The Divine Fire Part 82

"Besides," said Lucia simply, "I'm staying for the best of all possible reasons; because I want to."

"Well, if it's pleasant for you, you forget that it's anything but pleasant for Horace and me. Horace--if you care what he thinks--would be exceedingly annoyed if he knew about it."

"Isn't he just a little unreasonable?"

"He is not. Is it nice for him to know that you prefer living with these people to staying in his house?"

"What would he say if he knew that one of these people lent us this room?"

The words and the smile that accompanied them challenged Edith to speak; and speak she must. But she could not bring herself to utter the abominable name. "And was that on Sophie's account or yours?"

"On both our accounts; and it was beautifully done."

"Oh, if it was done beautifully there's no doubt on whose account it was done. I should have thought you were the last person, Lucia, to put yourself under such an obligation."

"There was no obligation. It was kinder to Mr. Rickman to take his room than refuse it, that was all."

Lucia had no difficulty whatever in bringing out the name. And that, if Edith's perceptions had not been dulled by horror, would have struck her as a favourable sign.

"Young Rickman!" Edith's astonishment was a master stroke in all that it ignored and in all that it implied of the impossibility of that person. "Your notions of kindness are more than I can understand.

Whatever possessed you to take his room? If he'd offered it fifty times!"

"But it wasn't wanted."

Edith relaxed the tension of her indignant body and sank back in her chair (or rather, Mr. Rickman's chair) with an immense relief. "You mean he isn't in the house at present?"

"Oh yes, he's in the house, I'm glad to say. Neither Sophie nor I could stand very much of the house without him."

That admission, instead of rousing Edith to renewed indignation, appeared to crush her. "Lucia," she murmured, "you are hopeless."

Another cup of tea, however, revived the spirit of remonstrance.

"I know you don't see it, Lucia, but you are laying yourself under an obligation of the worst sort; the sort that puts a woman more than anything in a man's power."

Lucia ignored the baser implication (so like Lucia). "I'm under so many obligations to Mr. Rickman already, that one more hardly counts."

She hastened to appease the dumb distress now visible on her cousin's face. "I don't mean money obligations; though there's that, too--Horace knows all about it. I don't know if I can explain--" She laid her hands in her lap and looked at Edith and beyond her, with liquid and untroubled eyes; not seeing her, but seeing things very far off, invisible from Edith's point of view; which things she must endeavour, if possible, to make her see. "The kind of obligations I mean are so difficult to describe, because there's nothing to take hold of. Only, when you've once made a man believe in you and trust you, so that he comes to you ever afterwards expecting nothing but wonderful discernment, and irreproachable tact, and--and an almost impalpable delicacy of treatment, and you know that you failed in all these things just when he needed them most, you do feel some obligations. There's the obligation to make up for your blunders; the obligation to think about him in a certain way because no other way does justice to his idea of you; the obligation to show him the same consideration he showed to you; the obligation to take a simple kindness from him as he would have taken it from you--"

"My _dear_ Lucia, you forget that a man may accept many things from a woman that she cannot possibly accept from him."

"Yes, but they are quite another set of things. They don't come into it at all. That's where you make the mistake, Edith. I've got--for my own sake--to behave to that man as finely as he behaved to me. I owe him a sort of spiritual redress. I always shall owe it him; but I'm doing something towards it now." She said to herself, "I am a fool to try to explain it to her. She'll never understand. I wish Kitty were here. She would have understood in a minute."

Edith did not understand. She thought that Lucia's perceptions in this matter were blunt, when they were only superlatively fine.

"All this," said she, "implies an amount of intimacy that I was not aware of."

"Intimacy? Yes, I suppose it _is_ intimacy, of a sort."

"And how it could have happened with a man like that--"

"A man like what?"

"Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn't dream of allowing you to meet, even in his own house."

"Horace? You talk about my being under an obligation. It was he who helped to put me under it."

"And how?"

"By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave him a thought--when he had been so magnificent. There were a thousand things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an opportunity and he never gave it me. He can't blame me if I take it now."

"If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible reasons. He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could have any idea of. I don't know what he is now, but he was, at one time, thoroughly disreputable."

"Whatever _did_ he do?"

"Do? He did everything. He drank; he ran after the worst sort of women--he mixes now with the lowest cla.s.s of journalists in town; he lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the next house to this."

Lucia's face quivered like a pale flame.

"I don't believe it. I don't believe it for a moment."

"It's absurd to say you don't believe what everybody knows, and what anybody here can tell you."

"I never heard a word against him here. Ask Sophie She's known him for five years. Besides, _I_ know him. That's enough."

"Lucy, when you once get hold of an idea you're blind to everything outside it."

"I take after my family in that. But no, I'm not blind. He may have gone wrong once, at some time--but never, no, I'm sure of it, since I knew him."

"Still, when a man has once lived that sort of life, the coa.r.s.eness must remain."

"Coa.r.s.eness? There isn't any refinement, any gentleness he isn't capable of. He's fine through and through. Stay and meet him, Edith, and see for yourself."

"I _have_ met him."

"And yet you can't see?"

"I've seen all I want to see."

"Don't, Edith--"

There was a sound of feet running swiftly up the stair; the door of the adjoining room opened and shut, and a man's voice was heard singing. These sounds conveyed to Edith a frightful sense of the nearness and intimacy of the young man, and of the horror of Lucia's position. As she listened she held her cousin by her two hands in a dumb agony of entreaty.

"Horace is coming back," she whispered.

"No, Edith, it's no good. I'm going to stay till Kitty takes me."

Edith wondered whether, after all, Lucia was so very fastidious and refined; whether, indeed, in taking after her family, she did not take after the least estimable of the Hardens. There was a wild strain in them; their women had been known to do queer things, unaccountable, disagreeable, disreputable things; and Lucia was Sir Frederick's daughter. Somehow that young voice singing in the next room rubbed this impression into her. She stiffened and drew back.

"And am I to tell Horace, then, that you are happy here?"