"You were quite right," she was saying. "I _am_ tired, and I had better leave off. If you had rather stay and finish, please stay."
At those words Mr. Rickman was filled with a monstrous and amazing courage. He made for the door, crossing without a tremor the whole length of the library. He reached the door before Miss Harden, and opened it. He returned her good-night with a hope that she would be rested in the morning. And as he went back to his solitary labour he smiled softly to himself, a smile of self-congratulation.
He had meant her to go--and she had gone.
Upstairs in her room overhead Lucia communed with her own face in the gla.s.s.
"My private secretary?"
The face in the gla.s.s looked dubious.
"Of course I would rather have a gentleman for my private secretary.
Some people would say he isn"t a gentleman." (She had said it herself the other day.)
The face in the gla.s.s smiled dimly, between two parted veils of hair.
"What _is_ a gentleman?"
The face in the gla.s.s suggested that this was indeed a subtle and a difficult question.
"It was not his business if I chose to tire myself. Would it have been his business if he"d been a gentleman?"
The face in the gla.s.s offered no opinion.
"I think I like him best when he"s impertinent. He is so _very_ funny, poor dear, when he tries to be polite."
The face in the gla.s.s, framed by two white arms raising a column of hair, was suffused with rosy mirth.
"I wonder what Horace really thinks of him?"
The face, triumphantly crowned with its dark coil, looked grave.
"He _is_ a gentleman. At least, he lied like one."
By this time Lucia was in bed, and there was no face in the gla.s.s to dispute or corroborate that statement.
CHAPTER XXIII
The next morning he gave into her hands the ma.n.u.script of _Helen in Leuce_. It had arrived two or three days ago, packed by Spinks between his new shirts. She had expected to feel a little guilty as she received the familiar sheets; but as she glanced over them she saw that they were anything but familiar; what she had to deal with was a clean new draft.
She had a fairly clear recollection of the outline of the play.
In Act I Helen lands in the enchanted island of Leuce, and is found watching the ship that brought her sailing away with the dead Menelaus, for he, being altogether mortal, may not follow her there.
The Chorus tells the story of Helen, her rape by Theseus, her marriage with Menelaus, her flight with Paris, the tragedy of Troy and her return to Argos. It tells how through all her adventures the G.o.dhead in her remained pure, untouched, holding itself apart.
In Act II Helen is asleep, for the soul of Leda still troubles her divinity, and her mortality is heavy upon her. Helen rises out of her sleep; her divinity is seen struggling with her mortality, burning through the beauty of her body. Desire wakens in Achilles, and in Helen terror and anguish, as of one about to enter again into the pain of mortal life. But he may not touch her till he, too, has put on immortality. Helen prays for deliverance from the power of Aphrodite.
She rouses in Achilles a great anger against Aphrodite by reminding him of the death of Patroclus; so that he calls down upon the G.o.ddess the curses of all the generations of men.
It was this Act that lived in Lucia"s memory. Act III she had not yet read, but she had gathered from the argument that Pallas Athene was there to appear to Achilles and divest him of his mortality; that she was to lead him to Helen, whose apotheosis was supposed to be complete; the Act concluding with two choruses, an epithalamium celebrating the wedding of Helen and Achilles, and a Hymn in praise of Athene.
She remembered how when Horace had first told her of the subject, Helen in Leuce, she had looked it up in Lempriere, found a reference in Homer and another in Euripides, had shaken her head and said, "What can he make of that?"
Now for the first time she saw what he had made of it. Rickman"s Helen was to the Helena of Euripides what Sh.e.l.ley"s Prometheus is to the Prometheus of aeschylus. Rickman had done what seemed good in his own eyes. He had made his own metres, his own myth and his own drama. A drama of flesh and blood, a drama of spirit, a drama of dreams. Only a very young poet could have had the courage to charge it with such a weight of symbolism; but he had contrived to breathe into his symbols the breath of life; the phantoms of his brain, a shadowy Helen and Achilles, turned into flesh and blood under his hands. It was as if their bodies, warm, throbbing, full-formed, instinct with irresistible and violent life, had come crashing through the delicate fabric of his dream.
As she read Lucia"s mind was troubled, shaken out of its critical serenity. She heard a new music; she felt herself in the grasp of a new power, a new spirit. It was not the cla.s.sic spirit. There was too much tumult in its harmonies, as if the music of a whole orchestra had been torn from its instruments and flung broadcast, riding triumphantly on the wings of a great wind. There were pa.s.sages (notably the Hymn to Aphrodite in the second Act) that brought the things of sense and the terrible mysteries of flesh and blood so near to her that she flinched. Rickman had made her share the thrilling triumph, the flushed pa.s.sion of his youth. And when she was most hurt and bruised under the confusion of it, he lifted her up and carried her away into the regions of spiritual beauty and eternal strength.
It was all over; the tumult of the flesh and the agony of the spirit; over, too, the heaven-piercing singing, the rapture of spirit and of flesh made one. Rickman had ended his amazing drama with the broad majestic music of his Hymn to Athene. Lucia had borne up under the parting of Helen and Menelaus; but she was young, and at that touch of superb and ultimate beauty, two tears, the large and heavy tears of youth, fell upon Rickman"s immaculate ma.n.u.script, where their marks remain to this day. The sight of them had the happy effect of making her laugh, and then, and not till then, she thought of Rickman--Mr.
Rickman. She thought of him living a dreadful life among dreadful people; she thought of him sitting in his father"s shop, making catalogues _raisonnes_; she thought of him sitting in the library making one at that very moment. And this was the man she had had the impertinence to pity; whom Horace would say she now proposed to patronize. As she stood contemplating the pile of ma.n.u.script before her, Miss Lucia Harden felt (for a great lady) quite absurdly small.
In that humble mood she was found by Miss Palliser.
"What"s up?" said Kitty.
"Kitty, that little man in there--he"s written the most beautiful play. It"s so terribly sad."
"What, the play?"
"No, the little man. It"s a cla.s.sic, Kitty--it"ll live."
"Then I"m sure you needn"t pity him. Let"s have a look at the thing."
Miss Palliser dipped into the ma.n.u.script, and was lost.
"By Jove," she said, "it does look ripping. Where does the sadness come in?"
"He thinks he"ll never write another."
"Well, perhaps he won"t."
"He will--think of it--he"s a genius, the real thing, this time.
Only--he has to stand behind a counter and make catalogues."
Miss Palliser meditated. "Does he--does he by any chance drop his aitches?"
"Kitty, he _does_."
"Then Lucy, dear child, beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair--"
"Don"t. That little man is on my mind."
"I shouldn"t let him stop there too long, if I were you. He might refuse to get on."
"I must do something for him, and I must do it now. What _can_ I do?"
"Not much, I imagine."