"Thank you very much. It _was_ mine. I was afraid it was lost."
"It would have been a great pity if it had been."
Mr. Rickman dropped his sod.
She answered the question that appeared in his eyes, though not on his tongue. "Yes, I read it. It was printed, you see. I read it before I could make up my mind whether I might or not."
"It was all right. But I wish you hadn"t."
To look at Mr. Rickman you would have said that all his mind was concentrated on the heel of his boot, as it slowly but savagely ground the sod to dust. Even so, the action seemed to say, even so could he have destroyed that sonnet.
"What did you think of it?"
He had looked up, when she least expected, with his disarming and ingenuous smile. Lucia felt that he had laid an ambush for her by his abstraction; the question and the smile shot, flashed, out of it with a directness that made subterfuge impossible.
The seriousness of the question was what made it so awkward for a lady with the pleasure-giving instinct. If Mr. Rickman had merely asked her if she liked his new straw hat with the olive green ribbon (supposing them to be on terms that made such a question possible) she would probably have said "Yes," whether she liked it or not; because she wanted to give pleasure, because she didn"t care a straw about his straw hat. But when Mr. Rickman asked her how she liked his sonnet, he was talking about the things that really mattered; and in the things that really mattered Lucia was sincerity itself.
"I thought," said she, "I thought the first dozen lines extremely beautiful."
"In a sonnet _every_ line should be beautiful--should be perfect."
"Oh--if you"re aiming at perfection."
"Why, what else in Heaven"s name should I aim at?"
Lucia was silent; and he mistook her silence for distrust.
"I don"t want you to judge me by that sonnet."
"But I shouldn"t dream of judging you by that sonnet, any more than I should judge that sonnet by its last two lines. They"re not the last you"ll ever write."
"They"re the last you will ever read."
"Well, it"s something to have written one good sonnet."
"One swallow doesn"t make a spring."
"No; but it tells us spring is coming, and the other swallows."
"There won"t be any other swallows. All my swallows have flown."
"Oh, they"ll fly back again, you"ll see, if you wait till next spring."
"You weren"t serious just now when you asked me if I was a poet. _I_ was serious enough when I said I didn"t know."
Something pa.s.sed over Lucia"s face, a ripple of shadow and flame, some moving of the under currents of the soul that told him that he was understood, that something had happened there, something that for the moment permitted him to be personal.
"What made you say so?"
"I can"t tell you. Not natural modesty. I"m modest about some things, but not about that."
"Yet surely you must know?"
"I did yesterday."
"Yesterday?"
"Yesterday--last night; in fact up to eleven o"clock this morning I firmly believed that I had genius, or something uncommonly like it. I still believe that I _had_ it."
He seemed to himself to have become almost grossly personal; but to Lucia he had ceased to be personal at all; he had pa.s.sed into the region of realities; and in so pa.s.sing had become intensely interesting. To Lucia, with the blood of ten generations of scholars in her veins, the question of a man"s talent was supremely important; the man himself might not matter, but his talent mattered very much; to discuss it with him was entirely natural and proper. So she never once stopped to ask herself why she was standing on Harcombe Hill, holding this really very intimate conversation with Mr. Rickman.
"The things," he continued, "the things I"ve written prove it. I can say so without the smallest conceit, because I haven"t it now, and never shall have it again. I feel as if it had belonged to somebody else."
Mr. Rickman was losing all likeness to his former self. He spoke no longer impulsively, but in the steady deliberate tones of unalterable conviction. And Lucia no longer heard the c.o.c.kney accent in this voice that came to her out of a suffering so lucid and so profound. She forgot that it came from the other side of the social gulf. If at any point in that conversation she had thought of dismissing him, she could not have dismissed him now. There was very little use in having saved his neck if she abandoned him to his misery.
Instead of abandoning him she sat down on a rough seat by the roadside to consider Mr. Rickman"s case in all its bearings. In doing so she found herself for the first time contemplating his personal appearance as such; and that not altogether with disapproval. Though it was not in the least what she would have expected, he showed to advantage in the open air. She began to perceive the secret of his extravagant and preposterous charm. There was something about him--something that he had no right to have about him, being born a dweller in cities, which none the less he undeniably and inevitably had, something that made him one with this moorland setting, untamed and beautiful and shy. The great natural features of the landscape did him no wrong; for he was natural too.
Well, she had found his sonnet for him; but could she help him to recover what he had lost now?
"I hope you won"t mind my asking, but don"t you know any one who can help you?"
"Not any one who can help me out of this."
"I believe it must have been you Sir Joseph Harden used to talk about.
I think he saw you once when you were a boy. I know if he were alive he would have been glad to help you."
"He did help me. I owe my education to the advice he gave my father."
"Is that the case? I am very glad."
She paused, exultant; she felt that she was now upon the right track.
"You said you had written other things. What have you written?"
"A lyrical drama for one thing. That sonnet was meant for a sort of motto to it."
A lyrical drama? She was right, then; he was Horace Jewdwine"s great "find." If so, the subject was fenced around with difficulty. She must on no account give Horace away. Mr. Rickman had seemed annoyed because she had read his sonnet (which was printed); he would be still more annoyed if he knew that she had read his lyrical drama in ma.n.u.script.
He was inclined to be reticent about his writings.
Lucia was wrong. Mr. Rickman had never been less inclined to reticence in his life. He wished she had read his drama instead of his sonnet. His spring-time was there; the swift unreturning spring-time of his youth. If she had read his drama she would have believed in his pursuit of the intangible perfection. As it was, she never would believe.
"I wonder," she said, feeling her ground carefully, "if my cousin Horace Jewdwine would be any good to you?"
"Mr. Jewdwine?"
"Do you know him?"
"Yes, slightly. That is--he knows--he knows what I can do. I mean what I"ve done."
"Really?" The chain of evidence was now complete. "Well, what does he say?"