Her beauty, as he now reflected, was of the sort that dwells less in the parts than in the whole, it was subtle, pervading, and profound.
It rejected all but the finer elements of s.e.x. In those light vanishing curves her womanhood was more suggested than defined; it dawned on him in tender adumbration rather than in light. Such beauty is eloquent and prophetic through its richness of a.s.sociation, its kindred with all forms of loveliness. As Lucia moved she parted with some of that remoter quality that had first fascinated, then estranged him; she took on the grace of the creatures that live free in the sunlight and in the open air.
The mist shut them in with its grey walls. There was nothing to be seen but the patch of gra.s.s trodden by her feet, and her moving figure, grey on grey.
The walk was somewhat lacking in incident and conversational openings.
Such as occurred seemed, like Kitty Palliser"s hat, to be packed with meaning. There was the moment, the dreadful moment, when he lagged behind and lost sight of her. The moment, his opportunity, when an enormous bramble caught and pinned her by the feet and skirt. She tried to tread on it with one foot and walk away from it with the other, a thing manifestly impossible and absurd. Besides, it hurt--horribly. He knelt before her on the wet moor, unconscious of his brand-new trousers, conscious of nothing but the exquisite moment; and, with hands that trembled violently, freed first her delicate feet and then her skirt. He breathed hard, for the operation was intricate and took time. That bramble seemed to have neither beginning nor end, it branched out in all directions and was set with mult.i.tudinous and powerful thorns. Lucia stood still, being indeed unable to move, and watched his long, slender fingers adroitly disentangling her.
"I"m afraid you"re hurting yourself," said she.
"Not at all," said Mr. Rickman gallantly, though the thorns tortured his hands, drawing drops of blood. His bliss annihilated pain.
"Take care," said she, "you are letting yourself get terribly torn."
He took no notice; but breathed harder than ever. "There, I"ve got it all off now, I think."
"Thank you very much." She drew her skirt gently from his detaining grasp.
"No--wait--please. There"s a great hulking brute of a thorn stuck in the hem."
She waited.
"Confound my clumsiness! I"ve done it now!"
"Done what?" She looked down; on the dainty hem there appeared three distinct crimson stains. Mr. Rickman"s face was crimson, too, with a flush of agony. Whatever he did for her his clumsiness made wrong.
"I"m awfully sorry, but I"ve ruined your--your pretty dress, Miss Harden."
For it was a pretty, a very pretty, a charming dress. And he was making matters worse by rubbing it with his pocket-handkerchief.
"Please--please don"t bother," said she, "it doesn"t matter." (How different from the behaviour of Miss Walker when Spinks spilt the melted b.u.t.ter on her shoulder!) "You"ve hurt your own hands more than my dress."
The episode seemed significant of the perils that awaited him in his intercourse with Miss Harden.
She went on. The narrow hill-track ended in the broad bridle-path that goes straight up Harcombe (not Harmouth) valley. He wondered, with quite painful perplexity, whether he ought still to follow at a discreet distance, or whether he might now walk beside her. She settled the question by turning round and waiting for him to come up with her. So they went up the valley together, and together climbed the steep road that leads out of it and back in the direction they had just left. The mist was thinner here at the top of the hill, and Rickman recognized the road he had crossed when he had turned eastwards that morning. He could now have found his way back perfectly well; but he did not say so. A few minutes" walk brought them to the place where he had sat down in his misery and looked over Harmouth valley.
Here they stopped, each struck by the strange landscape now suddenly revealed to them. They stood in clear air above the fog. It had come rolling in from the south, submerging the cliffs, and the town, and the valley; and now it lay smooth and cold and blue-white, like the sea under a winter sky. They might have been looking down on some mysterious world made before man. No land was to be seen save the tops of the hills lashed by the torn edges of the mist. Westward, across the bay, the peaks of the cliffs showed like a low, flat coast, a dull purplish line tormented by a livid surf. The flooded valley had become an arm of that vague sea. And from under the fog, immeasurably far below, there came the m.u.f.fled sound of the mother sea, as if it were beating on the invisible floor of the world.
"I say, that"s rather uncanny, isn"t it?" So uncanny did it seem to him that he felt that it called for remark.
She looked at him with that faintly interrogative lifting of the eyebrows, which always seemed familiar to him. He remembered afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick. But in her, accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth, it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain insolence. And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break it to him that their ways must now diverge.
"There"s a horrible unconsciousness about it," he went on, pursuing as usual his own fancy. "If you _could_ get bare nature without spirit, it would look like that."
"It _doesn"t_ look quite real," she admitted. (After that, there must be no more concessions. They must separate.)
"It hasn"t any reality but what we give it."
"Hasn"t it?"
(A statement so sweeping challenged contradiction.)
"You think that"s only my c.o.c.kney view?"
"I think it isn"t Nature. It"s your own idea."
"It isn"t even my own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P"raps you"ll say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn"t tell which was Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my c.o.c.kney view is the view of the modern poets. They don"t--they can"t distinguish between Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature--we wouldn"t know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets have got so near it that they"ve blocked the view for themselves and everybody else."
"Really, you talk as if they were a set of trippers."
"So they are! Wordsworth was nothing but a tripper, a glorified tripper. Nature never looked the same since he ran his Excursion-train through the Lake country--special service to Tintern and Yarrow."
"This is slightly profane."
"No--it only means that if you want Nature you musn"t go to the poets of Nature. They"ve humanized it. I wouldn"t mind that, if they hadn"t womanized it, too."
"That only means that they loved it," she said softly.
"It means that they"ve demoralized it; and that now it demoralizes us.
Nature is the supreme sentimentalist. It"s all their fault. They"ve been flinging themselves on the bosom of Mother Earth, and sitting and writing Stanzas in Dejection on it, and lying down like a tired child on it, and weeping away their lives of care, that they have borne and yet must bear on it, till they"ve saturated it with their beastly pathos. There isn"t a dry comfortable place left for anybody else."
"Perhaps that"s just the way Nature inspires poets, by giving out the humanity it absorbs."
"Perhaps. I can"t say it inspires me."
"Are you a poet?" she asked. She was beginning to think it must be a case of mistaken ident.i.ty; for this was not what she had expected of him.
He did not answer at first, neither did he look at her. He looked at the beautiful face of Nature (the sentimentalist), and a wave of hot colour rushed again over his own.
"I don"t know whether I am or not."
"Let us hope not, since you want to make a clean sweep of them."
"I"d make a clean sweep of myself if I stood in my own light. Anything for a good view. But I"m afraid it"s too late." His tone dropped from the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest. "We"ve done our work, and it can"t be undone. We"ve given Nature a human voice, and now we shall never--never hear anything else."
"That"s rather dreadful; I wish you hadn"t."
"Oh, no, you don"t. It"s not the human voice you draw the line at--it"s the c.o.c.kney accent."
Lucia"s smile flickered and went out, extinguished by the waves of her blush. She was not prepared to have her thoughts read--and read aloud to her--in this way; and that particular thought was one she would have preferred him not to read.
"I daresay Keats had a c.o.c.kney accent, if we did but know; and I daresay a good many people never heard anything else."
"I"m afraid you"d have heard it yourself, Miss Harden, if you"d met him."
"Possibly. It isn"t what I should have remembered him by, though. That reminds me. I came upon a poem--a sonnet--of yours--if it was yours--this morning. It was lying on the library floor. You will find it under the bronze Pallas on the table."
Mr. Rickman stooped, picked up a sod and examined it carefully.