The Divine Fire Part 90

"I? I have nothing to forgive. You haven't done anything to me. But I should never forgive you if I thought this foolishness could make one moment's difference to--to Flossie."

"It never has made any difference to her," he replied coldly, "or to my feeling for her. I never felt towards any woman as I feel towards you. It isn't the same thing at all. Heaven knows I thought I cared enough for her to marry her. But it seems I didn't. That's why I say it makes no difference to her. Nothing is altered by it. As far as Flossie is concerned, whether I marry her or not I shall have behaved abominably. I don't know which is the more dishonourable."

"Don't you?"

"No. I only know which I'm going to do."

She turned her head away. And that turning away was intolerable. It was the closing of the door.

"Is it so very terrible to you?" he said gently.

He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour--Lucia's honour.

"To me? I'm not thinking of myself--not of myself at all. How could I think of myself? I'm thinking of _her_." She turned to him and let her tears gather in her eyes unheeded. "Don't you see what you've done?"

Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done. He had taken the friends.h.i.+p she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands. All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion. He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour. And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise. The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing.

Supposing he had suppressed both his pa.s.sion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then? Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?

"Don't you see what you have done?" she said. "You've made me wish I had never come here and that I'd never seen you again. It was only the other night--the dear little girl--she came up here and sat with me, and we had a talk. We talked about you. She told me how she came to know you, and how good you'd been to her and how long it was before either of you knew. She told me things about herself. She is very shy--very reserved--but she let me see how much she cares--and how much you care. Think what you must be to her. She has no father and no mother, she has n.o.body but you. She told me that. And then--she took me up to her room and showed me all her pretty things. She was so happy--and how can I look at her again? She would hate me if she knew; and I couldn't blame her, poor child. She could never understand that it was not my fault."

But as she said it her conscience rose in contradiction and told her that it was her fault. Her fault in the very beginning for drawing him into an intimacy that his youth and inexperience made dangerous. Her fault for sacrificing, yes, sacrificing him to that impulse to give pleasure which had only meant giving pleasure to herself at his expense. Her fault for endlessly refining on the facts of life, till she lost all feeling of its simpler and more obvious issues. Kitty had been right when she told her that she treated men as if they were disembodied spirits. She had trusted too much to her own subtlety.

That was how all her blunders, had been made. If she had been cold as well as subtle--but Lucia was capable of pa.s.sionate indiscreet things to be followed by torments of her pride. Her pride had only made matters worse. It was her pride, in the beginning, that had blinded her. When she had told Kitty that she was not the sort of woman to let this sort of thing happen with this sort of man, she had summed up her abiding att.i.tude to one particular possibility. She had trusted to the social gulf to keep her safe, apart. Afterwards, she knew that she had not trusted so much to the social gulf. She had not been quite so proud; neither, since Kitty had opened her eyes, had she been so blind; but she had been ten times more foolish. Her mind had refused to dwell upon Kitty's dreadful suggestions, because they were dreadful. Unconscious of her s.e.x, she had remained unconscious of her power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman for protection. Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the pa.s.sionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was left subtler and more pure. She had thought she could really deal with him now as a disembodied spirit. And so under the shelter of his engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.

These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.

She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me so unhappy?"

"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"

She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so pa.s.sionately denied.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."

He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat. She called him back, as she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of delivering a final stab. Only that this time she knew it was a stab; and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.

But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the ma.n.u.script, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.

"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them--or--or have anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if I'd taken what belonged to some one else."

As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.

But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood. "And yet," he murmured, "you say it isn't true."

She did not contradict him this time. And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.

BOOK IV

THE MAN HIMSELF

CHAPTER LXII

After all, the wedding did not take place on the twenty-fifth; for on the twentieth Keith was summoned to Ilford by a letter from his stepmother. Mrs. Rickman said she thought he ought to know (as if Keith were seeking to avoid the knowledge!) that his father had had a slight paralytic seizure. He had recovered, but it had left him very unsettled and depressed. He kept on for ever worrying to see Keith.

Mrs. Rickman hoped (not without a touch of asperity) that Keith would lose no time in coming, as his father seemed so uneasy in his mind.

Very uneasy in his mind was Isaac, as upstairs in the big front bedroom, (which from its excess of gla.s.s and mahogany bore a curious resemblance to the front shop,) he lay, a strangely shrunken figure in the great bed. His face, once so reticent and regular, was drawn on one side, twisted into an oblique expression of abandonment and agony.

Keith was not prepared for the change; and he broke down completely as the poor right hand (which Isaac _would_ use) opened and closed in a vain effort to clasp his. But Isaac was intolerant of sympathy, and at once rebuked all reference to his illness. Above the wreck of his austere face, his eyes, blood-shot as they were and hooded under their slack lids, defied you to notice any change in him.

"I sent for you," he said, "because I wanted to talk over a little business." His utterance was thick and uncertain; the act of speech showed the swollen tongue struggling in the distorted mouth.

"Oh, don't bother about business now, father," said Keith, trying hard to steady his voice.

His father gave an irritable glance, as if he were repelling an accusation of mortality, conveyed in the word "now."

"And why not now as well as any other time?"

Keith blew his nose hard and turned away.

"What's the matter with you? Do you suppose I'm ill?"

"Oh no, of course not."

"No. I'm just lying here to rest and get up my strength again; G.o.d willing. But _in case_ anything should happen to me, Keith, I want you to be clear as to how you stand."

"Oh, that's all right," said Keith cheerfully.

"It's not all right. It's not as I meant it to be. Between you and me, my big house hasn't come to much. I think if you'd stayed in it--well--we won't say any more about that. But Paternoster Row--now--that's sound. Mrs. Rickman always 'ad a fancy for the City 'ouse, and she's put money into it. You'll have your share that was settled on you when I married your poor mother. You stick to the City 'ouse, Keith, and it'll bring you in something some day. And the Name'll still go on." It was pathetic, his persistent clinging to the immortality of his name. Pathetic, too, his inability to see it otherwise than as blazoned for ever and ever over a shop-front. His son's fame (if he ever achieved it) was a mere subsidiary glory. "But Pilkington'll get the Strand 'ouse. Whatever I do I can't save it. I don't mind owning now, the Strand 'ouse was a mistake."

"A very great mistake."

"And Pilkington'll get the 'Arden library."

"You don't know. You may get rid of him--before that time."

Isaac seemed to be torn by his thoughts the more because they found no expression in his face that was bound, mouth, eye, and eyelid in its own agony. Before _what_ time? Before the day of his death, or the day of redemption? "The mortgage," he said, "'as still three years to run.

But I can't raise the money."

Keith was silent. He hardly liked to ask, though he would have given a great deal to know, the amount of the sum his father could not raise. A possibility, a splendid, undreamed of possibility, had risen up before him; but he turned away from it; it was infamous to entertain it, for it depended on his father's death. And yet for the life of him he could not help wondering whether the share which would ultimately come to him would by any chance cover that mortgage. To be any good it would have to come before the three years were up, though--He put the splendid horrible thought aside. He could not contemplate it. The wish was certainly not the father of that thought.

But supposing the thought became the father of a wish?

"That reminds me," said Isaac, "that there was something else I 'ad to say to you."