Queen Lucia | Page 2

be spared from their studies of art and literature, and their social

engagements. Indeed she did not usually stop at taking the leading part,
but, if possible, doubled another character with it, as well as being
stage-manager and adapter, if not designer of scenery. Whatever she
did--and really she did an incredible deal--she did it with all the might
of her dramatic perception, did it in fact with such earnestness that she
had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all, she simply
contemplated herself and her own vigorous accomplishment. When she
played the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practice
every day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who
passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the
roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply Emmeline
Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach or dainty Scarletti, or noble
Beethoven. The latter perhaps was her favorite composer, and many
were the evenings when with lights quenched and only the soft
effulgence of the moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows,
she sat with her profile, cameo-like (or like perhaps to the head on a
postage stamp) against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and
entranced herself and her listeners, if there were people to dinner, with
the exquisite pathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
Devotedly as she worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her
Steinway Grand, she could never bring herself to believe that the two
succeeding movements were on the same sublime level as the first, and
besides they "went" very much faster. But she had seriously thought, as
she came down in the train today and planned her fresh activities at
home of trying to master them, so that she could get through their
intricacies with tolerable accuracy. Until then, she would assuredly stop
at the end of the first movement in these moonlit seances, and say that
the other two were more like morning and afternoon. Then with a sigh
she would softly shut the piano lid, and perhaps wiping a little genuine
moisture from her eyes, would turn on the electric light and taking up a
book from the table, in which a paper-knife marked the extent of her
penetration, say:
"Georgie, you must really promise me to read this life of Antonino
Caporelli the moment I have finished it. I never understood the rise of
the Venetian School before. As I read I can smell the salt tide creeping
up over the lagoon, and see the campanile of dear Torcello."

And Georgie would put down the tambour on which he was working
his copy of an Italian cope and sigh too.
"You are too wonderful!" he would say. "How do you find time for
everything?"
She rejoined with the apophthegm that made the rounds of Riseholme
next day.
"My dear, it is just busy people that have time for everything."
It might be thought that even such activities as have here been indicated
would be enough to occupy anyone so busily that he would positively
not have time for more, but such was far from being the case with Mrs
Lucas. Just as the painter Rubens amused himself with being the
ambassador to the Court of St. James--a sufficient career in itself for
most busy men--so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her
pursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but a
monarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism
of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real
and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its
queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure
autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling,
and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds.
The ruler of Riseholme, happier than he of Russia, had no need to fear
the finger of Bolshevism writing on the wall, for there was not in the
whole of that vat which seethed so pleasantly with culture, one bubble
of revolutionary ferment. Here there was neither poverty nor discontent
nor muttered menace of any upheaval: Mrs Lucas, busy and serene,
worked harder than any of her subjects, and exercised an autocratic
control over a nominal democracy.
Something of the consciousness of her sovereignty was in her mind, as
she turned the last hot corner of the road and came in sight of the
village street that constituted her kingdom. Indeed it belonged to her, as
treasure trove belongs to the Crown, for it was she who had been the
first to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan village into
the palace of culture that was now reared