The Divine Fire | Page 3

pages of the manuscript which she had
again taken on her lap.
"I suppose he is very dreadful. Still, I think we ought to do something
for him."
"And what would you propose to do?"
There was an irritating smile on her cousin's face. He was thinking, "So
she wants to patronize him, does she?"
He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for
she always knew. He only said, "I don't exactly see you playing

Beatrice to his Dante."
Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right. The Hardens
had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most
superbly patronizing women he knew. And Rickman might or might
not be a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great
lady in her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he
smiled again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more
irritating than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.
"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing
him down here."
He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous
vision.
"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought
you'd like it."
Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think
about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and his
last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never had he
known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.
"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if he were not
impossible. His manners have not that repose which distinguishes his
Helen. Really, for two and twenty, he is marvellously restrained."
"Restrained? Do you think so?"
"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to her
vagueness, "his Helen is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me some
of it."
She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,
polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what she
thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations, made
apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the

troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous
soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an
aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but she
had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford critic
had not been able to see.
The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over
the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the
enfolding hills.
Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great
chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to
Rickman.
But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.
"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.
"Don't what?"
"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool of
the evening."
"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."
Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful
pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands and
arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these things
so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only beauty but a
certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which appealed to
him was the languor of fatigue.
"You might play to me, now," he said.
She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in which,
if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no reproach, only
a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered what she was
thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace
selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and would
not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction. "No, he is
not selfish, he is only ill."
And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into the
house.
His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her figure.
Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men.
His entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and
Lucia satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was
really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her
absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came
to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her
charm. He could not