The Divine Fire Part 116

There had been, he admitted, an understanding between him and Miss Harden. It hardly amounted to an engagement; and it had been cancelled on the score of health.

"Of _her_ health?"

The compression of Jewdwine's lips intimated that the great poet had sinned (not for the first time) against convention.

"She _is_ ill, then?"

"I said on the score of health. We're first cousins, and it is not always considered advisable--"

"I see. Then that's all over."

"At any rate I'm not going to take any risks."

Rickman pondered that saying for a while. "Do you mean you're not going to let her take any risks?"

Jewdwine said nothing, but endeavoured to express by his manner a certain distaste for the conversation.

("Or does he mean," thought Rickman, "that he won't risk having a delicate wife on his hands?")

"It's not as if I didn't know," he persisted, "I know she--she lies on her back and can't move. Is it her spine?"

"No."

"Or her heart?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Is it something worse?"

Jewdwine was silent.

And in the silence Rickman's mind wandered free among all imaginable horrors and forebodings. At last, out of the silence, there appeared to him one more terrible than the rest. He saw what Jewdwine must have meant. He gathered it, not from anything he had said, but from what he refused to say, from the sternness of his face, from his hesitations, his reserves. Jewdwine had created the horror for him as vividly as if he had shaped it into words.

"You needn't tell me what it is. Do you mind telling me whether it's curable or not?"

"My _dear_ Rickman, if I knew why you are asking all these questions--"

"They must seem extraordinary. And my reason for asking them is more extraordinary still."

They measured each other with their eyes. "Then, I think," said Jewdwine quietly, "I must ask you for your reason."

"The reason is that if you're not going to marry her I am."

"That," said Jewdwine, "is by no means certain. There is not a single member of her family living except my sister and myself. Therefore I consider myself responsible. If I were her father or her brother I would not give my consent to her marrying, and I don't give it now."

"Oh. And why not?"

"For many reasons. Those that applied in my own case are sufficient."

"You only said there was a risk, and that you weren't going to take it. Now I mean to take it. You see, those fools of doctors may be mistaken. But whether they're mistaken or not, I shall marry her just the same."

"The risk, you see, involves her happiness; and judging by what I know of your temperament--"

"What do you know about my temperament?"

"You know perfectly well what I know about it."

"I know. You don't approve of my morals. I don't altogether blame you, considering that since I knew Miss Harden I very nearly married someone else. My code is so different from yours that I should have considered marrying that woman a lapse from virtue. So the intention may count against me, if you like."

"Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean. Neither of us is fit to marry Miss Harden--and _I_ have given her up." He said it with the sublime a.s.surance of Jewdwine, the moral man.

"Does it--does her illness--make all that difference? It makes none to me."

"Oh, well--all right--if you think you can make her happy."

"My dear Jewdwine, I don't think, I know." He smiled that smile that Jewdwine had seen once or twice before. "It may be arrogant to suppose that I'll succeed where better men might fail; still--" He rose and drew himself up to all his slender height--"in some impossible things I have succeeded."

"They are not the same things."

"No; but in both, you see, it all depends upon the man." With that he left him.

As Rickman's back turned on him, Jewdwine perceived his own final error. As once before in judging the genius he had reckoned without the man, so now, in judging the man he had reckoned without his genius.

This horrid truth came home to him in his solitude. In the interminable watches of the night Jewdwine acknowledged himself a failure; and a failure for which there was no possible excuse. He had had every conceivable advantage that a man could have. He had been born free; free from all social disabilities; free from pecuniary embarra.s.sment; free from the pa.s.sions that beset ordinary men. And he had sold himself into slavery. He had opinions; he was packed full of opinions, valuable opinions; but he had never had the courage of them.

He had always been a slave to other people's opinions. Rickman had been born in slavery, and he had freed himself. When Rickman stood before him, superb in his self-mastery, he had felt himself conquered by this man, whom, as a man, he had despised. Rickman's errors had been the errors of one who risks everything, who never deliberates or counts the cost. And in their repeated rivalries he had won because he had risked everything, when he, Jewdwine, had lost because he would risk nothing.

He had lost ever since the beginning. He had meant to discover this great genius; to befriend him; to protect him with his praise; eventually to climb on his shoulders into fame. And he had not discovered him; and as for climbing on his shoulders, he had been shaken off with one shrug of them. There had been risk in pa.s.sing judgement on young Rickman, and he had not taken the risk. Therefore he had failed as a critic. He had waited to found an incorruptible review. It had been a risky proceeding, and he had not taken the risk.

His paper was a venal paper, sold like himself to the public he despised. Of all that had ever appeared in it, nothing would live, nothing but a few immortal trifles, signed S.K.R. He had failed pretty extensively as an editor. Last of all he had wanted to marry his cousin Lucia; but there was risk in marrying her, and he would not take the risk, and Rickman would marry her. He had failed most miserably as a man.

With that Jewdwine turned on his pillow, and consoled himself by thinking of Miss Fulcher and her love.

CHAPTER LXXIX

Lucia had been lying still all the afternoon on her couch in the drawing-room; so still that Kitty thought she had been sleeping. But Kitty was mistaken.

"Kitty, it's past five, isn't it?"

"Yes, dear; a quarter past."

"It'll be all over by this time to-morrow. Do you think he'll be very terrible?"

"No, dear. I think he'll be very kind and very gentle."

"Not if he thinks I'm shamming."