The Divine Fire Part 109

"Do you remember why you refused it?"

She did not answer, but a faint flush told him that she had not forgotten.

"The same objection--the same reason for objecting--holds good now."

"Not quite. I should not be wronging any one else."

"You mean the Beaver, who dotes upon immortal verse?"

She smiled a little sadly. "Yes; there's no Beaver in the question now."

"You shall have the sonnets in any case. I brought them for you in place of the _Aurea Legenda_, and the Neapolitan Horace and--"

She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, as if she could shut out sound with sight. "Please--please. If you go on talking about it we shall both be very tired. Don't you feel as if you'd like some tea?" She was bringing out all her feminine reserves to conquer him.

But he was not going to be conquered this time. He could afford to wait; for he also had reserves.

"I'm so sorry," he said humbly. "I won't bore you any more till after tea."

And Lucia knew it was an armistice only and not peace.

At tea-time Kitty perceived that the moment was not yet propitious for her invitation. She was not even sure that it would ever come. Nor would it; for Rickman knew that his only chance lay in their imminent parting, in the last hour that must be his.

He was counting on it when the steady, resistless flow of a stream of callers cut short his calculations. It flowed between him and Lucia.

They could only exchange amused or helpless glances across it now and then. At last he found a moment and approached her.

"I wanted to give you those things before I go."

"Very well. We'll go into the house in one minute."

He waited. She made a sign that said, "Come," and he followed her. She avoided the morning-room that looked on the courtyard with its throng of callers; hesitated, and opened the door into the library. He ran upstairs to fetch the ma.n.u.script, and joined her there. But for the empty bookshelves this room, too, was as he had left it.

Lucia was sitting in a window seat. He came to her and gave the poems into her open hands, and she thanked him.

"Nonsense. It's good of you to take them. But that doesn't release you from your obligations."

She laid the ma.n.u.script on the window-seat, protected by her hand. He sat there facing her, and for a moment neither spoke.

"I haven't very much time," he said at last. "I've got to catch the seven-forty."

"You haven't. We don't want you to go like this. Now you're here you must stay a fortnight at the very least."

He hung his head. He did not want her to see how immense was the temptation. He murmured some half-audible, agitated thanks, but his refusal was made quite plain. He could not give up the advantage he had counted on. "I'm afraid I must bore you again a little now. I've only got an hour."

"Don't spoil it, then. See how beautiful it is."

She rose and threw open the lattice, and they stood together for a moment looking out. It was about an hour before sunset, an April sunset, the golden consummation of the wedding of heaven and earth. He felt a delicate vibration in the air, the last tender resonance of the nuptial song. This April was not the April of the streets where the great wooing of the world goes on with violence and clangour; for the city is earth turned to stone and yields herself struggling and unwilling to the invasion of the sky. Here all the beautiful deep-bosomed land lay still, breathless in her escape from the wind to the sun. Up the western valley the earth gave all her greenness naked to the light; but the hills were dim with the divine approaches of her mystical union, washed by the undivided streams of blue and purple air that flowed to the thin spiritual verge, where earth is caught up and withdrawn behind heaven's inmost veil.

The hour was beautiful as she had said. Its beauty had clothed itself with immortality in light; yet there was in it such mortal tenderness as drew his heart after it and melted his will in longing. He turned from the window and looked at her with all his trouble in his eyes.

Lucia saw that her words had saddened him, and she sat still, devising some comfort for him in her heart.

"I don't think," he said at last, "you quite know what you are doing.

I'm going to tell you something that I didn't mean to tell you. When I said I'd had nothing to do with all this, it wasn't altogether true."

"So I supposed," she murmured.

"There was a--a certain amount of trouble and difficulty about it--"

"And what did that mean?"

"It only meant that I had to work rather hard to put it right. I liked it, so you needn't think anything of that. But if you persist in your refusal all my hard work goes for nothing." He was so powerless against her tender obstinacy that he had determined to appeal to her tenderness alone. "There were about three years of it, the best three years out of my life; and you are going to fling them away and make them useless. All for a little wretched scruple. This is the only argument that will appeal to you; or I wouldn't have mentioned it."

"The best years out of your life--why were they the best?"

"Because they were the first in which I was free."

She thought of the time nine years ago when she had taken from him three days, the only days when he was free, and how she had tried to make rest.i.tution and had failed. "And whatever else I refuse," she said, "I've taken _them_? I can't get out of that?"

"No. If you want to be very cruel you can say I'd no business to lay you under the obligation, but you can't get out of it."

She looked away. Did she want to be very cruel? Did she want to get out of it? Might it not rather be happiness to be in it, immersed in it? Lost in it, with all her scruples and all her pride?

His voice broke and trembled into pa.s.sion. "And what is it that I'm asking you to take? Something that isn't mine and _is_ yours; something that it would be dishonourable of me to keep. But if it _was_ mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to give you and you wouldn't have."

Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had given her, that she had not refused. His eyes followed her movements.

She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.

She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body were sharper than ever. His face was more than ever serious and clean cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows, darkening their blue. He was refined almost to emaciation. And she saw other things. As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other, his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole. He changed his att.i.tude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze. She did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she noticed them now. Perhaps she would not have seen them but for that attempt to hide them which revealed their significance. She said to herself, "He is poor; and yet he has done this." And the love that had been so long hidden, sheltered and protected by her pity, came forth, and knew itself as love. And she forgot his greatness and remembered only those pitiful human things in which he had need of her. So she surrendered.

"I will take everything--on one condition. That you will give me--what you said just now I wouldn't have." The eyes that she lifted to his were full of tears.

For one moment he did not understand. Very slowly he realized that the thing he had dreamed and despaired of, that he dared not ask for, was being divinely offered to him as a free gift. There was no moment, not even in that night of his madness, in this room nine years ago, nor in that other night in Howland Street, when he had desired it as he desired it now.

Her tears hung curved on the curved lashes of her eyes, and spilt themselves, and fell one by one on to the pages of the ma.n.u.script. He heard them fall.

Before he let himself be carried away by the sweep of her impulse and his own pa.s.sion he saw that not honour but common decency forbade him to take advantage of a moment's inspired tenderness. He had already made a slight appeal _ad misericordiam_; but that was for her sake not his own. He realized most completely his impossible position. He had no income, and he had damaged his health so seriously that it might be long enough before he could make one; and these facts he could not possibly mention. She suspected him of poverty; but the smallest hint of his real state would have roused her infallible instinct of divination. He had felt, as her eyes rested on his emaciated body, that they could see the course of its sufferings, its starvation. He meant that she should never know what things had happened to him in Howland Street. His chivalry revolted against the brutality of capturing her tender heart by such a lacerating haul on its compa.s.sion.

All this swept through him between the falling of her ears. Last of all came the thought of what he was giving up. Was it possible that she cared for him?

It could not be. The illusion lasted only for an instant. Yet while it lasted the insane longing seized him to take her at her word and risk the consequences. For she would find out afterwards that she had never loved him; and she would disguise her feeling and he would see through her disguise. He would know. There could never be any disguise, any illusion between her and him. But at least he could take her in his arms and hold her now, while her tears fell; she would be his for this moment that was now.

He searched her face to see if indeed there had been any illusion.

Through the tears that veiled her eyes he could not see whether it were love or pity that still shone in them; but because of the tears he thought it must be pity.

She went on. "You said I had taken the best years of your life--I would like to give you all mine, instead, such as it is--if you'll take it."

She said it quietly, so quietly that he thought that she had spoken so only because she did not love him.

"How can I take it--now, in this way?"