"For me to help you?"
"Yes."
"I do see it. It _was_ impossible--but not for any of the reasons you suppose. If it had been possible--"
"What then?"
"Then, perhaps, I needn"t have felt so sorry and ashamed. You know I really _am_ a little bit ashamed of having asked a great poet to be my private secretary."
It was thus that she extricated herself from the embarra.s.sing position in which his clumsiness had placed her. For he saw what she meant when she told him that he should not say these things to her. He had made her feel that she ought to defend him from the charges he had brought against himself, when she knew them to be true, when her gentleness could only have spared him at the expense of her sincerity. How beautifully she had turned it off. He refrained from the obvious pretty speeches. His eyes had answered her.
"If you knew that you _had_ done something for me; not a little thing but a great one--" He paused; and in the silence they heard the sound of Flossie"s feet coming up the stair. He had only just time to finish his sentence--"Would it please you or annoy you?"
She answered hurriedly; for as she rose, Flossie was knocking at the door.
"It would please me more than I can say."
"Then," he said in a voice that was too low for Flossie to hear, "you _shall_ know it."
CHAPTER LVI
It was impossible that Rickman"s intimacy with Miss Harden should pa.s.s unnoticed by the other boarders. But it was well understood by Miss Roots, by Flossie and by all of them, that any attentions he paid to her were paid strictly to his editor"s cousin. And if there was the least little shade of duplicity in this explanation, his conscience held him so far guiltless, seeing that he had adopted it more on Lucia"s account than his own. Incidentally, however, he was not displeased that it had apparently satisfied Flossie.
But if Flossie felt no uneasiness at the approaches of Mr. Rickman and Miss Harden, the news that Lucia was staying under the same roof with the impossible young poet could hardly be received with complacency by her relations. It threw Edith Jewdwine into an agony of alarm. Horace as yet knew nothing about it; for he was abroad. Even Edith had heard nothing until her return from her autumn holiday in Wales, when a letter from Lucia informed her that she would be staying for the next week or two with Sophie Roots in Tavistock Place. Edith was utterly unprepared for her cousin"s change of plans. She had not asked Lucia to go with her to Wales; for Lucia"s last idea had been to spend September and October in Devonshire with Kitty Palliser. Edith, eager for her holiday, had not stopped to see whether the arrangements with Kitty were completed; and Lucia, aware of Edith"s impatience, had omitted to mention that they were not. But what made Lucia"s move so particularly trying to Edith was the circ.u.mstance that relations between them had latterly been a little strained; and when Edith searched her heart she found that for this unhappy tension it was she and not Lucia who had been to blame.
And now (while Lucia was resting calmly on Mr. Rickman"s sofa), in the grave and beautiful drawing-room of the old brown house at Hampstead a refined and fastidious little lady walked up and down in a state of high nervous excitement. That little lady bore in her slight way a remarkable resemblance to her brother Horace. It was Horace in petticoats, diminutive and dark. There was the same clearness, the same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy mouth. Bat the flame of Edith"s small steel black eyes revealed a creature of more ardour and more energy.
At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to entertain. For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always been as fastidious and refined as she could wish. The house and the drawing-room were mainly the cause of it. Before Horace became editor of _The Museion_, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment kept up with difficulty on a narrow income. In a drawing-room seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and (after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a preoccupied and superlatively married man. From this position, compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of culture and refinement as head of the great editor"s house. She held a sort of salon, to which her brother"s reputation attracted many figures if possible more distinguished than his own. She found herself the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious to stand well with Horace Jewdwine. With a dignity positively marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three years in that long drawing-room. She laid down the law grandiloquently to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with superb compliments those who had achieved. Happily for Edith those gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.
And then, in the very flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came. Lucia, with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm. And the little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia! To Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it, but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to satisfy that instinct of hers which was so fatal and so blind. And Horace, who to Edith"s great relief had freed himself from this most undesirable attachment, who for three years had presented every appearance of judicious apathy, Horace, perceiving that men"s eyes (and women"s too) loved to follow and to rest upon his cousin, discovering all over again on his own account the mysterious genius of her fascination, had ended by bowing down and worshipping too. His adoration was the more profound (and in Edith"s shrewd opinion more dangerous), because he kept it to himself; because it pledged him to nothing in the eyes of Lucia and the world.
But the eyes of the world, especially of the journalistic world, are exceedingly sharp; and if Lucia had not been charming in herself those literary ladies and gentlemen would have found her so, as the lady whom Horace Jewdwine was presumably about to marry. It was Hanson, Hanson of the _Courier_, who sent the rumour round, "_La reine est morte, vive la reine_." The superb despotic Edith saw herself not only deserted, but deposed; left with neither court nor kingdom; declining from the palace of royalty to the cottage of the private gentlewoman, and maintaining her imperious refinement on a revenue absurdly disproportioned to that end. Not that as yet there had been any suggestion of Edith"s abdication. As yet Lucia had only spent her winter holidays at Hampstead. But when, at the end of the present summer, Lucia suddenly and unexpectedly broke down and her salary ceased with her strength, it became a question of providing her with a home for three months at the very least. Even then, the revolution was delayed; for Horace had gone abroad in the autumn. But with every month that Edith remained in power she loved power more; and in her heart she had been considering how, without scandal to the world, or annoyance to Horace, or offence to Lucia, she could put her rival delicately aside. She had long been on the look-out for easy posts for Lucia, for posts in rich and aristocratic families in the provinces, or better still for ladies in want of charming travelling companions.
But now, better, a thousand times better, that Edith should have been forced to abdicate than that Lucia should have taken herself out of the way in this fashion; a fashion so hideously suggestive of social suicide; that she should be living within four miles of her fastidious and refined relations in a fifth-rate boarding-house inhabitated by goodness knows whom. If only that had been all! Of course it was intolerable to think of Lucia mixing with the sort of people whom n.o.body but Goodness ever does know; but, after all, she wouldn"t mix with them; she hadn"t had time to; and if instantly removed from the place of contamination she might yet be presented to society again without spot or taint. But it was not all. Out of the many hundred base abodes of Bloomsbury Lucia had picked out the one house she ought to have avoided, the one address which for five years her cousin Horace had been endeavouring to conceal from her; it being the address of the one disreputable, the one impossible person of his acquaintance. Rickman had appeared, as strange people sometimes did, at Edith"s court; an appearance easily explained and justified by the fact that he was a genius of whom Horace Jewdwine hoped great things.
But he had never been suffered in that salon when Lucia had been there. Horace had taken untold pains, he had even lied frequently and elaborately, to prevent Lucia"s encountering, were it only by accident, that one impossible person; and here she was living, actually living in the same house with him. Even if Rickman could be trusted to efface himself (which wasn"t very likely; for if there is anything more irrepressible than a c.o.c.kney vulgarian it is a poet; and Rickman was both!), could they, could anybody trust Lucia and her idiotic impulse to be kind? To be kind at any cost. She never calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating reflection for Miss Jewdwine. Poor as she was, she thought nothing of paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable lodging, when she might--she ought--to have been living with her relations free of all expense. But there was the sting, the unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay anything, rather than stop another week in Hampstead. And Edith knew that it was she who had made Lucia feel like that; she who had driven her to this deplorable step. Not by anything done, or said, or even implied; but by things not done, things not said, things darkly or pa.s.sionately thought. For Lucia, with her terrible gift of intuition, must somehow have known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every pa.s.sing current of another person"s thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. n.o.body can help their thoughts; and there was something positively indecent in the uncanny insight that divined them. All the same, Edith, confronted with the consequences of these movements of the unfettered brain, was stung with compunction and considerable shame. Horace would be furious when he knew; more furious with Edith than Lucia. Therefore Edith was furious with Sophia Roots, the cause of this disaster, who must have known that even if Lucia was too weak-minded to refuse her most improper invitation, that invitation ought never to have been given. Edith had her pride, the pride of all the Jewdwines and the Hardens; and her private grievances gave way before a family catastrophe. She did not want Lucia at Hampstead; but at all cost to herself Lucia must be brought back to her cousin"s house before anybody knew that she had ever left it. It was even better that Horace should marry her than that they should risk the scandal of a mesalliance, or even-a pa.s.sing acquaintance with a man like Rickman. She would go and fetch Lucia now, this very evening.
She went as fast as a hansom could take her, and was shown up into Rickman"s room where she had the good luck to find Lucia alone. Lucia was too tired to go out very much; and at that moment of her cousin"s entrance she was resting on Mr. Rickman"s sofa. As the poor poet had been so careful to remove the more telling tokens of his occupation, Edith did not see that it was Mr. Rickman"s room; and she was a little surprised to find Sophia Roots so comfortably, not to say luxuriously lodged.
She lost no time in delivering her soul, lest Sophia should pop in upon them.
"Lu-_chee_-a," she said with emphasis, "I think you ought to have told me."
"Told you what?"
"Why, that you hadn"t anywhere to go to, instead of coming here."
"But I didn"t come here because I hadn"t anywhere to go to. I came because I wanted to see something of Sophie after all these years."
"You could have seen Sophie at Hampstead. I would have asked her to stay with you if I"d known you wanted her."
"That would have been very nice of you. But I"m afraid she wouldn"t have come. You see she can"t leave her work at the Museum--ever, poor thing."
"Oh. Then you don"t see so much of Sophie after all?"
"Not as much as I should like. But I must be somewhere; and I"m perfectly happy here."
As she rose to make tea for Edith (at the poet"s table, and with the poet"s bra.s.s kettle), she looked, to Edith"s critical eyes, most suspiciously at home. Edith"s eyes, alert for literature, roamed over the bookcases before they settled on the tea-pot (the poet"s tea-pot); but it was the tea-pot that brought her to her point. Did Lucia mix with the other boarders after all?
"This isn"t a bad room," she said. "I suppose you have all your meals up here?"
"Only tea and breakfast."
"But, my dear girl, where do you lunch and dine?"
"Downstairs, in the dining-room."
"With all the other boarders?"
Lucia smiled. "Yes, all of them. You see we can"t very well turn any of them out."
"Really, Lucia, before you do things like this you might stop to consider how your friends must feel about it."
"Why should they feel anything? It"s all right, Edith, really it is."
"Right for you to take your meals with these dreadful people? You can"t say they"re not dreadful, Lucia; for they are."
"They"re not half so dreadful as you might suppose. In fact you"ve no idea how nice they can be, some of them. Indeed I don"t know one of them that isn"t kind and considerate and polite in some way. Yes, polite. They"re all inconceivably polite. And do you know, they all want me to stay on; and I"ve half a mind to stay."
"Oh, no, my dear, you"re not going to stay. I"ve come to carry you off the very minute we"ve finished tea. Sophia should have known better than to bring you here."
"Poor little Sophie. If she can stand it, I might."
"That doesn"t follow at all. And if you can stand it, your relations can"t. So make up your mind that you"re going back with me."
"It"s extremely kind of you; but I should hurt Sophie"s feelings terribly if I went. Why should I go?"
"Because it isn"t a fit place for you to be in. To begin with, I don"t suppose they feed you properly."
"You can"t say I look the worse for it."
No, certainly she couldn"t; for Lucia looked better than she had done for many months. In the fine air of Hampstead she had been white and languid and depressed; here in Bloomsbury she had a faint colour, and in spite of her fatigue, looked almost vigorous. What was more, her face bore out her own account of herself. She had said she was perfectly happy, and she looked it.
A horrible idea occurred to Edith. But she did not mean to speak of Rickman till she had got Lucia safe at Hampstead.