The Divine Fire Part 87

And now because the thing had been done so beautifully, so perfectly (if a little unexpectedly), by somebody else, because she was relieved of all anxiety and responsibility, Lucia was rejoicing with all her heart.

He had not been five minutes in the room before he saw it all. Lucia believed that it was all over, and was letting herself go, carried away by the spectacle of a supreme and triumphal happiness. She triumphed too. Her eyes when they looked at him seemed to be saying, "Didn't I tell you so?"

He saw why they had been asked to dinner. The spirit of the bridal hour was upon her, and she had made a little feast to celebrate it.

Like everything she did, it was simple and beautiful and exquisite of its kind. And yet it was not with that immaculate white linen cloth, spread on Keith's writing-table, strewn with slender green foliage and set out with delicate food and fruit and wine, nor with those white flowers, nor with those six shaded candles, that she had worked the joyous tender charm. These things, in her hands and in his eyes, became sacramental, symbolic of Lucia's soul with its pure thoughts and beautiful beliefs, its inspired and burning charities.

And the hero of this feast of happiness sat at her right hand, facing his little bride-elect, a miserable man consumed with anguish and remorse. He had never had so painful a sense of the pathos of his Beaver. For if anybody was happy it was she. Flossie was aware that it was her hour, and that high honour was being paid to her. Moreover, he could see for the moment that the worm had ceased to gnaw, and that she had become the almost affectionate thrall of the lady whose motto was _Invictus_. She had been forced (poor little girl) to antic.i.p.ate her trousseau in order to attire herself fitly for the occasion, and was looking remarkably pretty in her way. She sat very upright, and all her demeanour was irreproachably modest, quiet and demure. Nothing could have been more correct than her smile, frequent, but so diminutive that it just lifted her upper lip and no more. No insight, no foreboding troubled her. Her face, soft and golden white in the candlelight, expressed a shy and delicate content. For Flossie was a little materialist through and through. Her smooth and over feminine body seemed to have grown smoother and more feminine still under the touch of pleasure; all that was hard and immobile in her melting in the sense of well-being.

It was not merely that Flossie was on her good behaviour. His imagination (in league with his conscience) suggested that the poor child, divinely protected by the righteousness of her cause, was inspired to confound his judgement of her, to give no vantage ground to his disloyalty, to throw him defenceless on his own remorse. Or was it Lucia who inspired her? Lucia, whose loving spirit could create the thing it loved, whose sweetness was of so fine and piercing a quality that what it touched it penetrated. He could not tell, but he thanked Heaven that at least for this hour which was hers the little thing was happy. He, for his part, by unprecedented acts of subterfuge and hypocrisy, endeavoured to conceal his agony.

Miss Roots alone divined it. Beyond looking festive in a black silk gown and a kind of white satin waistcoat, that clever lady took a strained and awkward part in the rejoicing. He was inclined to think that the waistcoat committed her to severity, until he became aware that she was watching him with a furtive sympathy in the clever eyes that saw through his pitiful play. How was it that Lucia, she who once understood him, could not divine him too?

From this estranging mood he was roused by the innocent laughter of the Beaver. He was aware of certain thin and melancholy sounds that floated up from some room below. They struggled with the noises of the street, overcame, and rose strident and triumphant to invade the feast. They seemed to him in perfect keeping with the misery and insanity of the hour.

It was Mr. Partridge playing on his flute.

Miss Roots looked at Lucia. "That's you, Lucy. You've been talking to him about that flute. I suppose you told him you would love to hear him play it?"

"No, Sophie, I didn't tell him that." But Lucy looked a little guilty.

The flute rose as if in pa.s.sionate protest against her denial. It seemed to say "You did! You know you did!"

"I only said it was a pity he'd given it up, and I meant it. But oh!"

and Lucy put her hands up to her ears, "I don't mean it any more."

"That comes," said Rickman, "of taking things on trust."

She smiled and shook her head. It was her first approach to a sign of rea.s.surance.

"That's the sort of thing she's always doing. It doesn't matter for you, Lucy. You won't have to stay on and hear him."

"I don't know. I think I shall stay on. You see, Mr. Rickman, I can't part with this pretty room."

"Do you like it?"

"I like it very much indeed. You're all coming to dine with me here again some day."

"And you must come and dine with us, Miss Harden, when we've got settled." It was Flossie who spoke.

"I shall be delighted."

He looked up, surprised. He could not have believed the Beaver could have done it so prettily. He had not even realized that it could be done at all. It never occurred to him that his marriage could bring him nearer to Lucia Harden. He looked kindly at the Beaver and blessed her for that thought. And then a thought bolder than the Beaver's came to him. "I hope," he said, "you'll do more than that. You must come and stay with us in the summer. You shall sit out in a deck-chair in the garden all day. That's the way to get strong."

Then he remembered that she could do that just as well in someone else's garden up at Hampstead, and he looked shy and anxious as he added, "Will you come?"

"Of course I'll come," said she.

He saw her going through the house at Ealing and sitting in the little green garden with the lilac bushes about her all in flower. And at the thought of her coming he was profoundly moved. His eyes moistened, and under the table his knees shook violently with the agitation of his nerves. Miss Roots gave one queer little glance at him and another at Flossie, and the moment pa.s.sed.

And Lucia had not divined it. No, not for a moment, not even in the moment of leave-taking. She was still holding Flossie's hand in hers when her eyes met his, kind eyes that were still saying almost triumphantly, "I told you so."

As she dropped Flossie's hand for his, she answered the question that he had not dared to ask. "I've read them," she said, and there was no diminution in her glad look.

"When may I see you?"

"To-morrow, can you? Any time after four?"

CHAPTER LXI

He came into Lucia's presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself. And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.

Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-cla.s.sic drama. Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day. Between _Helen in Leuce_ and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul.

"Well," he said, glancing at the poems, as he seated himself. "What do you think of them? Am I forgiven? Do you consent?"

"So many questions? They're all answered, aren't they, if I say I consent?"

"And do you?" There was acute anxiety in his voice and eyes. It struck her as painful that the man, whom she was beginning to look on as possibly the greatest poet of his age, should think it necessary to plead to her for such a little thing.

"I do indeed."

"Without reservations?"

"What reservations should there be? Of course I could only be glad--and proud--that you should do me so much honour. If I can't say very much about it, don't think I don't feel it. I feel it more than I can say."

"Do you really mean it? I was afraid that it might offend you; or that you'd think I oughtn't to have written the things; or at any rate that I'd no business to show them to you. And as for the dedication, I couldn't tell how you'd feel about that."

And she, having before her eyes the greatness of his genius, was troubled by the humility and hesitation of his approach. It recalled to her the ways of his pathetic youth, his youth that obscurity made wild and shy and una.s.sured.

"I can't tell either," she replied, "I don't know whether I ought to feel proud or humble about it; but I think I feel both. Your wanting to dedicate anything to me would have been enough to make me very proud. Even if it had been a little thing--but this thing is great. In some ways it seems to me the greatest thing you've done yet. I did think just at first that I ought perhaps to refuse because of that.

And then I saw that, really, that was what made it easy for me to accept. It's so great that the dedication doesn't count."

"But it _does_ count. It's the only thing that counts to me. You can't take it like that and separate it from the rest. Those sonnets would still be dedicated to you even if you refused to let me write your name before them. I want you to see that they _are_ the dedication."

Lucia shook her head. She had seen it. She could see nothing else when she read them. How was it that the poet's bodily presence made her inclined to ignore the reference to herself; to take these poems dedicated to her as an event, not in her life or his, but in the history of literature?

"No," she said, "you must not look at them that way. If they were, it might be a reason for refusing. I know most people would think they'd less right to accept what wasn't really dedicated to them. But, you see, it's just because it isn't really dedicated to me that I can accept it."

"But it is--"

"No, not to me. You wouldn't be so great a poet if it were. I don't see myself here; but I see you, and your idea of me. It's--it's dedicated to that dream of yours. Didn't I tell you your dream was divorced from reality?"

"You told me it would be reconciled to it."

"And it is, isn't it? And the reality is worth all the dreams that ever were?"