's perfectly safe."

"Who doesn't know what? And if who did?" roared Rickman, overcome with laughter.

"Sh--sh--sh--Flossie. I mean--M--miss Walker."

Rickman stopped laughing and looked at young Spinks with something like compassion. "I say, old chap, what do you mean?"

"I mean that I should have gone off my chump if I'd hung on at that place. I couldn't get her out of my mind, not even in the shop. I used to lie awake at nights, thinking of her. And then, you know--I couldn't eat."

"In fact, you were pretty bad, were you?"

"Oh, well, I just chucked it up and came here. It's all right, Razors; you needn't mind. I never had a chance with her. She never gave me so much as a thought. Not a thought. It's the queerest thing. I couldn't tell you how I got into this state--I don't know myself. Only now she's engaged and so forth, you might think that--well, you might think"--young Spinks had evidently come to the most delicate and complicated part of his explanation--"well, that I'd no right to go on getting into states. But when it doesn't make any difference to her, and it can't matter to you--" He paused; but Rickman gathered that what he wished to plead was that in those circumstances he was clearly welcome to his "state." "I mean that if it's all up with me, you know, it's all right--I mean, it's safe enough--for you."

Poor Spinks became lost in the maze of his own beautiful sentiments. Adoration for Rickman (himself the soul of honour) struggled blindly with his passion for Flossie Walker. But the thought, which his brain had formed, which his tongue refused to utter, was that the hopelessness of his passion made it no disloyalty to his friend. "It can make no difference to her, my being here," he said simply.

"Nonsense, you've as much right to be here as I have."

"Yes, but under the circumstances, it mightn't have been perfectly fair to you. See?"

"My dear Spinky, it's perfectly fair to me; but is it--you won't mind me suggesting it--is it perfectly fair to yourself?"

Spinks sat silent for a minute, laying his hand upon the place of, thought, as if trying to take that idea in. "Yes," he said deliberately. "That's all right. In fact, nothing else will do my business. It sounds queer; but that's the only way to get her out of my head. You see, when I see her I don't think about her; but when I don't see her I can't think of anything else."

Rickman was interested. It struck him that latterly he had been affected in precisely the opposite way. It was curious to compare young Sidney's sensations with his own. He forgot all about the man in Baker Street.

"I don't mean to say I shall ever get over it. When a man goes through this sort of business it leaves its mark on him somewhere." And indeed it seemed to have stamped an expression of permanent foolishness on Spinks's comely face.

Rickman smiled even while he sympathized. "Yes, I daresay. I'm sorry, old man; but if I were you I wouldn't be too down in the mouth. It's not worth it--I mean; after all, there are other things besides women in the world. It wouldn't be a bad place even if there weren't any women in it. Life is good," said the engaged man. "You had better dress for dinner." He could give no richer consolation without seeming to depreciate the unique value of Flossie. As for Spinks's present determination, he thought it decidedly risky for Spinks; but if Spinks enjoyed balancing himself in this way on the edge of perdition it was no business of his.

As it happened, the event seemed to prove that Spinks knew very well what he was about. The callow youth had evidently hit on the right treatment for his own disease. In one point, however, his modesty had deceived him. His presence was far from being a matter of indifference to Flossie. A rejected lover is useful in so many ways. It may be a triumph to make one man supremely happy; but the effect is considerably heightened if you have at the same time made another man supremely wretched. Flossie found that the spectacle of young Sidney's dejection restored all its first fresh piquancy to her engagement. At Tavistock Place he more than justified his existence. True, he did not remain depressed for very long, and there was something not altogether flattering in the high rebound of his elastic youth; but, as Miss Bishop was careful to point out, his joyous presence would have a most salutary effect in disturbing that prosaic sense of security in which gentlemen's affections have been known to sleep.

But Spinks was destined to serve the object of his infatuation in yet another way.

It was in the second spring after Rickman's engagement. Flossie and Ada were in the drawing-room one half hour before dinner, putting their heads together over a new fashion-book.

"Shouldn't wonder," said Miss Bishop, "if you saw me coming out in one of these Gloriana coats this spring. I shall get a fawn. Fawn's my colour."

"I must say I love blue. I think I'm almost mad about blue; any shade of blue, I don't care what it is. I know I can't go wrong about a colour. But then there's the style--" Flossie's fingers turned over the pages with soft lingering touches, while her face expressed the gravest hesitation. "Keith likes me best in these stiff tailor-made things; but I can't bear them. I like more of a fancy style."

"I see you do," said Miss Bishop solemnly.

"Yes, that's because she's a bit of a fancy article herself," murmured a voice from the back drawing-room, where Mr. Spinks had concealed himself behind a curtain, and now listened with a voluptuous sense of unlawful initiation.

"I sy, we shall have to stop, if he will keep on listening that wy."

"Don't stop, please, Miss Ada. There, I've got my fingers in my ears. On my honour, I have. You can talk as many secrets as you like now. I can't hear a word."

The two girls dropped their voices to a low impassioned monotone.

"You've got to dress for somebody else besides yourself now--an engaged young lady."

"Oh, I don't know that he takes so much notice. But he's given me lots of things, besides my ring. I'm to have a real silver belt--a Russian--next birthday."

"I sy, he's orf'ly good to you, you know. Some gentlemen get so careless once they're sure of you. D'you know, we all think you acted so honourable, giving out your engagement as soon as it was on. When do you think you'll be married?"

"I can't say. I don't know yet. Never, I think, as long as I'm in that old Bank."

Even with his fingers in his ears, young Sidney heard that voice, and before he could stop himself he was listening again.

"Don't you like it?" said Miss Bishop.

"No. I hate it."

Spinks gave a cough; and Miss Bishop began reading to herself in ostentatious silence, till the provocations of the page grew irresistible.

"Look here, Floss," she said excitedly. "Look at me. 'Fawn will be the pree-vyling colour this year, and for morning wear a plain tailor-myde costume in palest fawn is, for 'er who can stand it, most undeniably chic.'" Hitherto Miss Bishop had avoided that word (which she pronounced "chick") whenever she met it; but now, in its thrilling connection with the fawn-coloured costume, it was brought home to her in a peculiarly personal manner, and she pondered. "I wish I knew what that word meant. It's always coming up in my magazine."

"I think," said Flossie, "it means something like smart. Stylish, you know."

Young Sidney leapt suddenly from his seat. "Go it, Flossie! Give us the French for a nice little cup er tea."

"Really, it's too bad we can't have a plyce to ourselves where we can talk. I'm going." And as Miss Bishop went she still pondered Flossie's rendering of the word chic. Little did any of them know what grave issues were to hang on it.

Then Mr. Spinks emerged from his hiding-place. "Miss Walker," he said (he considered it more honourable to call her Miss Walker now whenever he could think of it; only he couldn't always think), "I didn't know you knew the French language."

"And why shouldn't I know it as well as other people?"

"I expect you know it a jolly sight better. Do you think, now, you could read and write it easily?"

"I might," said Flossie guardedly, "if I had a little practice."

"Because, if you could--You say your're tired of the Bank?"

"I should think I was tired of it."

"Well, Flossie, do you know, a good typewriter girl who can read and write French can get twice as much as you're getting."

"How do you know?"

"Girl I know told me so. She's corresponding clerk for a big firm of wine merchants in the City. She's going to be married this autumn; and if you looked sharp, you might get her berth."

"In a wine-merchant's shop? Mr. Rickman wouldn't hear of it."

"It isn't a shop, you know, it's an office. You ask him."

Flossie did not ask him; she knew a trick worth two of that. But not very long after Mr. Spinks had made his suggestion, finding Keith very snug in his study one evening, reading Anatole France, to his immense delight she whispered into his ear a little shy request that some day, when he wasn't busy, he would help her a bit with her French. The lessons were arranged for then and there, at so many kisses an hour, payable by quarterly instalments, if desired. And for several evenings (sitting very close together, as persons must sit who are looking over the same book) they read, translating turn by turn, the delicious Livre de Mon Ami, until Flossie's interest was exhausted.

"Come, I'm not going on with any more of that stuff, so you needn't think it. I've no time to waste, if you have; and I haven't come across one word in that book yet that'll be any use to me."

"What a utilitarian Beaver!" He lay back in his chair laughing at her, as he might have laughed at the fascinating folly of a child.

"I'll tell you what it is, Mr. Savage; I'll get another French master, if you don't look out. Some one who'll teach me the way I want to learn."

"I'll teach you any way you like, Floss, on any system; if you'll only explain what you want. What's your idea?"

"My idea's this. How would it be if you and me were to write French letters to each other?"

"Rather! The Beaver's intelligence is going to its head. That's the way to learn, Floss; you'll get over the ground like winking. But you know--I shall have to raise my terms."

"All right. We'll see about that."

He was delighted with her idea. That Flossie should have an idea at all was something so deliciously new and surprising; and what could be more heartrending than these prodigious intellectual efforts, her evident fear that her limitations constituted a barrier between them? As if it mattered! As if he wanted a literary critic for his wife. And how brutally he had criticized her--as if it mattered! Still, in spite of his compunction, the French lessons were not altogether a success. There was too much disagreement and discussion about terms; for the master became more and more exorbitant in his charges as the days went on, and the pupil still complained that she was learning nothing. She was thoroughly dissatisfied with his method. He would break off at the most interesting, the most instructive point, and let loose his imagination in all sorts of ridiculous histories that followed from the idea of her being a Beaver; and when she desired him to tell her such simple things as the French for "Your esteemed favour to hand," "Cheque enclosed," "We have forwarded to you to-day as per invoice," he wanted to know what on earth a beaver had to do with invoices.

It was Spinks who explained the nature of the connection.

Poor Spinks, who had made the suggestion with an almost suicidally honourable intention, was to his immense astonishment merely sworn at for his interference. And when Flossie brought Keith his tea that evening she found him in a most ungentlemanly humour.

She waited demurely for a pause in the storm that raged round Spinks and his confounded wine-merchant. She cast a significant glance at the table strewn at that moment with the rough draft of Rickman's tragedy. (Flossie couldn't understand why he could never write a thing out clearly from the first, nor why she shouldn't write it for him at his dictation.)

"It's all very well, Keith," said she, "but if you can't do more, I must."

Before she left the room it was understood between them that Flossie would renounce her wine-merchant, and that they would be married, if possible, some time in the autumn. He felt curiously shaken by that interview.

He spent the evening reading over what he had written, vainly trying to recall his inspiration, to kindle himself anew at his own flame. Last night he had had more inspiration than he could do with; his ideas had come upon him with a rush, in a singing torrent of light. His mind had been then almost intolerably luminous; now, there was twilight on its high parts and darkness over the face of its deep. His ideas, arrested in mid-air, had been flung down into the deep; and from the farther shore he caught, as it were, the flutter of a gown and the light laughter of a fugitive Muse.

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Chapter L

One day, four years after the publication of Saturnalia, Rickman received a letter in an unknown hand; a woman's hand, but with a familiar vivid signature, the signature that is to be seen beneath the portraits of Walter Fielding, the greatest among contemporary poets, the living god of Rickman's idolatry.

"Dear Sir," he wrote (or rather, some woman had written for him), "I came across your Poems the other day; by chance, I must confess, and not by choice. I have something to say to you about them, and I would therefore be glad if you could call on me here, to-morrow. I say, call on me; for I am an old man, and you, if I am not mistaken, are a young one; and I say to-morrow, because the day after to-morrow I may not have that desire to see you which I feel to-day.

"Faithfully yours,

"Walter Fielding.

"PS.--You had better come in time for lunch at one o'clock."

Rickman's hand trembled as he answered that letter. All evening he said to himself, "To-morrow I shall see Fielding"; and the beating of his heart kept him awake until the dawn of the wonderful day. And as he dressed he said to himself, "To-day I shall see Fielding." That he should see him was enough. He could hardly bear to think what Fielding had to say to him.

He had risen early, so as to go down into Surrey on his bicycle. About noon he struck into the long golden road that goes straight across the high moor where the great poet had built him a house. Inside his gates, a fork of the road sloped to the shore of a large lake fringed with the crimson heather. The house stood far back on a flat stretch of moor, that looked as if it had been cut with one sweep of a gigantic scythe from the sheltering pine-woods.

He saw Fielding far off, standing at the door of his house to welcome him. Fielding was seventy-five and he looked sixty. A strong straight figure, not over tall nor over slender, wearing, sanely but loosely, the ordinary dress of an English gentleman. A head with strong straight features, masses of white hair that hid the summit of the forehead, a curling moustache and beard, close-clipped, showing the line of the mouth still red as in his youth. A head to be carved in silver or bronze, its edges bitten by time, like the edges of an antique bust or coin.

"So you've come, have you?" was his greeting which the grasp of his hand made friendly.

He took Rickman straight into his study, where a lady sat writing at a table in the window.

"First of all," said he, "I must introduce you to Miss Gurney, who introduced you to me."

Miss Gurney rose and held out a slender feverish hand. She did not smile (her face narrowed so abruptly below her cheekbones that there was hardly room for a smile on it), but her eyes under their thick black brows turned on him an eager gaze.

Her eyes, he thought, were too piercing to be altogether friendly. He wondered whether it was the flame in them that had consumed her face and made it so white and small.

She made a few unremarkable remarks and turned again to her writing table.

"Yes, Gertrude, you may go."

Her sallow nervous hands had already begun gathering up her work in preparation for the word that banished her. When it came she smiled (by some miracle), and went.

They had a little while to wait before luncheon. The poet offered whisky and soda, and could hardly conceal his surprise when it was refused.

"You must forgive me," he said presently, "for never having heard of you till yesterday. My secretary keeps these things from me as a rule. This time she allowed herself to be corrupted."

Rickman felt a sudden interest in Miss Gurney.

"Your poems were sent to her by a friend of hers, with the request--a most improper one--that I should read them. I had no intention of reading them; but I was pleased with the volume at first sight. It was exactly the right length."

"The right length?"

"Yes, small octavo; the very best length for making cigar lighters."

Rickman had heard of the sardonic, the cruel humour with which Fielding scathed his contemporaries; still, he could hardly have expected even him to deal such a violent and devilish blow. Though he flushed with the smart he bore himself bravely under it. After all, it was to see Fielding that he had come.

"I am proud," said he, "to have served so luminous a purpose."

His readiness seemed to have disarmed the formidable Fielding. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the young man a moment or two without speaking. Then the demon stirred in him again with a malignant twinkle of his keen eyes.

"You see I was determined to treat you honourably, as you came to me through a friend of Miss Gurney's. But for her, you would have gone where your contemporaries go--into the waste-paper basket. They serve no purpose--luminous or otherwise." He chuckled ominously. "I had the knife ready for you. But if you want to know why I paused in the deed of destruction, it was because I was fascinated, positively fascinated by the abominations of your illustrator. And so, before I knew what I was doing (or I assure you I would never have done it), I had read, actually read the lines which the creature quotes at the bottom of his foul frontispiece. Why he quoted them I do not know--they have no more to do with his obscenities than I have. And then--I read the poem they were taken from."

He paused. His pauses were deadly.

"You have one great merit in my eyes."

Rickman looked up with a courageous smile, prepared for another double-edged pleasantry more murderous than the last.

"You have not imitated me."

For one horrible moment Rickman was inspired to turn some phrase about the hopelessness of imitating the inimitable. He thought better of it; but not before the old man divined his flattering intention. He shook himself savagely in his chair.

"Don't--please don't say what you were going to say. If you knew how I loathe my imitators. I shouldn't have sent for you if you had been one of them."

His mind seemed to be diverted from his present victim by some voluptuous and iniquitous reminiscence. Then he began again. "But you and your Saturnalia--Ah!"

He leant forward suddenly as he gave out the interjection like a growl.

"Do you know you're a very terrible young man? What do you mean by setting my old cracked heart dancing to those detestable tunes? I wish I'd never read the d----d things."

He threw himself back in his chair.

"No, no; you haven't learnt any of those tunes from me. My Muse wears a straighter and a longer petticoat; and I flatter myself she has the manners of an English gentlewoman."

Rickman blushed painfully this time. He had no reply to make to that.

"I didn't mean," Fielding went on, "to talk to you about your Saturnalia. But On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of Confession--those are great poems."

Rickman looked up, startled out of his self-possession by the unexpected words and the sudden curious vibration in the voice that uttered them. Yet he could hardly realize that Fielding was praising him.

"They moved me," said Fielding, "as nothing moves me now, except the Psalms of David. I have been a great poet, as poets go nowadays; but" (he smiled radiantly) "the painful conviction is forced upon me that you will be a greater--if you live. I wanted to tell you this, because nobody else is likely to find it out until you're dead. You may make up your mind to that, my friend."

"I had made up my mind to many things. But they don't matter--now."

Fielding ignored the compliment. "Has any one found it out? Except yourself?"

"Only one person."

"Man or woman?"

He thought of Maddox, that irresponsible person. "A man. And perhaps he hardly counts."

The old poet gave him a keen glance from his all-knowing eyes.

"There is one other person, who apparently doesn't count, either. Well, I think that was the luncheon-bell."

On their way to the dining-room he remarked: "That's another reason why I sent for you. Because I hear they've not been particularly kind to you. Don't suppose I'm going to pity you for that."

"I don't pity myself, sir."

"No--no--you don't. That's what I like about you," he added, taking his guest by the arm and steering him to his place.

At luncheon Miss Gurney took a prominent part in the conversation, which Rickman for her sake endeavoured to divert from the enthralling subject of himself. But his host (perceiving with evident amusement his modest intention) brought it up again.

"Don't imagine, for a moment," said he, "that Miss Gurney admires you. She hates young poets."

Miss Gurney smiled; but as Rickman saw, more in assent than polite denial. Throughout the meal she had the air of merely tolerating his presence there because it humoured the great man's eccentricity. From time to time she looked at him with an interest in which he detected a certain fear. The fear, he gathered, was lest his coming should disturb, or in any way do harm to the object of her flagrant adoration.

After she had left the table Fielding reproached him for mixing water with his wine.

"In one way," said he, "you're a disappointment. I should have preferred to see you drink your wine like a man."

"Unfortunately," said Rickman, "it's not so easy to drink it like a man, if you've ever drunk it like a beast."

"Ah-h. You're an even more remarkable person than I thought you were," said the poet, rising abruptly from the table.

He proposed that they should take a walk in the garden, or rather on the moor; for the heather ran crimson to the poet's doors, and the young pines stood sentinel at his windows.

They walked slowly towards the lake. On their way there Fielding stopped and drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with the pure, sweet air.

"Ah! that's better." He looked round him. "After all, we're right, Rickman. It's the poets that shall judge the world; and if we say it's beautiful, it is beautiful. And good."

Happy Fielding, thought Rickman. Fielding had never suffered as he had suffered; his dream had never been divorced from reality. It seemed fitting to the younger poet that his god should inhabit these pure and lofty spaces, should walk thus on golden roads through a land of crimson, in an atmosphere of crystal calm. He would have liked to talk to Fielding of Fielding; but his awe restrained him.

Fielding's mind did not wander long from his companion. "Let me see," said he, "do you follow any trade or profession?" He added with a smile, "besides your own?"

"I'm a journalist." Rickman mentioned his connection with The Museion and The Planet.

"Ah, I knew there was an unlucky star somewhere. Well, at any rate, you won't have to turn your Muse on to the streets to get your living. But a trade's better than a profession; and a craft's better than a trade. It doesn't monopolize the higher centres. I certainly had the impression that you had been in trade."

Rickman wondered who could have given it to him. Miss Gurney's friend, he supposed. But who was Miss Gurney's friend? A hope came to him that made his heart stand still. But he answered calmly.

"I was. I worked for two years in a second-hand bookshop as a bibliographical expert; and before that I stood behind the counter most of my time."

"Why did you leave it? You weren't ashamed of your trade?"

"Not of my trade, but of the way I had to follow it. I'm not ashamed of working for Mr. Horace Jewdwine."

He brought the name in awkwardly. In bringing it in at all he had some vague hope that it might lead Fielding to disclose the identity of the friend. Horace Jewdwine was a link; if his name were familiar to Fielding there would be no proof perhaps, but a very strong presumption that what he hoped was true.

"He is a friend of yours?"

"Yes." His hope leapt high; but Fielding dashed it to the ground.

"I never heard of him. I see," he said, "you've got a conscience. Have you also got a wife?"

"Not yet--but--"

"Good. So young a man as you cannot afford to keep both. I am so old that I may be pardoned if I give you some advice. But why should I? You won't take it."

"I should like to hear it all the same, sir."

"Well, well, it's cheap enough. Whatever you do, don't fritter yourself away upon the sort of women it may be your misfortune to have met."

It was beautifully done, this first intimation of his consciousness of any difference between them; between Rickman who had glorified a variety actress, and Walter Fielding whose Muse had "always had the manners of an English gentlewoman." And to Rickman's heart, amid vivid images of Poppies and Flossies, the memory of Lucia Harden stirred like a dividing sword.

"That is my advice," said Fielding. "But you will not take it."

"These things," said Rickman, "are not always in our power."

In the silence which followed he put the question that was burning in him.

"May I ask who the friend was who told Miss Gurney about me?"

"You may ask Miss Gurney; but I do not think she'll tell you. It seems to be a secret, and Miss Gurney, strange to say, is a young woman who can keep a secret."

He led the way to a seat overlooking the lake where they sat for awhile in silence, and Rickman found his thoughts roaming from his god.

Presently Fielding rose and turned back to the house. Rickman felt that the slow footsteps were measuring now the moments that he had to be with him. He was glad that they were slow.

Fielding stopped at his house-door, and stood for a second gazing earnestly at the young man.

"When you write anything," he said, "you may always send it to me. But no more--please--no more Saturnalia."

"There won't be any more Saturnalia."

"Good. I do not ask you to come again to see me."

Rickman struggled for an answer, but could not think of anything better than, "It's enough for me to have seen you once," which was not at all what he had meant to say.

Fielding smiled faintly; his humour pleased, Rickman fancied, with the ambiguity of his shy speech.

"I'm afraid I've tired you, sir," he said impulsively.

"You have not tired me. I tire myself. But here is Miss Gurney; she will look after you and give you tea."

"Geniality," he continued, "is not my strong point, as you may have perceived. And any unnatural effort of the kind fatigues me. My own fault."

"You have been very generous to me."

"Generous? There can't be any generosity between equals. Only a simple act of justice. It is you who have been good to me."

"I? To you?"

"Yes. You have satisfied my curiosity. I own that sometimes I have wanted to know what sort of voice will be singing after I am dead. And now I do know. Good-bye, and thank you."

He pressed his hand, turned abruptly and shuffled into the house. He was noticeably the worse for his walk, and Rickman felt that he had to answer for it to Miss Gurney.

"I'm afraid I've tired him. I hope I haven't done him harm."

Miss Gurney glanced sharply at him, turned, and disappeared through the study window. Her manner implied that if he had harmed Fielding she would make him feel it.

She came back still unsmiling. "No. You have not tired him."

"Then," said he as he followed her into the drawing-room, "I am forgiven?"

"Yes. But I did not say you had not done him harm."

The lady paused in her amenities to pour out his tea.

"Miss Gurney," he said as he took the cup from her, "can you tell me the name of the friend who sent my book to you?"

"No, I'm afraid I cannot."

"I see. After all, I am not forgiven?"

"I am not at all sure that you ought to be."

"I heard what he said to you," she went on almost fiercely. "That's why I hate young poets. He says there is only you to hate."

"So, of course, you hate me?"

"I think I do. I wish I had never heard of you. I wish he had never seen you. I hope you will never come again. I haven't looked at your poems that he praises so. He says they are beautiful. Very well, I shall hate them because they are beautiful. He says they have more life in them than his. Do you understand now why I hate them and you? He was young before you came here. You have made him feel that he is old, that he must die. I don't know what else he said to you. Shall I tell you what he said to me? He said that the world will forget him when it's listening to you."

"You misunderstood him." He thought that he understood her; but it puzzled him that, adoring Fielding as she did, she yet permitted herself to doubt.

"Do you suppose I thought that he grudged you your fame? Because he doesn't. But I do."

"You needn't. At present it only exists in his imagination."

"That's enough. If it exists there--"

"You mean, it will go down the ages?"

She nodded.

"And you don't want it to go?"

"Not unless his goes too, and goes farther."

"You need hardly be afraid."

"I'm not afraid. Only, he has always stood alone, so high that no one has touched him. I've always seen him that way, all my life--and I can't bear to see him any other way. I can't bear any one to touch him, or even to come anywhere near him."

"No one ever will touch him. Whoever comes after him, he will always stand alone. And," he added gently, "you will always see him so."

"Yes," she said, but in a voice that told him she was still unconsoled. "If I had seen him when he was young, I suppose I should always see him young. Not that I care about that so much. His youth is the part of him that interests me least; perhaps because it was never in any way a part of me."

He looked at her. Did she realize how far Fielding's youth, if report spoke truly, had belonged to, or in her own words, "been a part of" other women? Did she resent their part in him? He thought not. It was not so much that she was jealous of Fielding's youth, as that she shrank from any appearance of disloyalty to his age.

"And yet," she said, "I feel that no one has a right to be young when he is old. I hate young poets because they are young. I hate my own youth--"

Her youth? Yes, it was youth that leapt quivering in her tragic face, like a blown flame. Her body hardly counted except as fuel to the eager and incessant fire.

"Don't hate it," he said. "It is the most beautiful thing you have to give him."

"Ah--if I could give it him!"

He smiled. "You have given it him. He isn't old when he can inspire such devotion. He is to be envied."

He rose and held out his hand. As she took it, Miss Gurney's flame-like gaze rested on him a moment and grew soft.

"If you want to know, it was Lucia Harden who sent me your poems," said she. And he knew that for once Miss Gurney had betrayed a secret.

He wondered what had made her change her mind. He wondered whether Lucia had really made a secret of it. He wondered what the secret had to do with Fielding. And wondering he went away, envying him the love that kept its own divine fire burning for him on his hearth.

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Chapter LI

There were times when Rickman, harassed by his engagement, reviewed his literary position with dismay. Of success as men count success, he had none. He was recognized as a poet by perhaps a score of people; to a few hundreds he was a mere name in the literary papers; to the great mass of his fellow-countrymen he was not even a name. He had gone his own way and remained obscure; while his friends, Jewdwine and Maddox, had gone theirs and won for themselves solid reputations. As for Rankin (turned novelist) he had achieved celebrity. They had not been able to impart to him the secret of success. But the recognition and something more than recognition of the veteran poet consoled him for the years of failure, and he felt that he could go through many such on the strength of it.

The incident was so momentous that he was moved to speak of it to Jewdwine and to Maddox. As everything that interested him interested Maddox, he related it to Maddox in full; but with Jewdwine (such was his exceeding delicacy) he observed a certain modest reticence. Still there was no diminution in his engaging candour, his innocent assumption that Jewdwine would be as pleased and excited as Maddox and himself.

"He really seemed," said he, selecting from among Fielding's utterances, "to think the things were great."

Jewdwine raised his eyebrows. "My dear Rickman, I congratulate you." He paused for so long that his next remark, thoughtfully produced, seemed to have no reference to Rickman's communication. "Fielding is getting very old." If Rickman had been in a state of mind to attend carefully to Jewdwine's manner, he might have gathered that the incident had caused him some uneasiness.

It had indeed provided the editor of The Museion with much matter for disagreeable thought. As it happened (after months of grave deliberation), he had lately had occasion to form a very definite opinion as to the value of Rickman the journalist. He knew that Rickman the journalist had no more deadly enemy than Rickman the poet; and at that particular moment he did not greatly care to be reminded of his existence. Jewdwine's attitude to Rickman and his confidences was the result of a change in the attitude of The Museion and its proprietors. The Museion was on the eve of a revolution, and to Jewdwine as its editor Rickman the journalist had suddenly become invaluable.

The revolution itself was not altogether sudden. For many months the behaviour of The Museion had been a spectacle of great joy to the young men of its contemporary, The Planet. The spirit of competition had latterly seized upon that most severely academic of reviews, and it was now making desperate efforts to be popular. It was as if a middle-aged and absent-minded don, suddenly alive to the existence of athletic sports in his neighbourhood, should insist on entering himself for all the events, clothed, uniquely, if inappropriately, in cap and gown. He would be a very moving figure in the eyes of hilarious and immortal youth. And such a figure did The Museion in its latter days present. But the proprietors were going to change all that. The Museion was about to be withdrawn from circulation and reissued in a new form under the new title of Metropolis. As if aware of the shocking incongruity it was going to fling off its cap and gown. Whatever its staying power might be, its spirit and its outward appearance should henceforth in no way differ from those of other competitors in the race for money and position.

While the details of the change were being planned in the offices of The Museion, the burning question for the proprietors was this: would their editor, their great, their unique and lonely editor, be prepared to go with them? Or would he (and with him his brilliant and enthusiastic staff) insist on standing by the principles that had been the glory of the paper and its ruin? Mr. Jewdwine had shown himself fairly amenable so far, but would he be any use to them when it really came to the point?

To Jewdwine that point was the turning-point in his career. He had had to put that burning question to himself. Was he, after all, prepared to stand by his principles? It was pretty certain that if he did, his principles would not stand by him. Was there anything in them that would stand at all against the brutal pressure that was moulding literature at the present hour? No organ of philosophic criticism could (at the present hour) exist, unless created and maintained by Jewdwine single-handed and at vast expense. His position was becoming more unique and more lonely every day, quite intolerably lonely and unique. For Jewdwine after all was human. He longed for eminence, but not for such eminence as meant isolation. Isolation is not powerful; and even more than for eminence he longed for power. He longed for it with the passion of a weak will governed despotically by a strong intellect. It amounted to a positive obsession, the tyranny of a cold and sane idea. He knew perfectly well now what his position as editor of The Museion was worth. Compared with that great, that noble but solitary person, even Maddox had more power. But the editor of Metropolis, by a few trifling concessions to the spirit of modernity, would in a very short time carry all before him. He must then either run with the race or drop out of it altogether; and between these two courses, Jewdwine, with all his genius for hesitation, could not waver. After much deliberation he had consented (not without some show of condescension) to give his name and leadership to Metropolis; and he reaped the reward of his plasticity in a substantial addition to his income.

This great change in the organization of the review called for certain corresponding changes in its staff. And it was here that Rickman came in. He had been retained on The Museion partly in recognition of his brilliance, partly by way of satisfying the claims of Jewdwine's magnanimity. On The Museion he had not proved plastic either as sub-editor or as contributor. He did not fit in well with the traditions of the paper; for he was, to Jewdwine, modernity incarnate, the living spirit of revolt, to be bound down with difficulty by the editorial hand. Looking back on the record of the past four years Jewdwine marvelled how and why it was that he had kept him. A score of times he had been tempted to dismiss him after some fresh enormity; and a score of times Rickman had endeared himself by the seductive graces of his style. But Rickman on the staff of Metropolis was, Jewdwine considered, Rickman in the right place. Not only could he now be allowed to let loose his joyous individuality without prejudice to the principles of that paper (for the paper strictly speaking would have no principles), but he was indispensable if it was to preserve the distinction which its editor still desired. Jewdwine had no need of the poet; but of the journalistic side of Rickman he had endless need. It was a baser faculty, but his care must be to develop it, to train it, to handle it judiciously, until by handling he had made it pliable to all the uses of his paper. Jewdwine had a genius for licking young men into shape. He could hardly recognize that band of awkward and enthusiastic followers in his present highly disciplined and meritorious staff. None of them were like Rickman; none of them had done anything to rouse an uneasy suspicion of their genius. Still, none of them were precisely fitted for his present purpose. Rickman the poet, of course, you could not lick into shape. His shape, plastic only under the divine fire, was fashioned by the fingers of the god. But Rickman the journalist, once get him on to the right journal, would prove to be made of less unmanageable stuff. If he had not hitherto proved manageable, that was no doubt because hitherto he had been employed on the wrong journal.

And yet, when he came to discuss the change of programme with the different members of his staff (some of whom he was giving their dismissal), it was with Rickman (whom he proposed to retain) that he felt the most acute embarrassment. Rickman, although at the moment dining with Jewdwine, was so abominably direct.

"I see," he said, after listening to a lengthy exposition of the proprietors' view; "they want to popularize the thing."

Jewdwine winced perceptibly. "Well, hardly," said he. "In that case they would have been obliged to change their editor. We certainly want to draw a rather larger public than we have done; and to do that we must make some concessions to modernity. There's no doubt that the paper's interests have suffered from its tradition. We have been too exclusive, too detached. We can no longer afford to be detached. We propose to abandon the tradition in favour of--well--of a somewhat broader attitude." He looked keenly at Rickman, as if he defied him to put it any other way.

"I see. We've either got to take a more genial view of our contemporaries--or scoot."

"You may put it that way if you like. It simply means that if we are to appeal to a wider public, we must take a wider view. It's surely in the interests of the public, and of literature, that we should not narrow the influence of the paper any more than we can help. Not make the best criticism inaccessible." He continued to take the lofty and the noble view. The habit was inveterate. But his last remark started him on the way of self-justification. "Of course I couldn't go on with the paper if I hadn't come to see this for myself. The fact is, you cannot run a leading review on abstract principles."

Rickman forbore to smile at the fulfilment of his prophecy. Jewdwine's "Absolute" had been obliged to "climb down."

"Not," said Jewdwine, "if that review is really to lead public opinion."

"And certainly not," said Rickman, "if public opinion is to lead the review."

"In either case," said Jewdwine nobly, "the principles remain."

"Only they're not applied?"

"They are not applied, because there is nothing to apply them to. In the present state of literature a review like The Museion has no reason for its existence."

"I don't know. It was a very useful protest against some forms of modernity."

"My dear fellow, modernity simply means democracy. And when once democracy has been forced on us there's no good protesting any longer."

"All the same, you'll go on protesting, you know."

"As a harmless private person, yes. As a critic I must accept a certain amount of defeat at the hands of the majority."

"But you don't happen to believe in the majority?"

"I do believe in it," said he, bitterly. "I believe that it has destroyed criticism by destroying literature. A critic only exists through the existence of great men. And there are no great men nowadays; only a great number of little men."

"I see. Othello's occupation's gone."

"Not at all. Othello's occupation's only beginning. You can't criticize these people, but you must review them. And I assure you it means far more labour and a finer discrimination to pick out your little man from a crowd of little men than to recognize your great man when you see him."

"When you see him--"

"Ah yes--when I see him. But where is he? Show me," said Jewdwine, "one work of unmistakable genius published any time in the last five, the last ten years."

Rickman looked at him and said nothing. And to Jewdwine his silence was singularly uncomfortable. He would have been more uneasy still but for his conviction that the serenity in Rickman's eyes was reflected from the eyes of Fielding. Rickman, he thought, was rather too obviously elated at the great man's praise; and the exhibition of elation was unpleasant to him. Worse than all, he realized that Rickman, in spite of his serenity, was hurt. On the top of that came a miserable misgiving as to the worthiness of his own attitude to his friend.

As for Rickman, he had no feeling that he could have put into words, beyond owning in his heart that he was hurt. He had never before had any occasion for such a confession; he felt it to be humiliating both to Jewdwine and himself. Sometimes, in moments of depression he had suspected that it was Jewdwine's coldness that preserved his incorruptibility; but he had so sincere a desire for purity in their relations, that he had submitted without resentment to the freezing process that ensured it. He had in reserve his expectation of the day when, by some superlative achievement, he would take that soul, hitherto invincible, by storm. But now, in his inmost heart he owned that he was hurt.

Jewdwine changed the subject.

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Chapter LII

When Jewdwine changed the subject, it was to intimate that his friend might now expect a salary rising steadily with the fortunes of Metropolis.

That promise to marry Flossie in the autumn had made Rickman very uneasy on this head. The sources of his income had been hitherto uncertain; for The Planet might at any moment cease to be, and only indomitable hope could say that The Museion would be long for this world.

The amount of his income, too, depended on conditions which were, to some extent, beyond his own control. It had never sunk below a hundred and fifty, and had never risen above three hundred, even in the years when he wrote more articles than poems. Whereas, if he wrote more poems than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the transformation of The Museion. It certainly promised him a larger and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage in the autumn. It had been expressly understood that his promise to Flossie was to be fulfilled only if possible. But meanwhile he had got to make it possible, for Flossie (in spite of her promise) kept the terror of her wine-merchant perpetually dangling above his head. He had visited Messrs. Vassell & Hawkins' detestable establishment; and it made him shudder to think of his pretty Beaver shut up in a little mahogany cage, with her bright eyes peeping sad and shy through the brass netting, and her dear little nostrils sniffing the villainous alcoholic air.

But as the time approached and their marriage grew every day more certain and more near, the joy and excitement of the bridegroom were mingled with an inexplicable terror and misgiving. He had been disagreeably impressed by the manner of Flossie's insistence on his poverty. He had not missed the fine contempt conveyed by all her references to his profession, which she not unjustly regarded as the cause of the poverty. He was well aware that his genius was a heavy burden for so small a thing to bear; and his chivalry had determined that it should lie lightly on her lest it should crush or injure her. It was part of her engaging innocence that she knew nothing of the world in which his supremacy began and hers ended, that she had not even suspected its existence. If he had any illusions about her it was his own mind that created and controlled them. He delighted in them deliberately, as in a thing of his creating; seeing through them with that extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the more. Flossie's weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him. As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way affecting him as a poet and a man of letters. While the little suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire. For those two flames could never mingle. In that dream he saw himself travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never touched and never diverged; a feat only possible given two Rickmans, not one Rickman. There used to be many more of him; it was something that he had reduced the quantity to two. And in dreams nothing is absurd, nothing impossible.

Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited. At first it had been only a simple question of time and space. Not that Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him plenty of time for the everyday work that paid. But where was that divine solitude? Where were those long days of nebulous conception? Where the days when he removed himself, as it were, and watched his full-orbed creations careering in the intellectual void? The days when Keith Rickman was as a god? He was hardly aware how fast they were vanishing already; and where would they be in two months' time? It was on his tragedy that he based his hopes for his future; the future, in which Flossie had no part. He knew that the plea of art sounded weak before the inexorable claims of nature; he felt that something ought to be sacrificed to the supreme passion; but he couldn't give up his tragedy. He was consumed by two indomitable passions; and who was to say which of them was supreme? Still, tragedies in blank verse were a luxury; and Flossie had more than once pointed out to him he couldn't afford luxuries. He would sit up working on the tragedy till long past midnight; and when he woke in the morning his sense of guilt could not have been greater if he had been indulging in the most hateful orgies. But you can't burn even genius at both ends; and his paying work began to suffer. Jewdwine complained that it was not up to his usual level. Maddox had returned several articles. So at last he stuffed his tragedy into a drawer to wait there for a diviner hour. "That would have been a big expensive job," he said to himself. "I suppose it's possible to put as good work into the little things that pay; but I shall have to cut myself in pieces." That was what he was doing now; changing his gold into copper as fast as he could, so many pennies for one sovereign. Nobody was cheated. He knew that in his talent (his mere journalistic talent) there was a genius that no amount of journalism had as yet subdued. But he had an awful vision of the future, when he saw himself swallowed up body and soul in journalism. The gods were dead; but there were still men and columns.

That would be the inevitable surrender to reality. To have no part in the triumph of the poetic legions; but to march with the rank and file, to a detestable music not his own; a mere mercenary ingloriously fighting in a foreign cause.

To Jewdwine, Jewdwine once incorruptible, it seemed that Rickman was preparing himself very suitably for the new campaign. But Maddox mourned as he returned those articles; and when he heard of the approaching marriage which explained them he was frantic. He rushed up on Sunday afternoon, and marched Rickman out into the suburbs and on to a lonely place on Hampstead Heath. And there, for the space of one hour, with his arm linked in Rickman's, he wrestled with Rickman for his body and his soul. Jewdwine's cry had been, "Beware of the friendship of little men"; the burden of Maddox was, "Beware of the love of little women."

"That's all you know about it, Maddy. The love of great women absorbs you, dominates you. The little women leave you free."

Maddox groaned.

"A fat lot of freedom you'll get, Ricky, when you're married." Rickman looked straight before him to the deep blue hills of the west, as if freedom lay on the other side of them. "Good God," he said, "what am I to do? I must marry. I can't go back to Poppy Grace, and her sort."

"If that's all," said Maddox, "I don't see much difference. Except that marriage is worse. It lasts longer." Whereupon Rickman blushed, and said that wasn't all, and that Maddox was a brute. He would change his opinion when he knew Miss Walker.

Before very long he had an opportunity of changing it.

Rickman had been in error when he told Flossie that if she would consent to marry him he would never again be ill. For he was ill the first week in September, not two years after he had made that ill-considered statement. The Fielding episode, when the first fine stimulus was over, had left him miserable and restless. It was as if he had heard the sound of Lucia Harden's voice passing through the immeasurable darkness that divided them. And now he seemed to be suffering from something not unlike the nervous fever that had attacked him once before at Harmouth; complicated, this time, by a severe cold on the chest, caught by walking about through pouring rain in great agony of mind.

For Flossie (who may have felt latterly that she had chanced upon another season of depression in her woman's trade) that illness was a piece of amazing good luck, coming as it did at the moment of Keith's misgivings. It not only drew them together, just as they were drifting insensibly apart, but it revealed them to each other in a tenderer and serener light. There was a little hard spot in Flossie which was impervious to the subtler charm of Rickman when he was well. But Rickman ill and at her mercy, confined to the bed where (so long as Flossie waited on him) he lay very quietly, with the sheet drawn tight up to his chin, in a state of touching dependence and humiliation, was a wholly different person from the stormy and incomprehensible Rickman who for more than two years had struggled so madly in her toils. And if, to the eye of Mrs. Downey, Flossie appeared untouched by the really heartrending pathos of his attitude in sleep; beholding unmoved his huddled boyish form under the blankets, one half-naked arm laid slack along the bed, the other thrust out straight into the cold outside it; if she left Mrs. Downey to cover the poor fellow up, wondering why on earth the girl could sit there and never do it; if, when he woke, she missed the extreme poignancy of appeal in the murmurs that followed her as she went Beaver-like about her business in the room, it may be that in that unaccustomed service the hidden prescient motherhood in her was awakened and appeased (Flossie being still under the dominion of her dream). As yet it struggled blindly with her invincible propriety; a struggle poor Rickman was made aware of by the half-averted manner of her approaches, the secrecy and hesitation of her touch. But the little clerk undoubtedly found that patting pillows, straightening coverlets, and making mustard plasters, was an employment more satisfying to her nature than the perpetual handling of bank notes. And to Rickman lying there with his hungry heart filled for the time quite full with its own humility and gratitude, lying in a helplessness that had in it something soothing and agreeable, feeling the soft shy woman's hands about his bed, following with affectionate, remorseful eyes her coming and going, or watching as she sat patiently mending his socks, it came with the freshness of a new discovery that she was, after all, a very engaging little Beaver. He had never for one instant glorified his love for her; he understood it too thoroughly. It was love as Nature loves to have it; honest enough, too, but of its kind singularly devoid of any inspiring quality. Flossie had never moved him to the making of sonnets or of songs. Moreover, he had discovered in her a certain lack of tenderness, or of the outward signs of tenderness. Not but what Flossie commanded all the foolish endearing language of young love; only she was apt to lavish it on little details of attire, on furniture, on things seen in shop-windows and passionately desired. But there was something very transfiguring in the firelight of his bedroom hearth. As he lay in it, enjoying the pure sweet foretaste of domestic felicity, it was as if he saw more clearly into himself and her and the life that would so soon make them one. If it was not the best life, he told himself that of its kind it would be very good. He had no doubt now that Flossie loved him. He was led to this certainty by the maternal quality in her present dealings with him, when perhaps it should have warned him rather that these cares were not for him.

Flossie had somewhat elaborated her dream. Bearing the fascinating name of Muriel Maud, it had grown softer and rosier than ever. She could not any longer deny its mysterious association with Keith Rickman, though she would have died rather than that Keith should have suspected it. And now as she sat mending Keith's socks her fancy all the time was busy fashioning delicious garments for her dream. Flossie never pursued her vision of Muriel Maud beyond the period of enchanting infancy; when it outgrew the tender folly of those garments, it was dismissed from Flossie's fancy with unmaternal harshness. Therefore it appeared eternally innocent and young, mortal in a delicate immortality. In fact, viewing her life too in the light of the bedroom firelight, Flossie was herself deceived.

They were both blissfully unaware that Nature cares nothing about love, but was bent upon using them for the only end she does care about, the end that gives to love the illusion of its own eternity.

But Maddox saw through it in a minute. It was in the earlier stages of the poet's illness, and Maddox had happened to put his head into Rickman's room at the moment when Flossie, compelled by Mrs. Downey, was helping to put a stinging mustard plaster on his chest. They shrieked, and Maddox instantly withdrew.

He painted the scene afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic colours of his Celtic fancy. "Talk of Samson among the Philistines, it's nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d----d boarding-house. There was a woman on each side of his bed. They'd got him down on it; they were pinning the poor little chap in his blankets. I could just see Ricky-ticky's face between their shoulders; it was very red; and I shall never forget the expression on it, never. The agony, Rankin, the hopeless, unutterable agony."

"What were they doing to him?"

"I couldn't see properly. But I think they were cutting his hair off."

He declared later that he had distinctly heard the squeaking of that young Delilah's scissors. "We're not told whether Delilah was Samson's wife," said he. "But the Scriptures were never wrong on a point of human nature."

At which Rankin looked depressed; for he too was thinking of getting married; though, as Maddox reminded him for his comfort, not to Miss Flossie Walker.

"Is our Ricky-ticky," urged Rankin, "the man to show wisdom in choosing a wife?"

"He isn't the man to marry at all."

"Did you expect him to live like an anchorite, then?"

"I didn't expect anything. He might have lived as he liked, provided he didn't ruin himself as he's doing now."

And though Maddox now saw that young Delilah frequently, and always at her prettiest and her best, he did not change his opinion.

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Chapter LIII

It was now the third week in September, and the wedding was fixed for the twenty-fifth of October. Everything was fixed, even Flossie's ideas on the subject of her trousseau. There never was a little woman so unwavering in her choice of such things as clothes and furniture. To be married in ivory white, and to go away in powder blue; to have a drawing-room furnished in imitation rosewood and tapestry, and a dining-room in stamped velvet and black oak (imitation, too), had been Flossie's firm determination from the first. It saves endless time and contention when a young woman so absolutely knows her own mind.

Not but what she required approval and support in her decisions; otherwise she would have been hardly recognizable as a young woman. And for Rickman to go shopping with the Beaver in Tottenham Court Road, to follow her undeviating course through the furniture galleries, to note the infallible instinct by which she made for and seized upon the objects of her choice, to see the austerity with which she resisted the seductions of the salesman who sought to entangle her with a more expensive article, the calmness of her mind in dealing with the most intricate problems of measurement and price, was to be led a helpless captive in a triumph of practical ability. Ability, good Lord! was there ever anything like Flossie's grasp of all facts that can be expressed in figures? His brain reeled before the terrifying velocity of her mental arithmetic. What a little woman it was to do sums in the top of its head!

Not that she dragged him on the chain for ever. There were idyllic resting-places, delicious, thrilling pauses in her progress; when she tried every chair in succession in the drawing-room suite; when she settled herself in the tapestry one, before the little rosewood tea-table (spread, for the heightening of the illusion, with a tea-service all complete); when she pretended to pour out tea, smiling over the tea-pot in the prettiest delight. With such a smile she would welcome him, with such a smile she would pour out his tea when he came back from Fleet Street to the home that was to be. (It did not occur to him that at the moment Flossie was only smiling at the tea-pot.) Though he stood aloof from the anticipatory scene, as he looked at her he grew positively weak with tenderness. In everything Flossie had her way. When they climbed (as they inevitably did) to the upper galleries he indeed offered some show of resistance when she insisted on choosing a terrible bedstead of brass with mother-o'-pearl ornaments. But to do him justice, it was sheer nervous terror which prompted the brutal remark that, "Really, mother-o'-pearl ornaments were more than he could stand"; for he melted and gave in at once at the sight of Flossie feeling the rosy down coverlet with her little hands. When their eyes met, Flossie's face was as rosy as the coverlet; so that the attendant spirit of commerce himself turned from them abashed. That there would, that there must be, such a moment Keith had had a horrible foreboding as he followed up the stairs.

Nobody could have been more happy than Flossie following the dream in Tottenham Court Road; and Rickman was happy because she was. Happy for a whole fortnight; and then for the first time they quarrelled.

And this was how it happened. They were going to live at Ealing; not because they liked it, but because the neighbourhood was cheap. Flossie had said, "When we're rich, we'll go to Kensington"; and he had answered with an odious flippancy, "Yes, and when we die we'll go to heaven"; but for the present, Flossie (wise Flossie who loved economy even more than Kensington) was content with Ealing. That she was obliged to be content with it made her feel, naturally, that she was entitled to gratification on every other point. It was not over Ealing, then, that they quarrelled, but over the choosing of the house. Flossie was all for a gay little brand-new, red-brick villa, with nice clean white paint about it, only two minutes from the tram; he for a little old-fashioned brown-brick house with jasmine all over it, and a garden all grass and lilac bushes at the back. He said the garden would be nice to sit in. She said, what was the good of sitting in a garden when you had to walk ever so far to the tram? He retorted that walking was a reason for sitting; and she that if it came to that they could sit in the house. She wouldn't hear of the old brown house, nor he of the brand-new villa. He was peculiarly sensitive to his surroundings.

"The villa," said he, "is a detestable little den."

"It isn't," said she, "it's got a lovely bay window in the drawing room, and a dear little balcony on the top."

"But there isn't a quiet place in it, dear, where I could write."

"Oh, that's all you're thinking of--"

"Well, there isn't, really. Whereas here" (they were going now through the little brown house), "there's a jolly big room at the back, where you can see miles away over the fields towards Harrow."

"Oh, you've got time to look out of the window, have you, though you are so busy?"

"Never mind the window, let's look at the house. What's wrong with it?"

"What's wrong with the house? It won't suit the furniture, that's what's wrong with it."

"You mean the furniture won't suit it?"

"The furniture's chosen and the house isn't. There's no good going back on that."

"Look here, this is the room I meant." They had climbed to the top of the little brown house, and Flossie had hardly condescended to glance through the doors he had opened on their way. He opened one now at the head of the stairs, and this time she looked in.

"It would make all the difference to me, Floss," he said humbly, "if I had a place like this when I want to get away to write."

"When you want to get away from me, you mean." Her lips shook; she looked round her with angry eyes, as if jealous of the place, and all that he meant to do in it.

It was a large room, with a wide window looking on to the garden and away across meadows and cornfields to Harrow Hill with its thin church spire. The window was guarded with iron bars. The wall-paper was designed in little circles; and in each circle there were figures of little boys and girls, absurd and gay. So many hundreds of little figures, and so absurd and gay, that to sit in that room surrounded by them, to look at them and endeavour to count them, was to go mad. But those figures fascinated Flossie.

"Oh, Lord, what a beastly wall-paper," said he.

"I think it's sweet," said she. And though she wasn't going to let him have the house, she was ready to quarrel with him again about the wall-paper. And then, in the corner by the window they came upon a child's toy, a little wooden horse, broken. He pointed it out to her, half-smiling. "Some kiddy must have left that there."

"Of course," said she, "it's been a nursery. And, I say, Keith, I think it must have died."

"How do you make that out?"

"It couldn't have been long here. Don't you see, the wall-paper's all new." (He thought that was rather sharp of her, the practical Beaver!) "And yet," she said continuing her train of induction; "it couldn't. If it had, they'd never have left that here."

Ah, that was not sharp; it was something better. There was, after all, about his Beaver a certain poetry and tenderness.

She picked up the little wooden horse, and held it in her hands, and adjusted its loosened mane, and mended its broken legs, fitting the edges delicately with her clever fingers. And it seemed to him that as she bent over the toy her face grew soft again. When she lifted her head her eyes rested on him, but without seeing him. Never had Flossie had so poignant a vision of Muriel Maud.

He looked at her with a new wonder in his heart. For the first time he was made aware of the change that two years had worked in her. She had grown, he thought, finer in growing firmer; her body in its maturity was acquiring a strength and richness that had been wanting in its youth; as if through that time of waiting it were being fashioned for the end it waited for. But that was not all. She had clothed herself unconsciously with poetry. She stood for a moment transfigured before him; a woman with sweet eyes beholding her desired destiny from far. Her soul (for a moment) rose in her face like a star--a dim prophetic star that trembled between darkness and dawn. He knew that she saw herself now as the possible mother of his children.

The anger and the jealousy were over; and all of a sudden she gave in.

"You can have the house, if you like, Keith."

"All right; I do like it. That's a dear little Beaver."

As he approached her her glance fled. "I didn't say you could have the room. I want to keep it empty."

He put his arm round her and led her to the window. "What do you want to keep it empty for, Flossie?"

Her poor little thoughts, surprised and dismayed, went scurrying hither and thither, trying to hide their trail.

"Oh," she said, still looking away from him. "To store things in." He drew her closer to him and kissed her tenderly.

It seemed to him that a serene and happy light rested on the garden, on the empty house, and on the empty room that she had peopled already with her innocent dream. It seemed to him that in that remote gaze of her woman's eyes, abstracted from her lover, unconsciously desirous of the end beyond desire, he saw revealed the mystery, the sanctity, the purity of wedded love. And seeing it he forgave her that momentary abstraction.

But the Beaver never dreamed; she was far too practical. She was building, that was all.

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Chapter LIV

That evening as they sat down to dinner, it might have been noticed that Mrs Downey's face was more flushed and festal than it had been since the day was fixed for Mr. Rickman's wedding and departure. She seated herself expansively, with a gay rustling of many frills, and smiled well pleased upon the arrangements of her table. From these signs it was evident that Mrs. Downey was expecting another boarder, a boarder of whom she had reason to be proud. Rickman noticed with dismay that the stranger's place was laid beside his own. He knew them so well, these eternal, restless birds of passage, draggled with their flight from one boarding-house to another. The only tolerable thing about them was that, being here to-day, they were gone to-morrow.

The new boarder was late, culpably late. But Mrs. Downey was proud of that too, as arguing that the poor bird of passage had stayed to smooth her ruffled plumage. Mrs. Downey approved of all persons who thus voluntarily acknowledged the high ceremonial character of the Dinner. She was glad that Mr. Rickman would appear to-night in full evening dress, to rush away in the middle of the meal, a splendour the more glorious, being brief. She was waiting for the delightful moment when she would explain to the visitor that the gentleman who had just left the room was Mr. Rickman, "the reviewer and dramatic critic." She would say it, as she had said it many times before, with the easy accomplished smile of the hostess familiar with celebrity.

But that moment never came. The very anticipation of it was lost in the thrill of the visitor's belated entrance. Yet nothing could have been quieter than the manner of it. She (for it was a lady) came into the room as if she had lived at Mrs. Downey's all her life, and knew her way already from the doorway to her chair. When she said, "I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I'm rather late," she seemed to be taking for granted their recognition of a familiar personal characteristic. Perhaps it was because she was so tall that her voice sounded like music dropped downward from a height.

There was a stir, a movement down each side of the table; it was subtle, like the flutter of light and wind, and sympathetic, answering to her footfall and the flowing rhythm of her gown. As it passed, Mrs. Downey's face became if possible more luminous, Miss Bramble's figure if possible more erect. A feeble flame flickered in Mr. Partridge's cheeks; Mr. Soper began feeling nervously in his pocket for the box of bon-bons, his talisman of success; while Mr. Spinks appeared as if endeavouring to assume a mental attitude not properly his own. Miss Bishop searched, double-chinned, for any crumbs that might have lodged in the bosom of her blouse; and Flossie, oh, Flossie became more demure, more correct, more absolutely the model of all propriety. Each was so occupied with his or herself that no one noticed the very remarkable behaviour of Mr. Rickman. He rose to his feet. He turned his back on Flossie. There was a look on his face as of a man seized with sudden terror, and about to fly.

In turning he found himself face to face with Lucia Harden.

He had the presence of mind to stand back and draw her chair from the table for her; so that his action appeared the natural movement of politeness.

Though she held out her hand by an instinct of recognition, there was a perceptible pause before she spoke. He had known that it was she before he saw her. She had to look at him twice to make quite sure.

And then, being sure, she smiled; not the slow, cold smile of politeness that dies downwards on the lips, but the swift smile of pleasure that leaps to the eyes and forehead.

"Mr. Rickman--? I think I should have known you anywhere else; but I didn't expect to meet you here."

He looked at her courageously.

And as he looked there fell from him the past five years, the long estranging years of bitterness and misery and vain desire, and the years, still more estranging, of his madness and his folly; and not the thinnest phantom shadow of time divided him from the days of Harmouth, That moment of recognition annihilated all between; a lustre of his life swept away in one sweep of her eyelids, dropped fathom deep and forgotten in the gaze of her pure and tender eyes. It was not the Lucia of their last meeting; the tragic and terrible Lucia who had been so divided from him by her suffering and her grief. As she had appeared to him on that evening, the last of his brief, incredible happiness, when he sat with her alone in the drawing-room at Court House, and she had declared her belief in him, so she appeared to him now. The unforgettable movements of her face, the sweet curve of her mouth (the upper lip so soft and fine that it seemed to quiver delicately with the rhythm of her pulses and her breath), the turn of her head, the lifting of her eyebrows, told him that she had kept no memory of his part in the things that had happened after that.

And he too forgot. With Lucia sitting at his right hand, he forgot the woman sitting at his left; he forgot the house of bondage, and he forgot that other house where the wedding chamber yet waited for the bride.

"I should have known you anywhere." His eyes dropped and he said no more.

That act of recognition had only lasted a second; but it had made its mark. Over the dim, fluttering table was the hush of a profound astonishment. He neither saw nor felt it; nor did he hear Mrs. Downey scattering the silence with agitated apologies.

"You'll excuse us beginning, Miss Harden; but it's Mr. Rickman's night at the theatre."

Miss Harden looked at him again, lifting her eyebrows with that air of interested inquiry that he knew so well. And yet, beyond those first half dozen words he said nothing.

"Silly boy," said Mrs. Downey to herself, "why can't he say he's sorry he has to go. I'm sure I gave him his opportunity." She was annoyed at his rudeness.

Whether he were sorry or not, he went at his appointed time. He never knew how he got out of the room, nor how he had behaved before going. He had simply looked at her, held her hand and left her. And he had not said a word; or none at least that he could remember.

Miss Harden was, it seemed, the guest, or the ostensible guest, of Miss Roots. And Miss Roots enjoyed herself, delighting openly in the recovery of the friend she had lost sight of for so many years. But from Mrs. Downey's point of view the Dinner that night was not exactly a success. Mr. Rickman had behaved in an extraordinary manner. Mr. Soper and Miss Bishop had never looked so--well, so out of place and common. And she could see that Mr. Spinks had taken advantage of the general consternation to help himself outrageously to ginger.

Lucia took her friend aside when it was over. "You might have told me he was here," said she.

"My dear, I didn't know you knew him."

"Then, did he never--" Whatever Lucia was going to say she thought better of it.

She did not see him till the next night, after dinner, when he came to her as she was sitting in a corner of the back drawing-room alone. And as he came, she looked at him with a curiously intent yet baffled gaze, as if trying to fit a present impression to one past. And yet she could hardly have had any difficulty in recognizing him; for his face was unforgettable, unique; but she missed something in it which used to be familiar. And now she saw that what she had missed was the restless look of youth; the sensuous eagerness that had helped to make it so irregular. It had settled into the other look that she had found there more rarely; the look that strengthened and refined the mobile features, and brought them into harmony with the clean prominent lines of the chin and of the serious level brows. Of all his looks it was the one that she used to like best.

"So you've come back again?" he said.

"But I never was away."

"I thought you were abroad?"

"Who told you that?"

"I don't know. I suppose I must have dreamt it."

"I think you must. I've been in town for the last six weeks."

"In town?"

"Yes, if Hampstead's town. I've been staying with the Jewdwines. Didn't he tell you?"

"No, he never told me anything."

She was silent for a moment. "So that's why you never came to see me."

"To see you? I didn't know--and if I had I shouldn't have thought--" He hesitated.

"Of what? Of coming to see me?"

"No, that you would have cared for me to come."

"I think that's not a thing you ought to say. Of course I cared."

"Well, but I couldn't take that for granted, could I?"

"Couldn't you? Not after the messages I sent you?"

"But I never got any messages."

"Didn't you?" Her upper lip quivered; it was as if she winced at some thought that struck her like a blow. "Then my cousin must have forgotten to give them to you. Just like him; he is shockingly careless."

Now Rickman knew it was not just like him; Jewdwine was not careless, he was in all things painfully meticulous; and he never forgot.

"I don't think I can forgive him for that."

"You must forgive him. He is overwhelmed with work. And he isn't really as thoughtless as you might suppose. He has given me news of you regularly. You can't think how glad I was to hear you were getting on so well. As for the latest news of all--" She lifted her face and looked at him with her sweet kind eyes. "It is true that you are going to be married?"

"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 beatitude 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 assurance which, if he had only listened intelligently, they might have had for him; the assurance 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 passionately 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.

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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 passed.

"One hardly likes to think of her, you know, sitting in the same room with Soper."

"We all have to put up with Mr. Soper."

"Yes; but if she isn't strong, she ought to have some place where she can be alone and rest. Besides, it'll be nicer for you. You'll see a great deal more of her, you know, that way."

In the end the offer was accepted. For, as Miss Roots pointed out to her friend, it would give him far more pleasure to lend his room than to sit in it himself.

Certainly it gave him pleasure, a thrilling, subtle, and perfidious pleasure, every time that he thought of Lucia occupying his room. But before she could be allowed to enter, he caused it to be thoroughly cleansed, and purified as far as possible from the tobacco smoke that lingered in the curtains and the armchairs. He tidied it up with his own hands, removing or concealing the unlovelier signs of his presence and profession. He bought several cushions (silk and down) for the sofa, and a curtain for the door to keep out the draught, and a soft rug for Lucia's feet; also a tea-table, a brass kettle and a spirit lamp, and flowers in an expensive pot. He did things to them to make them look as if they had been some little time in use. He caused a wrinkle to appear in the smooth blue cheeks of the sofa cushions. He rubbed some of the youth off the edges of the tea-table. He made the brass kettle dance lightly on the floor, until, without injury to its essential beauty, it had acquired a look of experience. It was the deceit involved in these proceedings that gave him the first clear consciousness of guilt. He persuaded himself that all these articles would come in nicely for the little house at Ealing, then remembered that he had provided most of them already.

In doubt as to the propriety of these preparations, he again approached Miss Roots. "I say," said he, "you needn't tell her all these things are mine. I'm going to leave them here in case she wants to stay on afterwards. She won't have to pay so much then, you know." He hesitated. "Do you think that's a thing that can be done?"

"Oh yes, it can be done," she replied with an unmistakable emphasis.

"But I mayn't do it? Mayn't I? It's all right if she doesn't know, you know."

Miss Roots said nothing; but he gathered that she would not betray him, that she understood.

He could not explain matters half so clearly to himself. He might have wanted to lend his study to his friend's cousin; he certainly did want to lend it to Lucia for her own sake; but besides these very proper and natural desires he had other motives which would not bear too strict examination. Lucia sitting in the same room with Mr. Soper was not a spectacle that could be calmly contemplated; but he hoped that by providing her with a refuge from Mr Soper he might induce her to stay till the moment of his own departure. And there was another selfish consideration. It was impossible to see her, to talk to her with any pleasure in the public drawing-room. Lucia could not come into his study as long as it was his; but if he gave it up to her and her friend, it was just possible that he might be permitted to call on her there. That she accepted him as a friend he could not any longer doubt. There were so many things that he had to say to her, such long arrears of explanation and understanding to make up. He could see that, unlike the Lucia he used to know, she had misunderstood him; indeed she had owned as much. And for this he had to thank Horace Jewdwine.

Jewdwine's behaviour gave him much matter for reflection, painful, but instructive. Jewdwine had not lied to him about Lucia's movements; but he had allowed him to remain in error. He had kept his cousin regularly posted in the news she had asked for, as concerning an unfortunate young man in whom they were both interested; but he had contrived that no sign of her solicitude should reach the object of it. It was as if he had been merely anxious to render an account of his stewardship; to assure her that the unfortunate young man was now prospering under his protection, was indeed doing so well that there was no occasion for Lucia to worry herself about him any more. Apparently he had even gone so far as to admit that there was friendship between Rickman and himself, while taking care that there should never be anything of the sort between Rickman and Lucia. He had constituted himself a way by which news of Rickman might reach Lucia; but he had sternly closed every path from Lucia to Rickman. That meant that Lucia might be depended upon; but that Rickman must be allowed no footing lest he should advance too far. In other words it meant that they acknowledged, and always would acknowledge, the genius while they judged it expedient to ignore the man.

But she had not always ignored him. Did it not rather mean, then, that Jewdwine would not trust her there; that, knowing her nature and how defenceless it lay before the impulses of its own kindness, he feared for her any personal communication with his friend? It did not occur to Rickman that what Jewdwine dreaded more than anything for Lucia was the influence of a unique and irresistible personal charm. As far as he could see, Jewdwine was merely desperately anxious to protect his kinswoman from what he considered an undesirable acquaintance. And five years ago his fears and his behaviour would have been justifiable; for Rickman owned that at that period he had not been fit to sit in the same room with Lucia Harden, far less, if it came to that, than poor Soper. But his life since he had known her was judged even by Jewdwine to be irreproachable. As Rickman understood the situation, he had been sacrificed to a prejudice, a convention, an ineradicable class-feeling on the part of the distinguished and fastidious don. It was not the class-feeling itself that he resented; he could have forgiven Jewdwine a sentiment over which he had apparently no control; he could have forgiven him anything, even his silence and his subterfuge, if he had only delivered Lucia's messages. That was an unpardonable cruelty. It was like holding back a cup of water from a man dying of thirst. He had consumed his heart with longing for some word or sign from her; he had tortured himself with his belief in her utter repudiation of him; and Jewdwine, who had proof of the contrary, had abandoned him to his belief. He could only think that, after taking him up so gently, Lucia had dropped him and left him where he fell. He owned that Jewdwine was not bound to tell him that Lucia had returned to England, or to provide against any false impression he might form as to her whereabouts; and it was not there, of course, that the cruelty came in. He could have borne the sense of physical separation if, instead of being forced to infer her indifference from her silence, he had known that her kind thoughts had returned to him continually; if he had known that whatever else had been taken from him, he had kept her friendship. Her friendship--it was little enough compared with what he wanted--but it had already done so much for him that he knew what he could have made of it, if he had only been certain that it was his. He could have lived those five years on the memory of her, as other men live on hope; sustained by the intangible but radiant presence, by inimitable, incommunicable ardours, by immaterial satisfactions and delights. If they had not destroyed all bodily longing, they would at least have made impossible its separation from her and transference to another woman. They would have saved him from this base concession to the folly of the flesh, this marriage which, as its hour approached, seemed to him more inevitable and more disastrous. Madness lay in the thought that his deliverance had been near him on the very day when he fixed that hour; and that at no time had it been very far away. No; not when two years ago he had stood hesitating on the edge of the inexpiable, immeasurable folly; the folly that had received, engulfed him now beyond deliverance and return. If only he had known; if he could have been sure of her friendship; if he could have seen her for one moment in many months, one hour in many years, the thing would never have begun; or, being begun, could never have been carried through.

Meanwhile the friendship remained. His being married could not make it less; and his being unmarried would certainly not have made it more. As there could be neither more nor less of it, he ought to have been able to regard it as a simple, definite, solidly satisfactory thing. But he had no sooner realized that so much at least was his than he perceived that he had only the very vaguest notion as to the nature and extent of it. Of all human relations, friendship was the obscurest, the most uncertainly defined. At this point he remembered one fatal thing about her; it had always been her nature to give pleasure and be kind. The passion, he imagined, was indestructible; and with a temperament like that she might be ten times his friend without his knowing from one day to another how he really stood with her. And hitherto one means of judging had been altogether denied to him; he had never had an opportunity of observing her ways with other men.

This third evening he watched her jealously, testing her dealings with him by her behaviour to the boarders, and notably to Spinks and Soper. For Lucia, whether she was afraid of hurting the feelings of these people, or whether she hesitated to establish herself altogether in Mr. Rickman's study, had determined to spend the first hours after dinner in the drawing-room. Miss Roots protested against these weak concessions to the social order. "You'll never be able to stand them, dear," she said; "they're terrible."

But Lucia had her way. "You've stood them for five years," said she.

"Yes, but I've had my work, and I'm used to it; and in any case I'm not Miss Lucia Harden."

"Mr. Rickman stands them."

"Does he? You wouldn't say so if you'd known him for five years."

"I wonder why he stayed."

"Do you? Perhaps Miss Flossie could enlighten you."

"Of course. I was forgetting her."

"Don't forget her," said Miss Roots drily; "she's important."

Miss Roots went up to the study, and Lucia turned into the drawing-room. She owned to herself that what took her there was not so much an impulse of politeness as an irresistible desire to know what manner of people Keith Rickman had had to live among. In those evenings the scene had grown familiar to her; the long room with the three tall windows looking on the street; the Nottingham lace curtains tied with yellow sashes in the middle; the vivid blue-green painting of the wood-work, a bad match for the wall paper; the oleographs and pier-glasses in their gilded frames; the carpet, with its monstrous meaningless design in brown and amber; the table, secretary, and cabinet of walnut wood whose markings simulated some horrible discoloration of decay; the base company of chairs, and the villainous little maroon velvet ottoman, worn by the backs of many boarders; and beyond the blue-green folding doors the dim little chamber looking on a mews. And the boarders, growing familiar, too, to her sensitive impressionable brain; Miss Bramble, upright in her morning gown and poor little lace cap and collar; Mrs. Downey sitting, flushed and weary, in the most remote and most uncomfortable chair; Mr. Spinks reading the paper with an air of a man engaged in profound literary research; the two girls sitting together on the ottoman under the gaselier; Mr. Soper wandering uneasily among them, with his insignificant smile and his offerings of bon-bons; and Keith Rickman sitting apart, staring at his hands, or looking at Flossie with his blue, deep-set, profoundly pathetic eyes. For that pretty lady's sake, how he must have suffered in those five years.

Rickman, from his retreat in the back drawing-room, watched her ways. She was kind to Miss Bramble. She was kind to that old ruffian Partridge whose neck he would willingly have wrung. She was kind, good Heavens! yes, she was kind to Soper. When the commercial gentleman approached her with his infernal box of bon-bons, she took one. He could have murdered Soper. He was profoundly depressed by the spectacle of Lucia's ways. If she behaved like that to every one, what had he to go upon? Nothing, nothing; it was just her way. And yet, he did not exactly see her sending messages to Soper.

He rose and opened the grand piano that stood in the back drawing-room. He went up to her (meeting with a nervous smile Flossie's inquiring look as he passed). He stood a moment with one arm on the chimney-piece, and waited, looking down at Lucia. Presently she raised her head and smiled, as surely she could never have smiled at Soper.

"Do you want me to play for you?" she said.

"That is exactly what I wanted." He drew the flattering inference that, while apparently absorbed in conversation with Miss Bramble, she had been aware of his presence in the background, and of every movement he had made.

"Well, I must ask our hostess first, mustn't I?"

She went to that lady and bent over her with her request.

If Lucia's aim was to give pleasure she had certainly achieved it. Mrs. Downey may or may not have loved music, but she was visibly excited at the prospect of hearing it. So were the boarders. They settled themselves solemnly in their seats. Spinks crushed his noisy newspaper into a ball and thrust it behind him; Miss Bramble put away her clicking needles; while Mr. Soper let himself sink into a chair with elaborate silence; one and all (with the exception of Mr. Partridge, who slept) they turned their faces, politely expectant, towards the inner room. It struck Lucia that in this the poor things were better mannered than many a more aristocratic audience.

Rickman lit the candles on the piano and seated himself beside her.

"I know what I have got to play." said she.

"What?"

"The Sonata Appassionata, isn't it?"

"Fancy your remembering."

"Of course I remember. It isn't every one who cares for Beethoven. I'm afraid the others won't like it, though."

"They've got to like it," he said doggedly.

And Lucia, with her fatal passion for giving pleasure, played. And as the stream of music flowed through the half-lit room, it swept away all sense of his surroundings, all memory of the love and truth and honour pledged to his betrothed, and every little scruple of pity or of conscience. It bore down upon the barriers that stood between him and Lucia, and swept them away too. And the secret sources of his inspiration, sealed for so many months, were opened and flowed with the flowing of the stream; and over them the deep flood of his longing and his misery rose and broke and mingled with the tumult. And through it, and high above it all, it was as if his soul made music with her; turning the Sonata Appassionata into a singing of many voices, a symphony of many strings.

So lost was he that he failed to perceive the effect of her playing on the audience of the outer room. Flossie sat there, very quiet in her awe; Miss Bishop kept her loose mouth open, drinking in the sounds; Mr. Soper leaned forward breathing heavily in a stupid wonder; there, over the tops of the chairs, one up-standing ribbon on Miss Bramble's cap seemed to be beating time to the music all by itself; while Mrs. Downey flushed and swelled with pride at the astonishing capabilities of her piano. He did not notice either that, as Lucia played the tender opening bars of the Sonata, Mr. Partridge shook off the slumber that bound him at this hour; that, as she struck the thundering chords that signal the presto Finale, he raised his head like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpet. He stared solemnly at Lucia as she came forward followed by Rickman; then he rose from his own consecrated chair, heavily but with a certain dignity suited to the moral grandeur of the act, and made a gesture of abdication.

"I was a professional myself once," said he. "My instrument was the flute."

There was no doubt about the spirit of Lucia's reception that night. Perhaps the finest appreciation of connoisseurs had never touched her more than did the praise of that simple audience. Rickman was the only one who did not thank her. For when her playing was over he had turned suddenly very cold, seized with a fierce shivering, the reaction from the tense fever of his nerves; and it was with difficulty that he controlled the chattering of his teeth. But before they parted for the night he asked if he might "call" some afternoon; his tone pointing the allusion to the arrangement that permitted this approach, "We can't talk very well here, can we?" he said.

She answered by inviting him and Miss Walker to tea the next day. He was conscious of a base inward exultation when he heard poor Flossie say that she could only look in later for a little while. In October, work was heavy at the Bank, and the Beaver seldom got home till after tea-time. His conscience asked him sternly if he had reckoned on that too?

When to-morrow came, Miss Hoots was busy also, and disappeared after tea. He had certainly reckoned on that disappearance.

There was a moment of embarrassment on his part when he found himself alone with Lucia in the room (his room) that he had made ready for her. He had done his work so thoroughly well that the place looked as if it had been ready for her since the beginning of time.

She was tired. He remembered how tired she used to be at Harmouth; and he noticed with a pang how little it took to tire her now. She leaned back in his chair, propped by the cushions he had chosen for her (chosen with a distinct prevision of the beauty of the white face and dark hair against that particular shade of greenish blue). She had been reading one of his books; it lay in her lap. Her feet rested on his fender, they stretched out towards the warmth of his fire. If only it were permitted to him always to buy things for her; always to give her the rest she needed; always to care for her and keep her warm and well. He wondered how things had gone with her those five years. Had she been happy in that college in the south? Had they been kind to her, those women; or had they tortured her, as only women can torture women, in some devilish, subtle way? Or would overwork account for the failure of her strength? He thought he saw signs in her tender face of some obscure, deep-seated suffering of the delicate nerves. Well, anyhow she was resting now. And in looking at her he rested, too, from the labour of conscience and the trouble of desire. Heart and senses were made quiet by her mere presence. If his hands trembled as they waited on her it was not with passion but with some new feeling, indescribable and profound. For brought so near to him as this, so near as to create the illusion of possession, she became for him something too sacred for his hands to touch.

He could count on about half an hour of this illusion before Flossie appeared. Afraid of losing one moment of it, he began instantly on the thing he had to say.

"All this time I've been waiting to thank you for your introduction to Fielding."

"Oh," she said eagerly, "what did he say? Tell me."

He told her. As she listened he could see how small a pleasure was enough to give life again to her tired face.

"I am so glad," she said in the low voice of sincerity; "so very glad." She paused. "That justifies my belief in you. Not that it needed any justification."

"I don't know. Your cousin, who is the best critic I know, would tell you that it did."

"My cousin--perhaps. But he does see that those poems are great. Only he's so made that I think no greatness reconciles him to--well, to little faults, if they are faults of taste."

"Did you find many faults of taste?"

She smiled. "I found some; but only in the younger poems. There were none--none at all--in the later ones. Which of course is what one might expect."

"It is, indeed. Did you look at the dates? Did you notice that all those later things were written either at Harmouth, or after?"

"I did."

"And didn't that strike you as significant? Didn't you draw any conclusions?"

"I drew the conclusion that--that the poet I knew had worked out his own salvation."

"Exactly--the poet you knew. Didn't it occur to you that he might never have done it, if you hadn't known him?"

He looked at her steadily. The colour on her face had deepened, but her eyes, as they met his, were grave and meditative. She seemed to be considering the precise meaning of his words before she answered.

"No, I didn't."

"What, never? Think. Don't you remember how you used to help me?"

She shook her head. "I only remember that I meant to have helped you. And I was very sorry because I couldn't. But I see now how absurd it was of me; and how unnecessary."

He knew that she was thinking now of her private secretary.

"It was beautiful of you. But, you know, it couldn't have happened. It was one of those beautiful things that never can happen."

"That's why I was so sorry. I thought it must look as if I hadn't meant it."

"But you did mean it. Nothing can alter that, can it?"

"No. You must take the will for the deed."

"I do. The will is the only thing that matters."

"Yes. But--it was absurd of me--but I thought you might have been counting on it?"

"Did I count on it? I suppose I did; though I knew it was impossible. You forget that I knew all the time it was impossible. It was only a beautiful idea."

"I'm sorry, then, that it had to remain an idea."

"Don't be sorry. Perhaps that's the only way it could remain beautiful. It wouldn't have done, you know. You only thought it could because you were so kind. It was all very well for me to work for you for three weeks or so. It would have been very different when you had me on your hands for a whole year at a stretch. And it's much better for me that it never came off than if I'd had to see you sorry for it afterwards."

"If I had been sorry, I should not have let you see it."

"I should have seen it, though, whether you let me or not. I always see these things."

"But I think, you know, that I wouldn't have been sorry."

"You would! You would! You couldn't have stood me."

"I think I could."

"What, a person with a villainous cockney accent? Who was capable of murdering the Queen's English any day in your drawing-room?"

"Oh, no; whatever you do you'll never do that."

"Well, I don't know. I'm not really to be trusted unless I've got a pen in my hand. I'm better than I used to be. I've struggled against it. Still, a man who has once murdered the Queen's English always feels, you know, as if he'd got the body under the sofa. It's like homicidal mania; the poor wretch may be cured, but he lives in terror of an attack returning. He knows it doesn't matter what he is or what he does; he may live like a saint or write like an archangel; but one aitch omitted from his conversation will wreck him at the last."

"You needn't be afraid; you never omit them."

"You mean I never omit them now. But I did five years ago. I couldn't help it. Everybody about me did it. The only difference between them and me was that I knew it, and they didn't."

"You were conscious of it, then?"

"Conscious? Do you know, that for every lapse of the sort in your presence I suffered the torments of the damned? Do you suppose I didn't know how terrible I was?"

She shook her head, this time with disapproval. "You shouldn't say these things."

"Do you mean, I shouldn't say them, or shouldn't say them to you?"

"Well, I think you shouldn't say them to me. Don't you see that it sounds as if I had done or said something to make you feel like that."

"You? Good Heavens! rather not! But whatever you said or did, I couldn't help knowing how you thought of me."

"And how was that?"

"Well, as half a poet, you know, and half a hair-dresser."

"That's funny; but it's another of the things you shouldn't say. Because you know it isn't true."

"I only say them because I want you to see how impossible it was."

"For me to help you?"

"Yes."

"I do see it. It was impossible--but not for any of the reasons you suppose. If it had been possible--"

"What then?"

"Then, perhaps, I needn't have felt so sorry and ashamed. You know I really am a little bit ashamed of having asked a great poet to be my private secretary."

It was thus that she extricated herself from the embarrassing position in which his clumsiness had placed her. For he saw what she meant when she told him that he should not say these things to her. He had made her feel that she ought to defend him from the charges he had brought against himself, when she knew them to be true, when her gentleness could only have spared him at the expense of her sincerity. How beautifully she had turned it off. He refrained from the obvious pretty speeches. His eyes had answered her.

"If you knew that you had done something for me; not a little thing but a great one--" He paused; and in the silence they heard the sound of Flossie's feet coming up the stair. He had only just time to finish his sentence--"Would it please you or annoy you?"

She answered hurriedly; for as she rose, Flossie was knocking at the door.

"It would please me more than I can say."

"Then," he said in a voice that was too low for Flossie to hear, "you shall know it."

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