Harmouth beach is a safe place for scandal; for even a steep-pitched
organ monotone with a brilliant feminine flourish on the top of it are
lost in the accompaniment of the sea. So happily for him no word of
the dialogue reached Rickman. All the same, to have a pair of blank
blue eyes, and a tortoiseshell binocular levelled at him in that
fashion is a little disturbing to a young man just recovering from a
nervous fever; and Rickman got up and dragged himself to the other end
of the esplanade out of the reach of the enemy's fire. Therefore he
did not see that Miss Palliser, who had been watching the scene from a
balcony on the front, had come down and joined the group; neither did
he hear her cheerful replies to a volley of inquiries.

"Yes; I've seen her. Nice day isn't it? What? No, I wouldn't if I
were you. I say, what a swagger eye-glass! Jolly, those long stems,
aren't they? You can stare for ever without pinching your nose or
gouging your next door neighbour's eye out with your elbow--Oh yes,
rather; he's a friend of Horace Jewdwine's. Do observe Tubs bathing;
his figure is not adapted--Did you say a gentleman? Yes, no, yes; ask
somebody else. It entirely depends on the point of view. He's an
awfully good sort. _Really_, Tubs ought to be made to bathe before
breakfast, when there's nobody about. Yes, of course she did. She gave
him the work to please Mr. Jewdwine, I suppose. He's been ill, poor
little beggar; I must go and speak to him."

After having thus first harried, then effectually baffled the enemy,
Miss Palliser started with a swinging stride in pursuit of Mr.
Rickman. He sat alone in an attitude of extreme dejection, on the
stones of an unfinished and forsaken jetty that marked the farthest
western limit of the esplanade. Having turned his back on that public
rendezvous, he was unaware of Miss Palliser's approach until she stood
beside him.

"Glad to see you out again," said she.

He sprang to his feet and raised his hat. At the first sight of his
face Miss Palliser had a shrewd idea of the cause and nature of his
illness.

"Thank you so much for your kind messages. I'm all right again, as you
see."

"I see nothing of the sort, as yet." She had meant to tell him that it
was Lucia who had sent her to inquire; but she thought better of it.

"Oh, well, I ought to get round in this bracing air."

"Harmouth air," said Kitty, "is not particularly bracing. In fact it's
very relaxing. It probably helped you to break down."

"Well, I shall be out of it soon, anyway." He sighed. "Miss Palliser,
can you tell me if Miss Harden has come back?"

"She came back the day before yesterday."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes, I've seen her."

There was a long pause, filled by the insistent clamour of the sea.
His next question was less audible to the outer than to the inner ear.

"How is she?"

Miss Palliser was seldom at a loss for a word; but this time she
hesitated. "She--she is very plucky."

There was another and a longer pause in which neither had the courage
to look at the other.

"Can I--Would it be possible for me to see her?"

Miss Palliser did not answer.

"I wouldn't dream of asking her, except that I've got something on my
mind."

"And she--my dear man, she's got everything on her mind."

"I know. I--I want to see her on business."

Miss Palliser's lithe figure grew rigid. She turned on him a look of
indignation and contempt. "Everybody wants to see her on business. But
some of them have had the grace to wait."

He smiled in the faint tolerant manner of a man so steeped in the
bitterness of the situation that no comment on it can add a further
sting.

"I can't wait. My business hasn't much to do with me; but it has a
great deal to do with Miss Harden."

She looked at him as he spoke. Something in his face and in his voice
too made her feel that her judgement of him had been unspeakably,
unpardonably coarse.

"I beg your pardon," she said gently.

"Oh don't. I'm not surprised that you thought that of me."

"I didn't think it. I don't quite know what I'm saying. I've spent the
last two days trying to keep fools from worrying her. I hate the
people who want to go to her; I hate the people who keep away; I hate
them all. But I'm sorry I spoke like that to you. You look horribly
ill."

"I'm not ill. But I'm nearly out of my mind about this business."

"What is it? Tell me, has it anything to do with the library?

"Yes."

"Well; the library's going to be sold."

"I know. That's what I want to speak to her about."

"There's not a bit of good in speaking to her. There are at this
moment," said Kitty incisively, "two persons in the house who call
themselves the men in possession."

"The brutes--"

"You may as well sit down. You can't turn them out, they're two to
one, and their position is, I believe, legally sound."

"I must go to her at once--I knew this would happen--Miss Palliser, is
any one with her?"

"I am with her. I'm going back to her in a minute; but I want to talk
to you first. Everybody's looking at us, but that can't be helped. Did
you say you _knew_ this would happen?"

"Yes--Miss Palliser, I'm in the most intolerable position with regard
to Miss Harden."

"You knew they were making these arrangements?"

"Oh yes, I knew it all the time I was working for her. What's more,
I'm supposed to be the agent for the sale."

"Well--if it's got to be sold, why not?"

"Well, you see, my father's only an ordinary dealer. I'm about the
only person concerned who knows the real value and I know that it's
been undervalued. Of course, without the smallest dishonesty on Mr.
Pilkington's part."

"Mr. who?" Kitty had not yet heard of Mr. Pilkington.

"Pilkington."

"What's his address?"

He gave it her.

Kitty made a note of the name and address.

"Unfortunately Mr. Pilkington has an absolute right to sell it, and my
father has an absolute right to buy it."

"Well, somebody's got to buy it, I suppose?"

"Yes, but it seems to me we oughtn't to do anything till we know
whether any of Miss Harden's people will come forward."

"She is the last of her people."

"How about Mr. Jewdwine? He's her cousin."

"On her mother's side."

"Still he's her cousin. I wrote to him ten days ago; and I haven't got
any answer as yet."

"What did you say to him?"

"I invited him to step in and buy the library over our heads."

"And how much would he have had to pay for it?"

"Probably more than one thousand two hundred."

"Well--if you think that Mr. Jewdwine is the man to deal so lightly
with two hundred pounds, let alone the thousand! Really, that's the
quaintest thing you've done yet. May I ask if this is the way you
generally do business?"

"No, I can't say that it is."

"Well, well, you were very safe."

"Safe? I don't want to be safe. Don't you see how horrible it is for
me? I'd give anything if he or anyone else would come in now and walk
over us."

"Still, I don't wonder that you got no answer to your very remarkable
proposal."

"It seemed to me a very simple and obvious proposal."

"I don't know much about business," said Kitty, "but I can think of a
much more simple and obvious one. Why can't your people buy in the
library and sell it again for Miss Harden on commission?"

"Do you suppose I haven't thought of that? It would be very simple and
obvious if it rested with me, but I'm afraid my father mightn't see it
in the same light. You see, the thing doesn't lie between Miss Harden
and me, but between my father and Mr. Pilkington."

"I don't understand."

"It's this way. My father won't be buying the library from Miss
Harden, but from Mr. Pilkington. And--my father is a man of business."

"And you most certainly are not."

"So he isn't likely to give any more for it than he can help."

"Of course not."

"Well, but--do you know what the library was valued at?"

Kitty did, and she would have blurted it out had not an inner voice
told her to be discreet for once. He took her silence for a confession
of ignorance.

"Would you think a thousand pounds an absurdly high valuation?"

"I don't know."

Kitty tried to banish all expression from her face. She really knew
very little about business and was as yet unaware of the necessary
publicity of bills of sale. The suspicion crossed her mind that
Rickman, in his father's interests, might be trying to pump her as to
the smallest sum that need be offered.

"Because," he added, "it isn't. Miss Harden stands to lose something
like three thousand pounds by it."

Kitty's evil surmises vanished utterly. "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed,
"how do you make that out?"

"It's only the difference between what the library ought to fetch and
what will be given for it. Of course no dealer could give the _full_
value; still, between one thousand and four thousand there's a
considerable difference."

"And who pockets it?"

"My fa--the dealer, if he succeeds in selling again to the best
advantage. He might not, and my father, as it happens, considers that
he's taking a great risk. But I know more about it than he does, and I
don't agree with him. That's why I don't want him to get hold of those
books if I can help it."

Kitty was thoughtful.

"You see," he continued, "I know he'd like to do what he thinks
generous under the circumstances, but he isn't interested in Miss
Harden, and he _is_ interested in the Harden library. It's a chance
that a dealer like him only gets once in a lifetime and I'm afraid it
isn't in human nature to let it go."

"But," said Kitty wildly, "he _must_ let it go. You must make him. Do
you mean to say you're going to sit and look on calmly while Miss
Harden loses three thousand pounds?"

"I'm not looking on calmly. On the contrary, I've lost my head."

"What's the good of losing your head, if Miss Harden loses her money?
What do you propose to do _besides_ losing your head? Lose time I
suppose? As if you hadn't lost enough already."

"I wrote to Mr. Jewdwine as soon as I heard of Sir Frederick Harden's
death. Still, you're right, I did lose time; and time was everything.
You can't reproach me more than I reproach myself."

"My dear man, I'm not reproaching you. I only want to know what you're
going to _do_?"

"Do? Is there anything left for me to do?"

"Not much, that I can see."

"If I'd only spoken straight out in the beginning--"

"Do you mean to her?"

"To her." He whispered the pronoun so softly that it sounded like a
sigh.

"Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I? I can see it was the one honest thing to do. But I
thought I'd no business to know about her father's affairs if she
didn't; and certainly no business to talk about them."

"No. I don't see how you could have done it."

"All the same I'd made up my mind to do it that morning--when the
telegram came. That stopped me."

"You were well out of it. You don't know what an awful thing it would
have been to do. She worshipped her father. Is this what you've been
making yourself ill about?"

"I suppose so. You know how adorably kind she was to me?"

"I can guess. She is adorably kind to every one," said Kitty, gentle
but astute.

"And, you see, I've behaved dishonourably to her."

"No. I don't see that."

"Don't you? Don't you? Why, my father sent me partly as his agent, and
all the time she believed I was only working for her."

"Did you behave as your father's agent?"

"No. But I let her slave from morning till night over that catalogue."

"Which she would have done in any case."

"Don't you see that I ought to have backed out of it altogether, in
the very beginning?"

"Ah yes--if everybody did what they ought."

"I tried twice, but it was no good. I suppose I didn't try hard
enough."

"What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?"

"That's how I argued. But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn't go
away. Of course, it was an abominable position, but I assure you it
felt like heaven when it didn't feel like 'ell."

His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of
his lapse. And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the
smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.

It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable
confession. But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was
his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered,
made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.

She wondered how it came that, when her mind was as full as it could
be of Lucia and her affairs, it could give such concentrated attention
to him and his. If he had been what the tortoiseshell eye-glass took
him for, a common man, it ought to have been easy and natural to
dismiss him. But she could not dismiss him. There was some force in
him, not consciously exerted, which held her there on that conspicuous
seat beside him under the gaze of the tortoiseshell eye-glass. Kitty
was by no means deficient in what she had called "profane fancy," and
she felt to her finger tips that she was making a spectacle of herself
at the end of the esplanade. Their backs at this moment she knew must
be standing out very clear and bold against the sky-line. But she
herself was losing the keen sense she had once had of his
inappropriateness to the scenes he moved in. Wherever he was he was
natural; he was (she had it in one word) sincere, as few people are
sincere nowadays. He was not a common man. That was it. All along it
had been the justification of their strange proceedings, this fact
that he was not common, that he was indeed unique. On that ground
Lucia had always met him, and she had ignored the rest. Kitty was
trying to sympathize with Lucia.

"But," he went on, simply, "I can't tell her that."

"No, you can't tell her that, but you can tell her everything else.
Look here, supposing that instead of sitting here tearing your
nervous system to tatters you go straight away and do it."

"What will she think of me?"

"Think of you? If she thinks of you at all, she'll bless you for
having spared her father's memory up to the last possible minute."

"Has it occurred to you that my motives are open to the worst
construction?"

"Well, frankly, it has. But it won't occur to Miss Harden. Go to her
and tell her everything."

"After all, what am I to tell her?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter much what you tell her now."

"It matters a great deal to me. I don't want her to think me more
dishonourable than I am."

"Oh, she won't do that."

"Perhaps she can't?"

"Well, you see, I don't know how dishonourable you've been. I only
know if I'd done a dishonourable thing--if I'd done--oh, the most
disgraceful thing I can imagine, a thing I couldn't _possibly_ tell to
anybody else, I wouldn't mind telling Lucia Harden. I should _have_ to
tell her. It wouldn't matter. She's so perfectly good, that your own
little amateur efforts in that line simply aren't in it; so when it
comes to telling her things, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a
lamb. And wait a minute; you're not likely to make a lamb of your
sheep; but don't go to the other extreme, and make a full-grown sheep
of your lamb."

"I shall not deceive her."

"You couldn't. She's not only a good woman, but a very clever one,
though she doesn't let you see it. Mind you, you won't find her clever
about stupid things. I doubt if you'll be able to make her understand
all this library affair. But she'll understand _your_ business."

They rose, and walked together, forgetful of the eagerly observant
group.

"Could she see me to-day--this evening? I'm going to-morrow."

"Yes, I'll tell her you're coming. When you _do_ see her, don't be
afraid--speak out."

"I'm not afraid of speaking to her--I'm afraid--"

"Of what?"

"Simply of _seeing_ her."

"You mean you are afraid of seeing her changed?" She understood him;
for it was what she herself had been afraid of.

"Horribly afraid."

"My dear Mr. Rickman, people in great trouble don't change to other
people. They only change to themselves."

He raised his hat and turned from her without speaking.

Kitty felt remorseful as she looked after him, for she had not
scrupled to sacrifice him to her idea. Kitty's idea was to get as high
a price as possible out of Rickman Senior, and Rickman Junior was the
only man who could get it. If the object was to shunt Rickman Senior
altogether, Rickman Junior could be depended on for that, too. She
could see that under the influence of his unhappy passion he had
absolutely detached himself from his father's interests and his own.
Kitty was profoundly sorry for him, and if she had yielded to her
impulses of mercy and pity she would have kept him from Lucia as she
would have kept a poor insane moth from the candle. It might be
necessary to turn the moth out of doors in order to save it,
and--well, she would have turned him out of doors, too, in sheer mercy
and pity. But Kitty had a practical mind, and that practical mind
perceived the services that might be rendered by a person so
suicidally inspired. If she had read him aright, fire and water were
nothing to what Mr. Rickman was prepared to go through for Lucia.
Therefore she sent him to Lucia.

But it was on his own account, for his healing and his consolation,
that she advised him to make a clean breast of it.




CHAPTER XXIX


Lucia was in the library and alone. Everything was as she had left it
that morning two weeks ago; she saw the same solid floor and ceiling,
the same faded Persian rugs, the same yellow pale busts on their tall
pedestals, the same bookshelves, wing after wing and row upon row. The
south lattice still showed through its leaded lozenge panes the bright
green lawn, the beech tree and the blue sky; the west lattice held the
valley and the hills, with the river, a sinuous band of silver between
the emerald and the amethyst. These things were so woven with the
tissue of her mind that the sense of them had remained with her during
the terrible seven days at Cannes. But now they appeared to her
stripped of their air of permanence and familiarity. They were blurred
and insubstantial, like things remembered rather than actually seen.
All that subdued and tender loveliness belonged only to her young
past, and she had been torn from it so violently, it had been flung so
far behind her, that it seemed to her at the moment incredible and
impossible. Life, that had hitherto dealt with her so gently and so
graciously, had in the last two weeks turned hideous and brutal.

She had no very clear idea of how she had got to Cannes. The going was
wiped out. She had been driven through the garden of the Villa des
Palmes and had recognized it as the garden of her dream. She had
passed (through the doors of the Villa) into a state of stupor in
which she had recognized nothing, and thence into a sequence of states
which she could now too well recall. There had been a state of waking,
in which she had found herself in a little gilt and velvet salon.
There was another woman in it, a vast woman in a thin black dress
twinkling all over with little black eyes. She had a great white
powdered face, and they called her Madame. Then followed a state of
hallucination, in which she believed Madame to be an innocent person,
the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked
at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of
imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details
of her father's death as presented brokenly by Madame. Last had come a
state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame. After
that something had appeared to her in vivid violent illumination.

So vivid and so violent that it seemed to her even now that she was
still sitting in the gilt and velvet salon in the Villa des Palmes;
she still saw the thin green light that came slanting through the
half-closed shutters; warm southern smells floated in, they mixed with
the thick stifling scent of patchouli and orris root wafted from
Madame as she went to and fro, and with some other odour, bitter and
sickly, that came from the room beyond.

She had made out certain familiar objects in this unfamiliar scene.
Her father's travelling rug lay folded on the red velvet sofa; his cap
and gloves were there, just as he had flung them down; his violin,
dumb in its black coffin-like case, stood propped up against the wall.
Everywhere else (only gradually discerned) were things belonging to
Madame, evidence of her supreme and intimate occupation of the room.

And outside was the garden of sharp aloes and palms, where, as she
believed, her father's spirit had gone looking for her, and had not
found her. His body lay in the inner room behind the closed door.

That horrible little gilt and velvet salon! Whenever she thought of it
she saw Madame; she saw Madame's little dry eyes blinking in her great
white powdered face; she saw the vast heaving of Madame's bust where
the little jet sequins shivered and shook; she heard her voice cooing
and purring voluptuous condolence; and she felt again her own passion
of disgust and fear as she wrenched herself free from the warm scented
body, quivering in its thin black sheath.

Then she saw the inner room behind the closed door. Nothing was
obscure and secret there. The slats of the shutter let in great shafts
of daylight; the coffin stood in the middle of the room, raised on
trestles, and covered with a white sheet. A crucifix stood at the head
of the coffin, propped against a chest of drawers. Three candles,
flickering in their sockets, were set on the table at its foot. On
each knob of the two top-drawers hung a wreath of yellow immortelles.

That long coffin, raised high on its trestles, seemed to fill the
little room. Lucia saw it now, she saw the face in it turned up to the
ceiling, sharp and yellow, the limp red moustache hanging like a
curtain over the half-open mouth. No trace of the tilted faun-like
smile.

She would never get away from that terrible room. The pattern of its
walls (garlands of pink rosebuds between blue stripes) was stamped
upon her brain. There too, as in the salon, abode the inextinguishable
odour shaken from Madame's dress, it mixed with the hot reek of
carbolic and the bitter stabbing odour of the coffin.

On the floor by the trestles lay a glove, a long enormous glove,
Madame's glove; it was greyish white, and wrinkled like the cast skin
of a snake. The finger of its fellow hung from the chest of drawers
beside the crucifix. It pointed downwards at the dead man.

Within the gay garlanded walls, surrounded by those symbols and
souvenirs of Madame, he lay with his face turned up to the ceiling,
and his mouth half open, as if it still gasped piteously for breath.
One more breath to beg for forgiveness, to defend himself, explain;
while bit by bit the place he had lived in gave up his secret.

She could not tell whether she forgave him or not. When she stood by
him there she could have implored _his_ forgiveness for having thus
come upon him unawares, for having found what he had taken such pains
to hide from her. It seemed somehow cruel and unfair. She did not tax
him with hypocrisy, because he had so long contrived to keep himself
clean in her sight; she was grateful to him for having spared her this
knowledge. But whether she forgave him or not--no, looking back on it
at this moment she could not tell. Lucia was too young for the great
forgiveness that comes of understanding.

She walked up and down the library, staring at the books, at the
tables piled with papers; she stood at each window in turn and looked
out on the garden, the valley and the hills, Harmouth Gap, and the
long brown rampart line of Muttersmoor. It was simply impossible for
her to realize their once intimate relation to her life.

She was unaware that her mood was chiefly the result of physical and
mental exhaustion. It seemed to her rather that she had acquired
strange powers of insight, that she had pierced to the back of the
illusion. Never had she possessed so luminous a sense of the unreality
of things. She found this view consoling, for it is the desire of
unhappy youth that there shall be no permanence where there is pain.

On this unreal and insubstantial background faces came and went all
day long, faces solemn and obsequious, faces glazed and feverish with
emotion; Robert's face with red-rimmed eyes hiding Robert's
unutterable sympathy under a thin mask of fright; Kitty's face with an
entirely new expression on it; and her own face met them with an
incomprehensible and tearless calm. For she was not even sure of that,
not even sure of her own sorrow. She had had to do with sorrow once
before, when her grandfather died, and she thought she would be sure
to know it when it came to her again; but she had no name for this new
feeling, and at times it seemed to her that it was not sorrow at all.

Whatever it was, she had determined to bear it as far as possible
alone. She was almost sorry that she had not refused Kitty's offer to
stay with her; she suffered so from Kitty's inability to conceal the
truth. Not that Kitty said anything; it was her unnatural silence that
was so terrible. With that extraordinary acuteness that had come upon
her now Lucia saw, in the involuntary hardening and flushing of
Kitty's face, that in Kitty's mind her father was not only suspected,
but condemned. She was afraid lest she herself should in some moments
of weakness betray him; and Kitty's strange unusual tenderness
inspired her with terror. She shrank even from old Mrs. Palliser,
Kitty's mother, with her soft trembling face and clinging hands. Their
sympathy was poignant and unnerving, and she needed all her strength
for the things she had to do.

She did them, too. While one half of her brain had slackened its grip
of the world, the other half retained the most perfect grasp of
certain necessary details. She spent the morning with her father's
solicitor, while he explained to her the first principles of finance,
and the inner meaning of mortgages and bills of sale. She understood
clearly that the things which would naturally have come to her on her
father's death belonged in a certain sense to Mr. Richard Pilkington
of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr. Schofield, poor man, had approached this
branch of his subject gently and gingerly, with every delicacy of
phrasing that his fancy could suggest. He leaned back in his chair and
looked at her through half-closed eyes, respectfully veiling the
shrewdness of his gaze. Lucia had at first displayed so little
interest and intelligence that he felt himself compelled to a broader
and simpler statement of the facts. With the exception of her own
personal possessions, nothing in Court House remained to her, nothing,
not a book, not a solitary piece of drawing-room furniture. Mr.
Pilkington's bill of sale was, he grieved to say, inclusive of
everything, from the Harden library and the great gallery of
portraits, to the glass and china in the pantry, and the blankets on
the beds. "Not even," he had said, "that little paper weight that you
have in your hand, Miss Harden." And Lucia had examined the paper
weight as if she saw it for the first time; she put it down and
smiled. It struck her as incomprehensible, ludicrous almost that any
one could spend so much passion and solemnity on things so
unimportant, so irrelevant; she was not in the least surprised to hear
that they did not belong to her; the inconceivable thing was that they
ever had belonged to her.

And as the solicitor looked at her the corners of his mouth twitched
with a little spasm of pity; his eyes lost their veiled shrewdness,
and when she smiled they stared in frankest fright. For a moment he
supposed that the shock of his announcement had turned her brain. It
never occurred to that astute intelligence that she was smiling at
his own simplicity.

When he had left she returned to the writing-table; she sorted and
arranged a disordered heap of business letters, letters of condolence
and tradesmen's bills. She pushed aside the letters of condolence--Kitty
would answer those. She unlocked a drawer and took from it two open
envelopes scored with many postmarks and addressed to Harmouth, to
Cannes and to Harmouth again; these she scrutinized anxiously, as if
they disclosed some secret guarded by their contents. Then she read
the letters carefully all over again.

One was from her cousin Edith Jewdwine. Edith's sympathy covered two
sheets; it flowed from her pen, facile and fluent. Edith had had the
influenza, otherwise Edith would have come to Lucia at once. Could not
Lucia come to her instead? Edith could not bear to think of Lucia
alone there in her trouble, in that great big house. She was glad that
Kitty Palliser was with her. If only she had not been so unfortunate
as to catch influenza, and so on!

Lucia was sorry that Edith had influenza, but she was not sorry that
she had not come. She did not want Edith with her.

The other letter was from Horace. Horace had refined his expressions
of condolence into one faultless phrase. The rest of his letter
consisted of apologies and offers of service. These his close cramped
handwriting confined to the centre of the sheet, leaving a broad and
decent margin to suggest the inexpressible. He had heard of his
uncle's death indirectly; why had she not sent for him? If she had
wired to him at once he could have made arrangements to meet and take
her to Cannes, or he could have joined her there and brought her home.
At present he was overwhelmed with business; but he hoped to run down
to Harmouth at the end of the week, and travel up to town with her. He
understood that she was going to stay with Edith. Busy as he was, he
would come now, at any minute, if he could be of any immediate use.
She had only to wire if she wanted him.

She laid down that letter, pushed it aside, took it up again, and
read it a second time, as if to satisfy herself as to the writer's
meaning. She was not sure as to what Horace was or was not willing to
do, but there could be no doubt that he was deeply sorry for her. Why
had she not sent for him? Why indeed? Her first instinct had been to
send for him. She had only to let him know that she was in trouble,
and he would have come to her at any inconvenience to himself. And
that, of course, was why she had not sent. It would have been so
impossible for him to refuse.

And now she was thankful that she had spared him, and that he had not
followed her to those terrible rooms in the Villa des Palmes, that he
knew nothing of those seven days. She would have endured any
suffering, paid any price to obliterate the memory of them. It was
horrible to think how nearly Horace had been there. Horace of all
people--the fastidious, the immaculate, the merciless. If she had
found it hard to judge her dead father tenderly, she knew what
Horace's judgement would have been.

She had "only to wire if she wanted him." Oh no; he was the last
person that she wanted now.

Those two letters she answered without more delay. To Horace she wrote
in a reassuring manner, so as to absolve him from any sense of
obligation he might happen to feel. She would rather he came down a
little later than he proposed. Meanwhile he was not to be anxious, for
Mr. Schofield was managing her affairs extremely well. She admitted
that when those wonderful affairs were settled her income would be but
small (she considered that this was a thing Horace ought to be told
before--before he wrote any more letters). She added that the library,
the pictures and the furniture would have to be sold. And Court House,
too, she was afraid. (That also was a fact that must not be concealed
from him for a moment. It seemed to concern Horace so much more than
it did her.) These things, which it was her duty to tell him, she told
simply and plainly. But she omitted to mention that two men in
possession were sitting in the housekeeper's room, in attitudes of
more or less constraint. She ended by assuring Horace of her
gratitude, with a fervency which suggested that he had some cause to
doubt it. And indeed, at the moment, she could hardly tell whether
she were more grateful to him for offering to come to her or for
having stopped away.

All this necessary business Lucia transacted with one half of her
mind; while the other stood far off, possessed by its sense of
unreality, of illusion.

Next she went through the tradesmen's bills. There were a great many
people to be paid, and unless Court House were sold there would be
nothing to pay them with. It was at this point that Robert came in
with the announcement that Mr. Rickman had called and wished to see
her.

At first (the active intelligence being busy with accounts), her only
idea was that she owed Mr. Rickman fifteen pounds and that when all
debts were paid fifteen pounds would represent a very solid portion of
her income. Then her dreaming self awoke to the memory of something
unachieved, an obligation rashly incurred, a promise that could never
be fulfilled.

Yes. She would see Mr. Rickman.




CHAPTER XXX


Lucia had risen and was standing in the embrasure of the south window.
She had her back to the door, so that she could not see him as he came
in.

He wondered how on earth he was going to get over the space between
the window and the door. A sudden wave of weakness went through his
body; he had horrible sensations of sinking at the middle and of
giving way altogether at the knees. He had been afraid of seeing her
suffer; now he knew that what he was really afraid of was her fear of
seeing him. He expected to see her face set in abhorrence of his
sympathy, her body shrink in anticipation of a touch on her pain.

Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had
divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she
held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had
happened.

His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his
breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.

"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me--"

"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not
come. Sit down, please."

She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.

He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the
table. She turned so as to face him.

She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest
on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she _was_ changed, too. Her
girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But
the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from
the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms
the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it
lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin,
and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of
exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the
quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.

"You have been ill?" she said.

And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the
first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.

She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him
well at the hotel.

Decidedly she had grown older and her manner had grown older too. It
suggested that it was she who was the protector; that she wished, as
far as possible, to spare him in an interview which must necessarily
be painful. It was as if she remembered that he at any rate was young,
and that these gloomy circumstances must be highly distasteful to his
youth. In that she was the same as ever; every nerve in her shrank
from the pain of giving pain.

At least that was his first impression. And then (no consoling view
being really open to him) he told himself he was a fool to suppose
that in the circumstances she could think of him at all. He had
nothing tangible to go upon. He could see through it. He could see
perfectly through the smile, the self-possession, even the air of
polite and leisurely interest in his illness. She dwelt on him because
he was of all themes the one most indifferent to her. She was simply
holding herself in, according to the indestructible instincts of her
race.

He need not have been afraid of seeing her suffer; that, at any rate,
he would not see. To let him see it would have been to her an extreme
personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class.
This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood
between them, waving him away. It opened up again the impassable gulf.
He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from
her beyond all possibility of approach. She had not changed. She had
simply reverted to her type.

Her eyes waited for him to speak. But they were not the eyes he knew,
the eyes that had drawn him to confession. It was borne in upon him
that this (though it might be his last moment with her) was not the
moment to confess. There was a positive grossness in the idea of
unburdening himself in the presence of this incommunicable grief. It
was like putting in a claim for consideration as an equal sufferer. He
had no right to obtrude himself upon her at all. In her calm-eyed
attention there was a hint--a very delicate and gentle one--that he
would do well to be impersonal, business-like, and, above all, brief.

"It was about the library that I wanted to see you, Miss Harden."

"Was it? I was just going to ask you not to do anything more to the
catalogue if you have not finished it."

"I finished it ten days ago--before the twenty-seventh."

She smiled faintly. "Then you kept your promise. It doesn't matter.
What I most wanted to speak to you about was the secretaryship I
offered you. I'm afraid we must give it up."

"Oh--Miss Harden--" his tone expressed that he had always given it up,
that it was not to be thought of for an instant. But evidently she was
possessed with the idea that he had a claim upon her.

"I'm very sorry, but as things have turned out I shan't be able to
keep a secretary. In fact, as you may have heard, I'm not able to keep
anything hardly--not even my promises."

"Please--please don't think of it--"

"There is no use thinking of it. Still, I wanted you to know that I
really meant it--I believed it could be done. Of course I don't know
how much you really wanted it."

"Wanted it? I'd 'ave given half my life for a year of it."

Lucia's hand, laid lightly on the table's edge, felt a strong
vibration communicated to it from Mr. Rickman's arm. She looked up, in
time to see his white face quiver before he hid it with his hand.

"I'm so sorry. Did it mean so much to you?"

He smiled through his agony at the cause assigned to it. "I'm not
thinking of that. What it means to me--what it always will mean is
your goodness--in thinking of it. In thinking of it now."

It was his nearest approach to a sympathetic allusion.

She did not wince (perceptibly), but she ignored the allusion.

"Oh, that's nothing. You would have been of great use to me. If I
thought of helping you at all, my idea was simply--how shall I put
it?--to make up in some way for the harm I've done you."

"What harm have you ever done me?"

For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous
passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she
explained.

"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was
responsible for your illness."

He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well
have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not
know that."

"I knew it, though."

"You knew it? How did you know it?"

"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him
the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to
you about."

He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss
Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater
difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done,
point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a
statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.

"If," she said, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's
your father who is going to buy it."

He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father)
that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.

It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged
from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.

Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view. Her
practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human,
and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to
nothing less than a moral miracle. But Miss Harden would have a
higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate
he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than
his own, and if _he_ considered that his father was morally bound to
withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his
remaining in it. Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father
might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure
of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.

"Why shouldn't he buy it?" she asked.

"Because, I'm afraid, selling it in--in that way, you won't make much
money over it."

"Well--it's not a question of making money, it's a question of paying
a debt."

"How much you make--or lose--of course, depends on the amount of the
debt--what it was valued at."

Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet. She had the
required fact at her fingers' ends and instantly produced it. "It was
valued at exactly one thousand pounds."

"And it should have been valued at four. My father can't give anything
like that. We ought to be able to find somebody who can. But it might
take a considerable time."

"And there is no time. What do you advise me to do then?"

"Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that
would be all right. If we can't, I advise you to buy it back, or a
part of it, yourself. Buy back the books that make it valuable. You've
got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_
printed by Wynken de Worde." (He positively blushed as he consummated
this final act of treachery to Rickman's.) "And heaps of others
equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so. You can buy
them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand. If
Pilkington collars the rest he'll still be paid, and there may be
something over."

She considered a moment. "Has Mr. Pilkington any idea of the value of
those books?"

"I'm certain he hasn't. Only an expert could have."

"Would it be perfectly fair to him?"

"To _him_? Perfectly fair. You buy them at his own valuation."

"I see. I should like to do that--if--if it can be managed."

"I think it can be managed. My father isn't likely to settle with Mr.
Pilkington without consulting me. If he _has_ settled we must try and
get him to withdraw."

"Oh, surely there would be no difficulty about that?"

He said nothing. It was really terrible the way she took integrity for
granted. To be sure his father had a reputation with the family. He
remembered how Sir Joseph used to praise him to his face as the only
honest dealer in London. But Sir Joseph was in the habit of buying
books, not selling them.

He rose and turned away, evading her innocent eyes.

"I hope not. I'll see Mr. Pilkington about it. By the way, here _is_
Mr. Pilkington. Did you expect him?"

"No, I--" Her voice died away, extinguished in her horror.




CHAPTER XXXI


There could be no mistake about it.

Mr. Pilkington was coming by the private way, stepping softly over a
fair green lawn. The low golden light before sunset flooded the lawn
so that Mr. Pilkington walking in it was strangely and gloriously
illuminated. Everything about him shone, from his high silk hat to the
tips of his varnished boots. His frock coat and trousers of grey
summer suiting clung to his figure like a warm and sunny skin. All
over Mr. Pilkington and round about him there hung the atmosphere of
the City. Not of the actual murky labyrinth, roofed with fog, but of
the City as she stands transfigured before the eyes of the young
speculator, in her orient golden mood.

Lucia had seen him. The light died out of her face, her lips
straightened. She stood motionless, superb, intent. With such a look
and in such an attitude a Roman maiden might have listened to the feet
of the Vandal at the gate.

He was coming very swiftly, was Dicky, as if borne by an impetus of
conquest. As he caught sight of Miss Harden through the open window,
though he kept his head rigidly averted, his eyes slewed round towards
her, and at the same moment his fingers rose instinctively to his
little fair moustache. It was the gesture of the irresistible male.

"_Must_ I see him?" she asked helplessly. She had realized everything
in that moment.

"Not unless you like. Shall I deal with him?"

"If you would be so good. But no--it doesn't matter. I shall have to
see him later."

She sat down again and waited. The silence was so tense that it seemed
to bear the impact of her pulses; it throbbed and quivered with pain.
Outside, the sound of the pebbles, crunched under Pilkington's
footsteps, became a concert of shrieks.

Rickman did not offer to go as Mr. Pilkington advanced; for, Heaven
knew how, in some obscure and subtle way she had managed to convey to
him that his presence was a protection.

Mr. Pilkington entered the room with the air of a man completely
assured as to his reception. He bowed to Miss Harden; an extraordinary
bow. No words could have conveyed the exquisite intimations of Mr.
Pilkington's spine. It was as if he had said to her, "Madam, you
needn't be afraid; in your presence I am all deference and chivalry
and restraint." But no sooner had Dicky achieved this admirable effect
of refinement than he spoilt it all by the glance he levelled at young
Rickman. _That_ expressed nothing but the crude emotion of the
insolent male, baulked of his desire to find himself alone on the
field. It insulted her as brutally as any words by its unblushing
assumption of the attitude of sex.

"I must introduce myself, Miss 'Arden," he said, ignoring Rickman. "I
think I have _not_ had the pleasure--" His large mouth closed
reluctantly on the unfinished phrase.

He seated himself with circumstance, parting the tails of his coat
very carefully. He had chosen a seat opposite the window. As if
conscious of the glory of his appearance, he offered himself liberally
to the light. He let it play over his figure, a figure that youth
subdued to sleekness that would one day be corpulence; it drew out all
the yellow in his moustache and hair; it blazed in his gold-rimmed
eye-glass; thence it alighted, a pale watery splendour, on the bridge
of his nose. It was a bridge where two nationalities met and contended
for mastery. Mr. Pilkington's nose had started with a distinctly
Semitic intention, frustrated by the Anglo-Saxon in him, its downward
course being docked to the proportion of a snub. Nobody knew better
than Mr. Pilkington that it was that snub that saved him. He was proud
of it as a proof of his descent from the dominant race. Assisted by
his reluctantly closing mouth and double eye-glass it inspired
confidence, giving to Mr. Pilkington's face an expression of extreme
openness and candour. He was proud of his eye-glass too. He
considered that it made him look like a man of science or of letters.
But it didn't. It did much better for him than that. It took all the
subtlety out of his face and endowed it with an earnest and enormous
stare. And as that large mouth couldn't and wouldn't close properly,
his sentences had a way of dying off in a faint gasp, leaving a great
deal to the imagination. All these natural characteristics were
invaluable for business purposes.

But if you had asked Mr. Pilkington for the secret of his success, he
would have told you that he owed it to his possession of two
qualities, "bounce" and "tact." To both, mind you; for tact without
bounce will carry a man neither far nor high; while bounce without
tact will elevate him occasionally to his own perdition.
Conversationally he was furnished with tentacles sensitive to the
lightest touch of an idea; he had the very subtlest discernment of
shades within shades. He grasped with airy impact; he moved by a
delicate contact and recoil, a process he was pleased to describe as
"feelin' his way."

He did not rush brutally into business, as a man of coarser fibre
might have done. He removed his gloves, adjusted his eye-glass and
admired the view. He shrank from the suggestion that he had come to
"take possession," but clearly he could not take possession of the
view. It was a safe and soothing topic.

"You have a very glorious outlook here, Miss Harden."

Then Mr. Pilkington perceived a shade. Miss Harden's outlook was _not_
glorious.

By an almost visible recoil from his own blunder he strove to convey
an impression of excessive delicacy.

"Wot very exceptional weather we are enjoying--" Perceiving another
and a finer shade (for evidently Miss Harden was not enjoying the
weather, or indeed anything else) Mr. Pilkington again shifted his
ground. He spoke of books. He noticed with approval the arrangement of
the library. He admired the Harden taste in costly bindings, as if he
were by no means personally concerned with any of these things. And
thus by a delicate and imperceptible transition, he slid into his
theme.

"Now, as regards this--this sale, Miss Harden. I hope you
understand--"

"I understand that you are my father's chief creditor, and that the
sale is necessary."

"Quite so. But I'm most awfully sorry for the necessity As for time--I
don't want you to feel that you're pressed or hurried in any way." Mr.
Pilkington's eyes gazed up at her under their great glasses, humid and
immense. His lower lip drooped in an uncertain manner. He had a great
deal of nice feeling about him, had Dicky.

"I hope those men aren't making a nuisance of themselves They've had
strict orders to keep in the background I'm orf'ly upset," said Mr.
Pilkington in a thick emotional voice, "about this affair; and I want
to consider you, Miss Harden, in every possible way."

"You are very kind. But I would rather you didn't consider me, in any
way at all."

As she said this Mr. Rickman looked at her with a grave smile,
conveying (behind Mr. Pilkington's back) an unmistakable warning.

Mr. Pilkington smiled too, a large and fluttering smile as of one
indulgent to any little attempt at brilliance on the part of a young
lady under a cloud. Lucia swept him and his smile with her long and
steady gaze, a gaze which made Dicky exceedingly uncomfortable.

"I think if you have any arrangements to make, you had better see my
solicitor."

"I have an appointment," said Dicky, not without a certain dignity,
"with Mr. Schofield, to-morrow morning."

"Then I suppose what you want now is to look over the house?"

The question and the gaze were so direct that Dicky (who had meant to
amble delicately round that point for another quarter of an hour) lost
his head, dropped his eye-glass, and fairly let himself go.

"Well, perhaps as I _am_ here, I'd better 'ave a look round. Of
course--if--if it's in any way inconvenient--"

"Not in the least. You can look round at once."

She rang the bell. On her way to it she gathered up some books that
were lying out of sight and laid them on the table.

"These," she said to Rickman, "belong to the library. They must go
with the rest."

He looked at them. One was an Aldine Dante, he had seen her reading
it. He took Pilkington aside and said something to him in a tone which
Lucia could not hear. Her hand was on the door when Pilkington sprang
forward.

"One moment, Miss Harden. Everything must be sold in the regular way,
but if you'll tell me of any books you've a special fancy for, I'll
make a note of them and buy them in for you." He paused, awaiting the
breath of inspiration. It came. "For--for a merely nominal sum."

To do Dicky justice this delicate idea greatly commended itself to his
good nature. Business is business, but not willingly did Dicky inflict
pain, least of all upon a young and pretty woman. Besides he had an
eye to his reputation; he was disposed to do this thing handsomely.
Rickman envied him his inspiration, his "merely nominal sum."

"Thank you. The books were not mine," said Lucia in spite of another
meaning look from her ally.

"Quite so. But I should disregard that if I were you. Anyhow you can
think it over, and if you change your mind you can let me or Mr
Rickman know before the sale."

Lucia looked down at him from her height. "I shall not change my mind.
If I want to keep any of the books, I can buy them from Mr. Rickman."

She turned to Rickman in the doorway. "All the same, it was kind of
you to think of it." She said it very distinctly, so that Mr.
Pilkington could hear.

Rickman followed her out of the room and closed the door behind them.
She turned on him eyes positively luminous with trust. It was as if
she had abandoned the leading of her intellect and flung the reins on
the neck of her intuition.

"I was right, wasn't I? I would so much rather buy them back from
you."

"From my father?"

"It's the same thing, isn't it?"

He smiled sadly. "I'm afraid it isn't, quite. Why didn't you accept
his offer?"

"I couldn't." She shuddered slightly. Her face expressed her deep and
desperate repugnance. "I _can_ buy them back from you. He is really
arranging with your father, isn't he?"

"Yes." It was the third time that she had appealed from Pilkington to
him, and there was a profound humiliation in the thought that at this
precise moment the loathsome Dicky might be of more solid use to her
than he.

"Well then," she said almost triumphantly. "I shall be safe. You will
do your best for me."

It was a statement, but he met it as if it had been a question.

"I will indeed."

He saw that it was in identifying his father with him that she left it
to their honour.




CHAPTER XXXII


Dicky Pilkington did not belong to the aristocracy of finance. Indeed,
finance had not in any form claimed him at the first.

Under the grey frock-coat and gleaming shirt-front, hidden away behind
the unapparent splendours of Dicky Pilkington's attire (his undermost
garments were of woven silk), in a corner of his young barbarian heart
there lurked an obscure veneration for culture and for art. When his
day's work was done, the time that Dicky did not spend in the
promenade of the Jubilee Variety Theatre, he spent in reading Karl
Pearson and Robert Louis Stevenson, with his feet on the fender. He
knew the Greek characters. He _said_ he could tell Plato from
Aristotle by the look of the text. Dicky had begun life as a Junior
Journalist. But before that, long, long before, when he was an
innocent schoolboy, Dicky had a pair of wings, dear little cherubic
wings, that fluttered uneasily under his little jacket. The wings
moulted as Dicky grew older; they shrank (in the course of his
evolution) to mere rudimentary appendages, and poor Dicky flopped
instead of flying. Finally they dropped off and Dicky was much happier
without them. Rickman used to say that if you stripped him you saw the
marks of them still quite plainly; and Dicky was always stripping
himself and showing them. They proved to these writing fellows what he
might have been if he had only chosen. He had begun by being a poet
like the best of them, and in his heart of hearts Dicky believed that
it was as a poet he should end. His maxim upon this head was: "When
I've feathered my nest it will be time enough for me to sing."

Dicky's nest was not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun
to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon,
walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell
you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would
talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he
came to forsake literature for finance.

He had begun in a small way by financing little tradesmen, little
journalists and actresses in temporary difficulties; lending small
sums to distressed clergymen, to governesses and the mistresses of
boarding-houses. By charging a moderate interest he acquired a
character for fairness and straight-forwardness. Now and then he did
what he called a really tip-top generous thing. "Character," said
Dicky Pilkington, "is capital"; and at thirty he had managed to save
enough of it to live on without bothering about earning any more.

Then, by slow degrees, Dicky extended his business. He lent larger
sums at correspondingly higher interest. Then he let himself go. He
was caught by the glory of the thing, the poetry of finance. He soared
to all the heights and sounded all the depths of speculation. He took
risks with rapture. He fancied himself lending vast sums at giddy
interest. "That," said Dicky to his conscience, was to "cover his
risk." He hadn't forgotten that character is capital. And when it
occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he was making rather a
large hole in it, he would then achieve some colossal act of
generosity which set him on his legs again. So that Dicky Pilkington
was always happy in his conscience as in everything else.

He had been prepared to do the handsome thing by Miss Harden, only her
manner had somehow "choked him off." He could have afforded it, for he
considered this Freddy Harden business as his very largest deal. He
held a mortgage on the land, from the river to the top of Harcombe
Hill. There was any amount to be got out of the pictures and the
furniture. And the library was not altogether to be sneezed at. It had
been Fred Harden's last desperate resource, (rather poor security in
Dicky's opinion); but if the sum advanced had not been prodigious
(compared with the sums that had gone before it) the interest had
been high. So that, in returning from his tour of inspection, he felt
considerably elated.

Rickman, as he went down the High Street that evening, saw Dicky a
little way in front of him. He noticed that the financial agent was an
object of considerable interest to the people of Harmouth. Men stood
at shop doors and street corners, women (according to their social
standing) hung out of bedroom windows or hid behind parlour curtains
to look after him as he went. Here and there Rickman caught sullen and
indignant glances, derisive words and laughter. Evidently the spirit
of Harmouth was hostile to Dicky. A Harden was a Harden, and Sir
Frederick's magnificently complete disaster had moved even the
townspeople, his creditors.

The excitement caused by Dicky concentrated at the windows of the
London and Provincial Bank, where Sir Frederick had had a large
balance--overdrawn.

Harmouth High Street is a lane, wide at the top and narrow at the
bottom, which gives on to the esplanade between the Marine Hotel and
the Bank. At a certain distance these buildings cut the view into a
thin slip of grey beach and steep blue sea. The form of Dicky was now
visible in the centre of that slip, top-hatted, distinct against the
blue. He stood on the edge of the esplanade as on a railway platform,
reading the paper and smoking a cigar. From time to time, looking up
with an expression half visionary, half voluptuous, he puffed and spat
in dreamy rhythmic sequence.

"_Coelum, non animam_," said Rickman to himself, "they change their
skies, but not their habits." When he came up with him, he found the
soul of Pilkington disporting itself in its own airy element,
exchanging ideas with two young damsels who frolicked on the beach
below. Backwards and forwards flew the light-hearted banter, like
balls of sea-foam, Mr. Pilkington the inspirer and the inspired. The
after-glow of his last triumphant witticism still illuminated his
countenance when he turned again to the printed page.

Now, owing to its peculiar construction, Harmouth High Street acts as
a funnel for the off-shore breezes; they rush through it as they rush
through Windy Gap, that rift in the coast before which the wary
fisherman slackens sail. Just such an air was careering seawards when
Mr. Pilkington was about to perform the difficult feat of folding his
paper backwards. It smote one side of the broadsheet and tore it from
his grasp, making it flutter like a sail escaped from the lanyard. The
breeze dropped; it hovered; it waited like the wanton that it was; and
when Mr. Pilkington's free hand made a clutch at the flying columns,
it seized that moment to lift his hat from his head and dash it to the
ground. Then the demon of the wind entered into and possessed that
high thing; the hat rolled, it curvetted, it turned brim over crown,
it took wings and flew, low and eager like a cormorant; finally it
struck the beach, gathering a frightful impetus from the shock, and
bounded seawards, the pebbles beating from it a thin drum-like note.
Never was any created thing so tortured with indecent merriment in the
face of doom. The end seemed certain, for Dicky Pilkington, though he
joined in the hysterics of the crowd, had not compromised his dignity
by pursuit; when, just as the hat touched the foam of perdition, Molly
Trick, the fat bathing woman, interposed the bulwark of her body; she
stooped; she spread her wide skirts, and the maniac leapt into them as
into a haven.

The young men who watched this breezy incident over the blinds of the
London and Provincial Bank were immensely diverted. Even Rickman
laughed as Dicky turned to him his cheerful face buffeted by the wind.

Mr. Pilkington had put up at the same hotel as Rickman, and they found
themselves alone at the dinner-table.

"Glori-orious air this," said Mr. Pilkington. "I don't know how you
feel, young 'un, but there's a voice that tells me I shall dine."

Mr. Pilkington was not deceived by that prophetic voice. He dined with
appetite undiminished by his companion's gloom. From time to time he
rallied him on his coyness under the fascinations of beef-steak, lager
beer, apricots and Devonshire cream.

"Well, Razors," he said at last, "and wot do you think of the Harden
Library?"

Rickman was discreet. "Oh, it isn't bad for a private show. Sir
Frederick doesn't seem to have been much of a collector."

"Wasn't he, though! In his own line he was a pretty considerable
collector, quite a what d'you call 'em--virtuoso."

"Not very much virtue about him, I imagine."

"Well, whatever there may have been, in ten years that joker went
through his capital as if it had been a paper hoop. Slap through it
and out at the other side, on his feet, grinning at you."

"How did he manage it?"

"Cards--horses--women--everything you can name," said Dicky, "that's
amusing, and at the same time expensive. They're precious slow down
here in the country; but get 'em up to town, and there's nothing like
'em for going the pace, when they _do_ go it."

"His velocity must have been something tremendous, to judge by the
smash." Rickman was looking at the financial agent with an expression
which some people might have been inclined to resent, but Dicky's
gaiety was proof against criticism.

"What did he die of?" Rickman asked slowly.

"What a beastly question to ask at dinner. He died, like most people,
of his way of living. If Freddy Harden had had opportunities equal to
his talents he would have smashed up ten years ago. Talent wasn't the
word for it, it was genius--genius."