The Divine Fire | Page 4

say positively wherein her beauty consisted,
therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding
out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some
women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious
prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous
regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the
flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was
merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment
for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her features,
(though it was impossible to think of them, or anything about her as
incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their subtlety.
Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did not commit
him to any irretrievable opinion.
But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in
which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct
how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She
had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the
look out to go one better, and to catch you tripping. Her lucidity was
remarkable; but it served to show up other people's strong points rather
than her own. Lucia did not impress you as being clever, and Jewdwine,
who had a clever man's natural distaste for clever women, admired his

cousin's intellect, as well he might, for it was he who had taught her
how to use it. Her sense of humour, too (for Lucia was dangerously
gifted), that sense which more than any of her senses can wreck a
woman--he would have liked her just as well if she had had none; but
some, no doubt, she needed, if only to save her from the situations to
which her kindness and her innocence exposed her; and she had just the
right amount and no more. Heavens! Supposing, without it, she had met
Keith Rickman and had yielded to the temptation to be kind to him!
Even in the heat Jewdwine shivered at the thought.
He put it from him, he put Rickman altogether from his mind. It was
not to think about Rickman that he came down to Court House. On a
day as hot as this, he wanted nothing but to keep cool. The gentle
oscillation of the hammock in the green shadows of the beech-tree
symbolized this attitude towards Rickman and all other ardent
questions.
Still, it was not disagreeable to know that if he could only make up his
mind to something very definite and irretrievable indeed, Court House
would one day be his. It was the only house in England that came up to
his idea of what a country house should be. A square Tudor building
with two short, gable-ended wings, thrown out at right angles to its
front; three friendly grey walls enclosing a little courtyard made golden
all day long with sunshine from the south. Court House was older than
anything near it except Harmouth Bridge and the Parish Church.
Standing apart in its own green lands, it looked older than the young
red earth beneath it, a mass upheaved from the grey foundations of the
hills. Its face, turned seawards, was rough and pitted with the salt air;
thousands upon thousands of lichens gave it a greenish bloom, with
here and there a rusty patch on groin and gable. It contained the Harden
Library, the Harden Library, one of the finest private collections in the
country. It contained also his cousin Lucia.
He had always loved Court House, but not always his cousin Lucia.
The scholarly descendant of a long line of scholars, Jewdwine knew
that he had been a favourite with his grandfather, Sir Joseph Harden,
the Master of Lazarus, he was convinced (erroneously) that he was a

Harden by blood and by temperament, and of course if he had only
been a Harden by name, and not a Jewdwine, Court House and the
great Harden Library would have been his instead of his cousin Lucia's.
He knew that his grandfather had wished them to be his. Lucia's mother
was dead long ago; and when his uncle Sir Frederick definitely
renounced the domestic life, Lucia and Lucia alone stood between him
and the inheritance that should have been his. This hardly constituted a
reason for being fond of Lucia.
His grandfather had wished him to be fond of her. But not until
Jewdwine was five and twenty and began to feel the primordial
manhood stirring in his scholarly blood did he perceive that his cousin
Lucia was not a hindrance but a way. The way was so obvious that it
was no wonder that he did not see it all