To-morrow, then, being Saturday, he would go up to town; and on Monday
he would return to his ambiguous post.

He had thought it out.




CHAPTER XVII


"There's a lot of rot," said Mr. Rickman, "talked about Greek tragedy.
But really, if you come to think of it, it's only in Sophocles you get
the tragedy of Fate. There isn't any such thing in Æschylus, you
know."

He had gone up to acquaint Miss Harden with his decision and had been
led off into this hopeful track by the seductions that still lurked in
the Euripides.

"There's Nemesis, which is the same thing," said she.

"Not at all the same thing. Nemesis is simply the horrid jealousy of
the gods; and the responsibility lies with the person who provokes
them, whether it's Prometheus, or Agamemnon, or Agamemnon's great
great grandfather. It's the tragedy of human responsibility, the most
brutal tragedy of all. All these people are crumpled up with it, they
go about tearing their hair over it, and howling out [Greek: drasanti
pathein]. There isn't any Fate in that, you know. Is there?"

He did not wait for an answer.

"In Sophocles now, it's all the other way about. His people aren't
responsible in the least. They're just a thundering lot of lunatics.
They go knocking their poor heads against the divine law, and trying
to see which is the hardest, till they end by breaking both. There's
no question of paying for the damage. It's pure Fate."

"Well--and Euripides?"

"Oh, Euripides goes on another tack altogether. There aren't any laws
to break, yet everybody's miserable all round, and nobody's
responsible. It's [Greek: tô pathonti pathein]. They suffer because
they suffer, and there's an end of it. And it's the end of Fate in
Greek tragedy. I know this isn't the orthodox view of it."

He paused, a little out of breath, for he had talked as usual against
time, leaving behind him a luminous trail of ideas struck out
furiously as he rushed along. His excitement was of the strong-winged
kind that carried him triumphantly over all obstacles, even the
barrier of the aitch.

Was she listening?

She was; but as she listened she looked down, and her fingers played
with the slender gold chain that went twice round her throat and fell
among the laces of her gown. On her mouth there was the same smile he
had seen when he first saw her; he took it for a smile of innermost
amusement. It didn't lurk; there was nothing underhand about it. It
hovered, delicately poised for flight.

"Euripides," she said, "had the deeper insight, then. He knew that
character is destiny."

"That character is destiny? Whose character? For all I know your
character may be my destiny."

It was one of those unconsidered speeches, flashed out in the heat of
argument, which nevertheless, once uttered are felt to be terrific and
momentous. He wondered how Miss Harden would take it. She took it (as
she seemed to take most things) calmly.

"No character could have any power over you except through your own."

"Perhaps not. All the same, you are not me, you are something outside.
You would be my destiny."

He paused again. Personalities were pitfalls which he must avoid. No
such danger existed for the lady; she simply ignored it; her mind
never touched those deeper issues of the discussion where his
floundered, perilously immersed. Still she was not unwilling to pursue
the theme.

"It all depends," said she, "on what you mean by destiny."

"Well, say I mean the end, the end I'm moving towards, the end I
ultimately arrive at--"

"Surely that depends on your character, your character, of course, as
a whole."

"It may or mayn't. It may depend on what I eat or don't eat for
dinner, on the paper I take in or the pattern of my waistcoat. And the
end may be utterly repellent to my character as a whole. Say I end by
adopting an unsuitable profession. Is that my character or my
destiny?"

"Your character, I think, or you wouldn't have adopted it."

"H'm. Supposing it adopts me?"

"It couldn't--against your will."

"No. But my will in this instance might not be the expression of my
character as a whole. Why, I may be doing violence to my character as
a whole by--by the unique absurdity that dishes me. That's destiny, if
you like, but it's not character--not my character, anyhow."

Personalities again. Whither could he flee from their presence? Even
the frigid realm of abstractions was shaken by the beating of his own
passionate heart. Her eyes had the allurements of the confessional; he
hovered, fascinated, round the holy precincts, for ever on the brink
of revelation. It was ungovernable, this tendency to talk about
himself. In another minute--But no, most decidedly that was not what
he was there for.

If it came to that, what _was_ he there for? It was so incredible that
he should be there at all. And yet there he was going to stay, for
three weeks, and more. He had come to tell her so.

Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone
conclusion.

"It is settled, then?" said she, "you will have no more scruples?"

"None."

"There's only one thing. I must ask you not to give anybody any
information about the library. We don't want to be bothered with
dealers and collectors. Some of the books are so valuable that we
should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known. Can you
keep the secret?"

His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan
Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. But he pledged
himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy. Why not? He was
a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other
dealers in the dark. It was an entirely sensible and business-like
pledge. And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to
something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable. He
had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman's. If
it were Miss Harden's interest that he should defend that secret from
his own father, he would have to defend it. He had given his word; and
for the life of him he could not tell why.

In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments
his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and
unforeseen. He had said to her, "Your character may be my destiny."
And perhaps it was. He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his
decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from
outside himself, rather than from within. And yet, as he sat there
feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogue
_raisonné_, he decided further that he would not go away at all.

He would not go back to town to-morrow. He could not afford the time.
He must and would finish that catalogue _raisonné_ by the
twenty-seventh. He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden.
Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was
none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more. For he and she
could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in
an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic
assumption that the library was hers. Such a pledge would, he
imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden
met face to face. And on him it was conceivably more binding than the
promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or to
intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss
Poppy Grace. Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more
trivial and the grosser claim. His word to Miss Harden was one of
those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of
the actual. To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the
sacrifice of the great three days.

He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town
by the river path at the bottom of the garden. Half-way to the river
he stopped and looked back. The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope
of glimmering lawn. The house loomed in the background, a grey mass
with blurred outlines. From a window open in the east wing he could
hear the sound of a piano.

He stood still and listened. All around was the tender, indescribable
Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt
its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue
transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and
sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night,
dividing the darkness. It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult,
rhythmic and controlled. What was she playing? If he stayed till
midnight he must hear it through. Night sheltered him, and he drew
nearer lest he should lose a note. He stretched himself on the lawn,
and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the
stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata
Appassionata.

It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not
tell him why he was there and what he was there for.

And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.




CHAPTER XVIII


It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking
up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn.
He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every
person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life
that he knew not and that knew not him.

"Lucia--Lucia!" Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition
standing in the south window. "Lu-chee-a!--" it pleaded. "You can't
say you're out when I can see perfectly well that you're in."

"Go away Kitty, I'm busy."

"You've no business to be busy at five o'clock in the afternoon."

Miss Kitty Palliser's body was outside the window, but her head,
crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was
already within the room.

"I'm dying of thirst," she said; "take me in and be kind to me and
give me tea."

Lucia rose and went to the window, reluctant but resigned. Scraps of
their conversation floated down to Mr. Rickman's end of the room.

"Yes, you may well look at my hat."

"I wasn't looking at it, I was looking through it."

"Well, if you can see through my hat, Lucia, you can see through me.
What do you think of it?"

"Of the hat? Oh, the hat is a poem."

"Isn't it? Did you ever see anything so inspired, so impassioned?"

"Inspired, but--don't you think--just a little, a little meaningless?"

"Meaningless? It's _packed_ with meaning."

"I should like to know what it means."

"If it means nothing else it means that I've been going to and fro
the whole blessed afternoon, paying calls in Harmouth for my sins."

"Poor Kitty."

"The last three times I paid calls in Harmouth," said poor Kitty, "I
sported a cycling skirt, the blousiest of blouses, and a tam-o'shanter
over my left ear. Of course everybody was in. So I thought if I went
like this--brand new frock--swagger hat--white gloves--that everybody
would be out."

"And were they?"

"No. Just like my luck--they were all--all in!"

"And yet you have the audacity to come here and ask for tea?"

"For Goodness' sake, don't talk of tea."

"I thought you were so thirsty."

"So I am. I thirst for amusement."

"Kitty! You've been amusing yourself all afternoon--at other people's
expense."

"Yes. It's cheap--awfully cheap, but fatiguing. I don't want to amuse
myself; I want to be amused."

Mr. Rickman took a longer look at the brilliant apparition.

Now, at a little distance, Miss Palliser passed as merely an ordinary
specimen of a brilliant but conventional type. This effect was an
illusion produced by her irreproachably correct attire. As she drew
nearer it became apparent that convention could never have had very
much to do with her. Tailor and milliner were responsible for the
general correctness of Miss Palliser's appearance, Miss Palliser
herself for the riot and confusion of the details. Her coat, flung
open, displayed a tangle of laces disposed after her own fancy. Her
skirts, so flawless and sedate, swept as if inspired by the storm of
her long-legged impetuous stride. Under her too, too fashionable hat
her brown hair was twisted in a way entirely her own; and fashion had
left untouched the wild originality of her face. Bumpy brows, jutting
eyebrows, and nose long in the bridge, wide in the nostril, tilted in
a gentle gradient; a wide full-lipped nervous mouth, and no chin to
speak of. A thin face lit by restless greenish eyes; stag-like,
dog-like, humorous and alert.

Miss Palliser sent the gaze of those eyes round the room. The hungry,
Satanic humour in them roved, seeking what it might devour. It fell
upon Mr. Rickman.

"What have you got there?"

Miss Harden's reply was inaudible.

"Let me in. I want to look at it."

"Don't, Kitty." Apparently an explanation followed from Miss Harden.
It also was inaudible.

"Lu-_chee_-a.! Where is Miss Roots, B.A.?"

"Please, _please_, Kitty. Do go into the morning-room."

This painful scene was cut short by Robert, who announced that tea was
served.

"Oh joy!" said Miss Palliser, and disappeared.

Lucia, following, found her examining the tea-tray.

"Only two cups," said Miss Palliser. "Isn't it going to get any tea
then?"

"Isn't what going to get any tea?"

"It. The man thing you keep in there."

"Yes. But it doesn't get it here."

"I think you might ask it in. It might amuse me."

Lucia ignored the suggestion.

"I haven't talked," said Miss Palliser, "to a man thing for ages."

"It hasn't come to be talked to. It's much too busy."

"Mayn't it come in, just for a treat?"

Lucia shook her head.

"What's it like? Is it nice to look at?"

"No--yes--no."

"What? Haven't you made up your mind yet?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"Lucia, you're a perfect dog in the manger. You don't care a rap about
the creature yourself, and yet you refuse to share it with your
friend. I put it to you. Here we are, you and I, living in a howling
wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, where even curates are at a
premium--is it right, is it fair of you, to have a presentable
man-thing in the house and to keep it to yourself?"

"Well--you see, it--it isn't so very presentable."

"Rubbish, I saw it. It looked perfectly all right."

"That," said Lucia, "is illusion. You haven't heard it speak."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing--nothing. Only it isn't exactly what you'd call a gentleman."

"Oh. Well, I think you might have told me that before."

"I've been trying to tell you."

Kitty reflected a moment. "So it's making a catalogue, is it? Whose
bright idea is that?"

"It was grandpapa's. It's mine now." She did not mention that it was
also Horace Jewdwine's.

"And what will your little papa say?"

"He won't say anything. He never does. The library's mine--mine to do
as I like with."

"You've broken the spell. Isn't there some weird legend about women
never inheriting it?"

"Well, they never have. I shall be the first."

"I say, if I were you, I should feel a little creepy."

"I do--sometimes. That's one reason why I want to get this thing made
in my lifetime, before I go away."

"Good gracious. You're not going away to die."

"I don't know what I'm going away to do. Anyhow, the catalogue will be
done. All ready for Horace when he steps into my shoes."

"Unless--happy thought--you marry him. That, I suppose, is _another_
pair of shoes?"

There was a pause, during which Miss Palliser gazed thoughtfully at
her friend.

"What have you been doing to yourself? You look most awfully tired."

"I've been sitting up rather late the last few nights, cataloguing."

"What on earth did you do that for?"

"Because I want to finish by the twenty-seventh."

There was a pause while Miss Palliser ate tea-cake.

"Is Horace coming down before you go?"

"No. He's too busy. Besides, he never comes when father isn't here."

"Oh dear no, he doesn't think it proper. It's odd," said Miss
Palliser, looking down at her tea-cake with an air of profound
philosophic reflection. "You can't ask your cousin to stay with you,
because it's improper; but it isn't improper to sit up making
catalogues with young Mr. Thing-um-a-jig till all hours of the night."

"Why should it be improper?"

"For Goodness' sake don't ask me. How should _I_ know? Don't you find
yourself wishing sometimes that Mr. Thing-um-a-jig was Mr. Jewdwine?"

"More tea, Kitty?"

"Rather! I'm going into the library to choose a book when I've
finished my tea. I shall take the opportunity of observing for myself
whether Mr.--Mr.--"

"Mr. Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord deliver us! Whether Mr. Savage Keith Rickman is a proper
person for you to know. That reminds me. Dearest, do you know what
they talk about in Harmouth? They talk about _you_. Conversation
jiggers round you like a silly moth round a candle. Would you like to
know what Harmouth thinks of you?"

"No. I haven't the smallest curiosity."

"I shall tell you all the same, because it's good for you to see
yourself as others see you. They say, dear, that you do put on such a
thundering lot of side. They say that attitude is absurd in one so
young. They say you ought to marry, that if you don't marry you can't
possibly hope to keep it up, and they say you never will marry if you
continue to be so exclusive. Exclusive was the word. But before I left
they'd married you to Mr. Jewdwine. You see dear, you're so exclusive
that you're bound to marry into your own family, no other family being
good enough."

"It's certainly a new light on my character."

"I ought to tell you that Mrs. Crampton takes a charitable view. She
says she doesn't believe you really mean it, dear, she thinks that you
are only very, _very_ shy. She has heard _so_ much about you, and is
_dying_ to know you. Don't be frightened, Lucia, I was most discreet."

"How did you show your discretion?"

"I told her not to die. I tried to persuade her that she wouldn't love
you so much if she did know you."

"Kitty, that wasn't very kind."

"It was the kindest thing I could think of. It must soothe her to
feel that this exclusiveness doesn't imply any reflection on her
social position, but merely a weird unaccountable dislike. How is it
that some people can't understand that your social position is like
your digestion or the nose on your face, you're never aware of either,
unless there's something wrong with it."

"Kitty, you're not in a nice mood this afternoon."

"I know I'm not. I've been in Harmouth. Lucy, there are moments when I
loathe my fellow-creatures."

"Poor things. Whatever have they been doing now?"

"Oh, I don't know. The same old thing. They make my life a burden to
me?"

"But how?"

"They're always bothering me, always trying to get at you through me.
They're always asking me to tea to meet people in the hope that I'll
ask them back to meet you. I'm worn out with keeping them off you.
Some day all Harmouth will come bursting into your drawing-room over
my prostrate form, flattened out upon the door-mat."

"Never mind."

"I wouldn't, sweetheart, if they really cared about you. But they
don't. If you lost your money and your social position to-morrow they
wouldn't care a rap. That's why I hate them."

"Why do you visit them if you hate them?"

"Because, as I told you, I hunger and thirst for amusement, and they
do amuse me when they don't make me ill."

"Dear Kitty, I'm sure they're nicer than you think. Most people are,
you know."

"If you think so, why don't _you_ visit them?" snapped Kitty.

"I would, if--"

"If they ceased to be amusing; if they broke their legs or lost their
money, or if they got paralytic strokes, or something. You'd visit
them in their affliction, but not in the ordinary playful
circumstances of life. That's because you're an angel. _I_," said Miss
Palliser sententiously, "am not. Why do I always come to you when I
feel most hopelessly the other thing?"

Lucia said something that had a very soothing effect; it sounded like
"Skittles!" but the word was "Kitti-kin!"

"Lucy, I shouldn't be such a bad sort if I lived with you. I've been
here exactly twenty minutes, and I've laid in enough goodness to last
me for a week. And now," said Miss Palliser with decision, "I'm
going."

Lucia looked up in some trepidation.

"Where are you going to?"

"I am going--to choose that book."

"Oh, Kitty, do be careful."

"I am always careful," said Miss Palliser, "in choosing a book."

In about ten minutes' time she returned. Her chastened mood had
vanished.

"Lucia," said she, "you have an immense regard for that young man."

"How do you know that I have an immense regard for him?"

"I suppose you expect me to say that I can tell by your manner. I
can't. Your manner is perfection. It's by Robert's manner that I
judged. Robert's manner is not perfection; for a footman, you know,
it's a shade too eager, too emotional."

"That, to my mind, is the charm of Robert."

"Still, there are drawbacks. A footman's face ought not to betray the
feelings of his mistress. That's how I knew that Mabel Flosser was
cooling off--by the increasing frostiness of Blundell. I shall feel
sure of you, Lucia, as long as Robert continues to struggle against
his fascinating smile. Take my advice--if you should ever cherish a
secret passion, get rid of Robert, for, sure as fate, he'll give you
away. Perhaps," she added meditatively, it _was_ a little mean of me."

"Kitty, what have you been up to?"

"It was your fault. You shouldn't be so mysterious. Wishing to
ascertain your real opinion of Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, I watched
Robert as he was bringing in his tea."

"I hope he was properly attentive."

"Attentive isn't the word for it. He may have felt that my eye was
upon him, and so got flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the
thing. He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him. That
won't do, you know. He'll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the
Savage Keith. Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant."

"He is, as it happens, excessively observant."

"So I found out. I found out all sorts of things."

"What things?"

"Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious. He doesn't waste
time. He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other;
which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous
so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my
eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some
horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance.
Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?"

"What a shame."

"Yes. I'm afraid he'll have to do a little re-copying."

"Oh, Kitty, why couldn't you leave the poor thing in peace?"

"There wasn't any peace to leave him in. Really, you'd have thought
that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the
Act. He couldn't have been more excited if I'd caught him in his bath.
Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty."

"Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you. You might have had the
decency to go away."

"There wouldn't have been any decency in going away. Flight would have
argued that I shared the theory of his guilt. I stayed where I was for
two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away--to the other end
of the room."

"You should have gone away altogether."

"Why? The library is big enough for two. It's so big that you could
take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of
it at the other. I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even
hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him
at his."

"In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly
could."

"I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything. I did
it on purpose. I am nothing if not subtle. _You_ would have crushed
him with a delicate and ladylike retreat; _I_ left him as happy as he
could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue."

"And then?"

"Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go. But before I went I
made another discovery. You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to
look at. Adieu, my exclusive one."




CHAPTER XIX


The chronicler who recorded that no woman had ever inherited the
Harden Library contented himself with the bare statement of the fact.
It was not his business to search into its causes, which belonged to
the obscurer regions of psychology. Sir Joseph Harden and those
book-lovers who went before him had the incurable defects of their
qualities. Hereditary instinct, working in them with a force as of
some blind fatality, drove too many of them to espouse their
opposites. Their wives were not expected to do anything noteworthy,
beyond sitting for their portraits to the masters of their day;
though, as a matter of fact, many of them contrived to achieve a far
less enviable distinction. The portraits have immortalized their faces
and their temperaments. Ladies of lax fibre, with shining lips and
hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads,
they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious
lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old
scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable
element in things, or that the library had been handed down from
father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by
devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its
men should be scholars and its women beauties, occasionally frail.

And scholarship, in obedience to the family tradition, ran superbly in
the male line for ten generations, when it encountered an insuperable
obstacle in the temperament of Sir Frederick. Then came Sir
Frederick's daughter, and between them they made short work of the
family tradition. Sir Frederick had appropriated the features of one
of his great grandmothers, her auburn hair, her side-long eyes, her
fawn-like, tilted lip, her perfect ease of manners and of morals. By a
still more perverse hereditary freak the Harden intellect which had
lapsed in Sir Frederick appeared again in his daughter, not in its
well-known austere and colourless form, but with a certain brilliance
and passion, a touch of purely feminine uncertainty and charm.

The Harden intellect had changed its sex. It was Horace Jewdwine who
had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable
discoveries. Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a
Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but
voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of
Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition. Now in the
opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a
contradiction in terms. Having engaged the best masters in the county,
whose fees together with their fares (second class from Exeter to
Harmouth) he had himself punctually paid, he had declined to take any
further interest in his grand-daughter. He had no objection to her
taking up music, a study which, being no musician, he was unable to
regard as in any sense intellectual. He supported his view by frequent
allusions to the brainlessness of song-birds; in fact, he had been
always a little bitter on the subject, having before his eyes the
flagrant instance of his son Frederick.

Frederick was no scholar. He despised his forefathers as a race of
pedants, and boasted that he never opened a book, barring the book of
life, in which he flattered himself he could have stood a very stiff
examination. He used a certain unbowdlerized edition which he was
careful to conceal from the ladies of his family. Before he was forty
Frederick had fiddled away the family tradition, and not only the
family tradition, but the family splendour and the family credit. When
Lucia at seventeen was studying the classics under Horace Jewdwine,
Frederick's debts came rolling in; at about the same period old Sir
Joseph's health showed signs of failing, and Frederick took to raising
money on his expectations. He had just five years to do it in.

It was then that Lucia first began to notice a change in her
grandfather's manner towards her. Sometimes she would catch his eyes
fixed on her with a curious, scrutinizing gaze, and once or twice she
thought she detected in them a profound sadness. Whenever at these
moments they happened to meet her eyes they were immediately averted.
Sir Joseph had not been given to betraying emotion, save only on
points of scholarship, and it was evident that he had something on his
mind.

What he had on his mind was the thought that at the rate Frederick was
living he might at any moment cease to live, and then what would
become of Lucia? And what would become of the Harden Library? What of
the family tradition? By much pondering on the consequences of
Frederick's decease Sir Joseph had considerably hastened his own.
Lucia knew nothing of all this. She was only aware that her
grandfather had sent for Horace Jewdwine on his death-bed. What had
passed between them remained known only to Horace. But part of a sum
of money left by Sir Joseph's will towards the founding of a Harden
scholarship was transferred by a codicil to Lucia for her education.

The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady,
Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when
Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he
pronounced her the worst educated young woman in Europe. Of all that
Miss Roots had so laboriously imparted to her she retained, not a
smattering, but a masterly selection. And now at four and twenty she
had what is called a beautiful view of life; with that exciting book
which her father kept so sedulously out of her reach she was
acquainted as it were through anthologies and translations. For
anything Lucia knew to the contrary, life might be all bursts of lyric
rapture and noble sequences of selected prose. She was even in danger
of trusting too much to her own inspired version of certain passages.
But anthologies are not always representative, and nobody knew better
than Lucia that the best translations sometimes fail to give the
spirit of the original.

Something of this spirit she caught from her father's brilliant and
disturbing presence. Lucia adored her father. He brought into her life
an element of uncertainty and freedom that saved it from the tyranny
of books. It was a perpetual coming and going. A dozen times in a year
Sir Frederick hurled himself from Harmouth to London, from London to
the Continent, and from the Continent back again to Harmouth, to
recruit. The very transience of his appearances and Lucia's ignorance
of all that lay behind them preserved her in her attitude of
adoration.

Sir Frederick took precious good care that it should not be disturbed
by the familiarity born of frequent intercourse, that she should see
him only in his moods of unnatural sobriety. And as he left Lucia to
the library so much, it was to be supposed that, in defiance of the
family tradition, he would leave the library to Lucia. But after all
Sir Frederick had some respect for the family tradition. When it
seemed only too likely that a woman would inherit the Harden Library,
he stepped in and saved it from that supreme disgrace by the happy
expedient of a bill of sale. Otherwise his natural inclination would
have been to leave it to his daughter, for whom he had more or less
affection, rather than to his nephew, for whom he had none.

As it happened, it was Horace Jewdwine who was responsible for the
labour which Lucia had so impetuously undertaken. Lucia was aware that
her grandfather's desire had been to rearrange and catalogue the
library. When she came of age and found herself mistress of a tiny
income (derived from capital left by her mother, carefully tied up to
keep it from Sir Frederick, and enlarged by regular accumulations at
compound interest) her first idea was to carry out her grandfather's
wishes; but it was not until Horace Jewdwine's last visit that her
idea became a determination. Horace had been strolling round the
library, turning over the books, not exactly with the covetous eye of
the heir apparent, but with that peculiar air of appropriation which
he affected in all matters of the intellect. In that mood Lucia had
found him irritating, and it had appeared that Horace had been
irritated, too. He had always felt a little sore about the library;
not that he really wanted it himself, but that he hated to see it in
the possession of such a rank barbarian as his uncle Frederick. A
person who, if his life depended on it, could not have told an Aldine
from an Elzevir. A person, incapable not only of appreciating valuable
books, but of taking ordinary decent care of them. There were gaps on
the shelves, a thing that he hated to see. Lucia, too; Lucia would
take books out by tens and twenties at a time and leave them lying all
over the house, and they would be stuck in again anywhere and anyhow.
No sort of method in their arrangement. No blinds, no glass doors to
protect them. He had pointed this out to Lucia, suggesting that it was
not a good thing to let too much dust accumulate on the tops of books,
neither was it altogether desirable that a strong south-westerly light
should play upon them all day long. Had she ever noticed how the
bindings were cracking and fading? For all this he seemed to be
blaming Lucia; and this, Lucia tried to persuade herself, was no great
matter; but when he asked for a catalogue, and she calmly told him
that there was none, he became involved in a sentence about a scandal
and a Vandal in which his opinion of his uncle Frederick unmistakably
appeared. He even forgot himself so far as to reflect on the sanity of
the late Master of Lazarus, at which point Lucia had left him to his
reflections.

She had not yet forgiven Horace for his interference that day, nor for
his remark about the scandal and the Vandal. As for his other
observations, they were insufferably rue. Hence her desperate efforts
to set the library in order before she went abroad; hence the secrecy
and haste with which she had applied to Rickman's, without asking
Horace's advice as she naturally would have done; hence, too, her vast
delight at the success of her unassisted scheme. Mr. Rickman was
turning out splendidly. If she had looked all through London she could
not have found a better man.




CHAPTER XX


It was Easter Sunday and Lucia's heart was glad, for she had had a
letter from her father. There never was such a father and there never
were such letters as, once in a blue moon and when the fancy seized
him, he wrote to his adorable Lucy. Generally speaking they were all
about himself and his fiddle, the fiddle that when he was at home he
played from morning to night. But this letter was more exciting. It
was full of all the foolish and delightful things they were to do
together in Cannes, in Venice and in Florence and in Rome. He was
always in one or other of these places, but this was the first time he
had proposed that his adorable Lucy should join him. "You're too young
to see the world," he used to say. "You wouldn't enjoy it, Lucy, you
really wouldn't. The world is simply wasted on any woman under five
and thirty." Lucia was not quite five and twenty. She was not very
strong, and she felt that if she didn't see the world soon she might
not enjoy it very much when she did see it. And it was barely a month
now till the twenty-seventh.

Lucia went singing downstairs and into the library to throw all its
four windows open to the delicious spring, and there, to her amazement
(for it was Sunday), she came upon Mr. Rickman cataloguing hard.

She felt a little pang of self-reproach at the sight of him. There was
something pathetic in his attitude, in his bowed head and spread
elbows, the whole assiduous and devoted figure. How hard he was
working, with what a surprising speed in his slender nervous hands.
She had not meant him to give up the whole of his three days' holiday
to her, and she really could not take his Easter Sunday, poor little
man. So, with that courtesy which was Mr. Rickman's admiration and
despair, she insisted on restoring it to him, and earnestly advised
his spending it in the open air. In the evening he could have the
library to himself, to read or write or rest in; he would, she
thought, be more comfortable there than in the inn. Mr. Rickman
admitted that he would like to have a walk to stretch his legs a bit,
and as she opened the south window she had a back view of him
stretching them across the lawn. He walked as rapidly as he wrote,
holding his head very high in the air. He wore a light grey suit and a
new straw hat with a dull olive green ribbon on it, poor dear. She was
glad that it was a fine day for the hat.

She watched him till the beech-tree hid him from her sight; then she
opened the west windows, and the south wind that she had just let in
tried to rush out again by them, and in its passage it lifted up the
leaves of Mr. Rickman's catalogue and sent them flying. The last of
them, escaping playfully from her grasp, careered across the room and
hid itself under a window curtain. Stooping to recover it, she came
upon a long slip of paper printed on one side. It was signed S.K.R.,
and Savage Keith Rickman was the name she had seen on Mr. Rickman's
card. The headline, _Helen in Leuce_, drew her up with a little shock
of recognition. The title was familiar, so was the motto from
Euripides,

[Greek: su Dios ephus, ô HElena thugatêr,]

and she read,

    The wonder and the curse of friend and foe,
        She watched the ranks of battle cloud and shine,
        And heard, Achilles, that great voice of thine,
    That thundered in the trenches far below.

    Tears upon tears, woe upon mortal woe,
        Follow her feet and funeral fire on fire,
        While she, that phantom of the heart's desire,
    Flies thither, where all dreams and phantoms go.

    Oh Strength unconquerable, Achilles! Thee
        She follows far into the shadeless land
        Of Leuce, girdled by the gleaming sand,
    Amidst the calm of an enchanted sea,
        Where, children of the Immortals, hand in hand,
    Ye share one golden immortality.

It was a voice from the sad modern world she knew so well, and in
spite of its form (which was a little too neo-classic and conventional
to please her) she felt it to be a cry from the heart of a living man.
That man she had identified with the boy her grandfather had found,
years ago, in a City bookshop. There had been no room for doubt on
that point when she saw him in the flush of his intellectual passion,
bursting so joyously, so preposterously, into Greek. He had,
therefore, already a certain claim on her attention. Besides, he
seemed to be undergoing some incomprehensible struggle which she
conceived to be of a moral nature, and she had been sorry for him on
that account.

But, if he were also--Was it possible that her grandfather's
marvellous boy had grown into her cousin's still more marvellous man?
Horace, too, had made his great discovery in a City shop. _Helen in
Leuce_ and a City shop--it hardly amounted to proof; but, if it did,
what then? Oh then, she was still more profoundly sorry for him. For
then he was a modern poet, which in the best of circumstances is to be
marked for suffering. And to Mr. Rickman circumstances had not been
exactly kind.

A modern poet, was he? One whom the gods torment with inspired and
hopeless passion; a lover of his own "fugitive and yet eternal bride,"
the Helen of Homer, of Æschylus and Euripides, the Helen of Marlowe
and Goethe, the Helen of them all. And for Mr. Rickman, unhappy Mr.
Rickman, perdition lurked darkly in her very name. What, oh what must
it feel like, to be capable of eliding the aitch in "Helen" and yet
divinely and deliriously in love with her? Here Lucia was wrong, for
Mr. Rickman was entirely happy with the aitch in Helen.

She was so sorry for him. But she did not see at the moment what she
could do for him besides being sorry. And yet, if he were Horace's
friend, she must do more. She was aware that she had been sorry for
him chiefly because he was not a gentleman. Well, she had seen men
before who were not gentlemen and she had been very far from feeling
any sort of sorrow for them. But she had never in all her life seen
anything like this inspired young Cockney, with his musical voice and
afflicting accent, a person whose emotions declared themselves
publicly and painfully, whose thoughts came and went as transparently
as the blood in his cheeks, who yet contrived somehow to remain in the
last resort impenetrable.

She could not ignore him. Apart from Horace he had established his
claim; and if he _was_ Horace's friend he had another and a stronger
title to consideration. But was he? She had really no proof.

She wondered whether Mr. Rickman had missed his sonnet. She laid it
almost tenderly in a conspicuous place on his table, and put a bronze
head of Pallas Athene on it to keep it down. Then she wondered again
whether he enjoyed the bookshop, whether he enjoyed making catalogues
_raisonnés_, whether he enjoyed himself generally, and she hoped that
at any rate he would enjoy his Easter Sunday. Poor little man.

Lucia was so happy herself that she wanted Mr. Rickman to be happy
too.




CHAPTER XXI


Mr. Rickman was anything but happy as he set out for his walk that
glorious April morning.

Outside the gate of Court House he stood and looked about him,
uncertain of the way he would go. All ways were open to him, and
finally, avoiding the high road, he climbed up a steep and stony lane
to the great eastern rampart which is Harcombe Hill. Beneath him lay
Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles
into the sea through a barrier of shingle. Two gigantic and flaming
cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet. In any
other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air,
but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a
haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two
huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.

But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first
thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and
apparently capricious versatility. Nature, round about Harmouth, is
never in the same mood for a mile together. The cliffs change their
form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like
blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their
seams. Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods,
pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes
where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day. It is not so much a
landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of
the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on
a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a
beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing;
and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness,
for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he
climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity
he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the
hills and the prone backs of the long ridges are all of one height;
the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that
has no boundary but the sky. The country has revealed its august,
eternal soul. He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves
it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman
whose soul he knows.

Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the
bay. To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia
Harden, had put on a veil. The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to
the valley and the town. Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth,
divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of
meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more
acutely conscious of his misery. He sat down among the furze and
heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit
there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love
makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.
And Nature never turned to a poet a lovelier and more appealing face.
It had rained in the night. From the enfolding blue, sky blue and sea
blue, blue of the aerial hills, the earth flung out her colours, new
washed, radiantly, immaculately pure. Bared to the sea, she flamed
from rose pink to rose red. Only the greater hills and the dark flank
of Muttersmoor waited for their hour, the hour of the ling and the
heather; the valleys and the lower slopes were glad with green. There
was an art in Nature's way; for, lest a joyousness so brimming and so
tender should melt and overflow into mere pathos, it was bounded and
restrained by that solemn and tragic line of Muttersmoor drawn
straight against the sky.

It was the same scene that had troubled him when he first looked at
it, and it troubled him still; not with that thrill of prescient
delight and terror, but with a feeling more mysterious and baffling,
an exquisite and indefinable reproach. He stared, as if he could hope
by staring to capture the meaning of the beautiful tender face; but
beyond that inscrutable reproach it had no meaning for him and no
expression. He had come to a land prophetic of inspiration, where, if
anywhere, he might have hoped to hear the lyric soul of things; and
the lyric soul of things absolutely refused to sing to him. It had
sung loud enough in the streets last Wednesday; it had hymned the
procession of his dreams and the loud tumultuous orgy of his passions;
and why could he not hear it now? For here his senses were satisfied
to the full. Never had Nature's material loveliness been more vividly,
piercingly present to him. The warm air was like a touch, palpable yet
divine. He lay face downwards on the earth and pressed it with his
hands; he smelt the good smell of the grass and young bracken, and the
sweet almond-scented blossom of the furze. And he suffered all the
torment of the lover who possesses the lips and body of his mistress,
and knows that her heart is far from him and that her soul is not for
him.

He felt himself to be severed from the sources of his inspiration;
estranged, profoundly and eternally, from the beauty he desired. And
that conviction, melancholy in itself, was followed by an overpowering
sense of intellectual dissolution, the corruption and decay of the
poetic faculty in him. He was aware, feverishly aware, of a faint
flowing measure, the reverberation of dead songs; of ideas, a
miserable attenuated procession, trailing feebly in the dark of his
brain, which when he tried to grasp them would be gone. They were only
the ghosts of the ideas that he had brought with him from London, that
had died on the journey down. The beauty of this place was devilish
and malign. He looked into Harmouth valley as if it had been a
graveyard. They were all buried down there, his dead dreams and his
dead power, buried without hope of any resurrection. Rickman's genius,
the only thing he genuinely trusted, had forsaken him.

It may be that every poet once in his lifetime has to come to this
Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out
after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani. For Rickman no agony
could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul. He could see
nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it
before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk. His
ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive
them. But this time, though he had not been drinking, he felt that
they had gone for ever, and that all his songs were sung. And over his
head high up in the sky, a lark, a little fiend of a lark, had chosen
that moment for bursting into music. With diabolical ease and
maddening ecstasy, he flung out his perfect and incommunicable song. A
song of joy and mockery and triumph.

He did not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage
Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty. Was it, he wondered,
the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of
the soul? Was he a precocious genius? Had he taken to the immortal
drink too early and too hard? Or was it, as Jewdwine had suggested,
that there were too many Rickmans, and that this poor seventh part of
him had been crushed by the competition of the other six? The horrible
thing was that they would live on for years, eating and getting drunk
and falling in love and buying suits of clothes, while the poet in him
was dead, like Keats, at three and twenty.

Then suddenly, for no reason whatever, a vision of Lucia Harden rose
before him like a light and refused to leave him.

It wrought in him, as he contemplated it, a gradual burning
illumination. He perceived that it was he himself who was responsible
for all this. He perceived the real nature of the things he had
pursued so passionately, the thing he called pleasure, the thing he
called love, and the thing he called his imagination. His notion of
pleasure was getting drunk and making love to Miss Poppy Grace; the
love he made was better described by a stronger and coarser
monosyllable, and he had used his imagination to glorify it. Oh yes,
because he had imagination, because he was a poet, he had not gone
down into the clay-pits and wallowed in the clay; neither had he been
content to dabble in it; he had taken it up in his hands and moulded
it into the form of a divinity, and then fallen down and worshipped
it. Fallen down and worshipped at the feet, the gaily twirling feet of
Miss Poppy Grace.

Poor Poppy, if he could have thought of her at all, he might have felt
a sort of pity for her transience, the transience of the feeling she
inspired. But he did not think of her; he did not even try to think
of her. Her image, once so persistent, had dropped clean out of his
mind, which was one reason why it was so empty. It had not been much
to boast of, that infatuation for Poppy, and yet somehow, after living
so intimately with it, he felt quite lost without it. It was a little
odd, if you came to think of it, that the thing he called his genius,
and the thing he called his love, should have chosen the same moment
to abandon him. Was it--was it possible--that there was some vital
connection between them? As the singing of birds in the pairing
season, was his genius merely a rather peculiar symptom of the very
ordinary condition known as falling in love? So that, failing that
source of inspiration--? That no doubt _was_ what was the matter with
him. His imagination languished because his passion for Poppy was
played out, and he had nothing to put in its place.

Well, yes, there was something; something that was not an instinct or
a passion, but an acquired taste. To be sure he had acquired it very
quickly, it had only taken him three days. In those three days he had
developed a preference for the society of ladies (the women of his own
class were not ladies but "young ladies," a distinction he now
appreciated for the first time). It was a preference that, as things
stood, he would never be able to gratify; there was something about it
ruinous and unhappy, like a craze for first editions in an impecunious
scholar, for ever limited to the twopenny bundle and the eighteenpenny
lot. He could not hope to enjoy Miss Harden's society for more than
three weeks at the outside. He only enjoyed it at all through an
accident too extraordinary, too fantastic to occur again. Between him
and her there stood the barrier of the counter. The barrier itself was
not insuperable: he might get over the counter, so might Miss Harden;
but there were other things that she never could get over. Though in
some ways he was all right, in others, again, he was not--he could see
very well that he was not--what Miss Harden would call a gentleman. He
was, through that abominable nervousness of his, an impossible person,
hopelessly, irredeemably involved in social solecisms. Or if not
impossible, he was, at any rate, highly improbable.

Perceiving all this, he was still unable to perceive the meaning of
his insight and his misery. He did not know, and there was nobody to
tell him, that this emptiness of his was the emptiness created by the
forerunners and servants of Love, who sweep and purify the
death-chamber where a soul has died and another soul is waiting to be
born. For in the house of Love there is only one chamber for birth and
for dying; and into that clean, unfurnished place the soul enters
unattended and endures its agony alone. There is no Mother-soul to
bear for it the birth-pains of the new life.

But Mr. Rickman was young, and youth's healthy instinct urged him to
vigorous exercise as the best means of shaking off his misery. He
crossed the road that runs along the top of Harcombe Hill and made for
the cliffs in a south-easterly direction across the fields. He then
kept along the coast-line, dipping into Harcombe valley, climbing
again to Easton Down. Here the coast was upheaved into terraces of
grey limestone, topped by a layer of sand riddled with rabbit holes.
Before one of these two young hawks were watching, perched on a
projecting boulder. So intent was their gaze and they so motionless
that the air seemed to stand still and wait for the sweep of their
wings. Mr. Rickman, whom youth made reckless, lay flat on his stomach
and peered over the edge of the cliff. He was fascinated, breathlessly
absorbed. He pressed the turf a little closer in his eagerness, and so
loosened a large stone that rolled down, starting a cataract of sand
and rubble. He had just time to throw himself back sideways, as the
hollow fringe of turf gave way and plunged down the cliff-side. So far
from taking his escape with becoming seriousness, he amused himself by
trying to feel as he would have felt if he had actually gone over the
cliff. He found that his keenest emotion was a thrill of horror, as he
imagined Miss Harden a possible spectator of the ridiculous evolutions
performed by his person in its passage through the air.

After an hour of dipping and climbing he reached a small fishing
village. Here he dined and rested, and it was mid-afternoon before he
turned again towards Harmouth. There was no chance of missing his way;
he had nothing to do but follow the coast-line as he had done before.

There were signs in the valley of the white fog that sometimes, even
in April, comes in before sunset; already a veil of liquid air was
drawn across the hills, and when he crossed Easton Down (if it was
Easton Down) again the sea's face was blurred with mist.

As he went on westwards the mist kept pace with him, gradually
diminishing the view he had hoped to see. And as it shifted and closed
round him, his movements became labyrinthine, then circular.

And now his view was all foreground; he was simply walking through
circles of moor, enclosed by walls of fine grey fog. He passed through
these walls, like a spirit, into smaller and smaller circles; then,
hopelessly bewildered, he stopped, turned, and walked in what he took
to be a contrary direction, feeling that the chance of going over the
cliff-side lent an agreeable excitement to a pastime that threatened
to become monotonous. This was assuming the cliff-side to be somewhere
near; and he was beginning to feel that it might be anywhere, under
his feet for all he knew, when the fog lifted a little from the high
ground, and he saw that he had lost his bearings altogether. He had
been going round and round through these circles without returning to
the point he started from. He went forward less cautiously in a larger
round, and then he suddenly stood still. He was not alone.

His foreground had widened slightly and a figure stood in the middle
of it. There was something familiar in the blurred outlines, traced as
if by a watery finger on the wall of mist. An idea had taken shape
stealthily behind him and flung its shadow there. The idea was Lucia
Harden. The fog hung in her hair in drops like rain; it made her grey
dress cling close about her straight, fine limbs; it gave its own
grandeur and indistinctness to her solitary figure.

She turned, unstartled, but with an air of imperfect recognition. He
raised his hat; the hat with the green ribbon on it.

"I beg your pardon, but can you tell me the shortest cut to Harmouth?
I think I've lost my way."

She answered absently. "You are all right. Turn to the left, and
you'll find the path along the cliff. It will bring you out on to
Harmouth beach."

He followed the path she had pointed out. Still absently she looked
after him, a dim figure going down into the fog, and it occurred to
her that she had sent him on a dangerous way. There were rabbit wires
and pitfalls on that path; places where the cliff was eaten away under
its curling edge of turf, and for Mr. Rickman, who didn't know his
ground, a single step might mean death.

She could not see him now. She called to him; "Mr. Rickman!" but there
was no answer; only the sound of Mr. Rickman going down deeper. She
called again, a little imperiously, and yet again. The last time her
voice carried well, for there was the vibrating note of terror in it.
He turned and saw her coming down the path towards him.

"I forgot," she said, still with the slight tremor of fear in her
voice. It seemed to draw out and intensify its sweetness. "That path
isn't safe in a fog like this. You had better go round by the road."

"Oh, thanks. You shouldn't have troubled. I should have got on all
right." They were climbing up the moor together.

"I'm afraid you wouldn't. I wasn't thinking, or I would never have
sent you that way."

"Why not? It was a very good way."

"Yes. But you were going down into the thick of the fog. You might
easily have walked over the cliff--and broken your neck."

He laughed as if that was the most delightfully humorous idea.

"I don't know," said he, "that it would have mattered very much if I
had."

She said nothing. She never did when he made these excursions into the
personal. Of course it would not have mattered to Miss Harden if he
had gone over the cliff. He had been guilty, not only of an
unpardonable social solecism, but of a still more unpardonable
platitude.

They had reached the top of the cliff, and Lucia stood still.

"Isn't there another short cut cut across the valley?" he asked.

"There is; but I don't advise you to try it. And there is a way round
by the road--if you can find it."

He smiled. Had he tried to approach her too soon, and was she
reminding him that short cuts are dangerous? There was a way round--if
he could find it. If indeed!

"Oh, I shall find it all right," said he, inspired by his double
meaning.

"I don't think you will, if the fog lasts. I am going that way and I
had better show you."

Show him? Was it possible?

She led the way, all too swiftly, yet with a certain leisure in her
haste. He followed with a shy delight.

He was familiar enough by this time with her indoor aspect, with her
unique and perfect manner of sitting still; now he saw that her beauty
was of that rare kind that is most beautiful in movement. He would
have liked that walk to last for ever, for the pure pleasure of
following, now the delicate poise of her head, now the faint ripple of
her shoulders under her thin coat, now the lines of her skirt breaking
and flowing with the almost imperceptible swinging of her hips.

Her beauty, as he now reflected, was of the sort that dwells less in
the parts than in the whole, it was subtle, pervading, and profound.
It rejected all but the finer elements of sex. In those light
vanishing curves her womanhood was more suggested than defined; it
dawned on him in tender adumbration rather than in light. Such beauty
is eloquent and prophetic through its richness of association, its
kindred with all forms of loveliness. As Lucia moved she parted with
some of that remoter quality that had first fascinated, then estranged
him; she took on the grace of the creatures that live free in the
sunlight and in the open air.

The mist shut them in with its grey walls. There was nothing to be
seen but the patch of grass trodden by her feet, and her moving
figure, grey on grey.

The walk was somewhat lacking in incident and conversational openings.
Such as occurred seemed, like Kitty Palliser's hat, to be packed with
meaning. There was the moment, the dreadful moment, when he lagged
behind and lost sight of her. The moment, his opportunity, when an
enormous bramble caught and pinned her by the feet and skirt. She
tried to tread on it with one foot and walk away from it with the
other, a thing manifestly impossible and absurd. Besides, it
hurt--horribly. He knelt before her on the wet moor, unconscious of
his brand-new trousers, conscious of nothing but the exquisite moment;
and, with hands that trembled violently, freed first her delicate feet
and then her skirt. He breathed hard, for the operation was intricate
and took time. That bramble seemed to have neither beginning nor end,
it branched out in all directions and was set with multitudinous and
powerful thorns. Lucia stood still, being indeed unable to move, and
watched his long, slender fingers adroitly disentangling her.

"I'm afraid you're hurting yourself," said she.

"Not at all," said Mr. Rickman gallantly, though the thorns tortured
his hands, drawing drops of blood. His bliss annihilated pain.

"Take care," said she, "you are letting yourself get terribly torn."

He took no notice; but breathed harder than ever. "There, I've got it
all off now, I think."

"Thank you very much." She drew her skirt gently from his detaining
grasp.

"No--wait--please. There's a great hulking brute of a thorn stuck in
the hem."

She waited.

"Confound my clumsiness! I've done it now!"

"Done what?" She looked down; on the dainty hem there appeared three
distinct crimson stains. Mr. Rickman's face was crimson, too, with a
flush of agony. Whatever he did for her his clumsiness made wrong.

"I'm awfully sorry, but I've ruined your--your pretty dress, Miss
Harden."

For it was a pretty, a very pretty, a charming dress. And he was
making matters worse by rubbing it with his pocket-handkerchief.

"Please--please don't bother," said she, "it doesn't matter." (How
different from the behaviour of Miss Walker when Spinks spilt the
melted butter on her shoulder!) "You've hurt your own hands more than
my dress."

The episode seemed significant of the perils that awaited him in his
intercourse with Miss Harden.

She went on. The narrow hill-track ended in the broad bridle-path that
goes straight up Harcombe (not Harmouth) valley. He wondered, with
quite painful perplexity, whether he ought still to follow at a
discreet distance, or whether he might now walk beside her. She
settled the question by turning round and waiting for him to come up
with her. So they went up the valley together, and together climbed
the steep road that leads out of it and back in the direction they had
just left. The mist was thinner here at the top of the hill, and
Rickman recognized the road he had crossed when he had turned
eastwards that morning. He could now have found his way back perfectly
well; but he did not say so. A few minutes' walk brought them to the
place where he had sat down in his misery and looked over Harmouth
valley.