The Divine Fire | Page 5

at once. He did not really see it
till Sir Joseph sent for him on his death-bed.
"There's been some mistake, Horace," Sir Joseph had then said. "Your
mother should have been the boy and your uncle Frederick the girl.
Then Lucia would have been a Jewdwine, and you a Harden."
And Horace had said, "I'm afraid I can't be a Harden, sir; but is there
any reason why Lucia--?"
"I was coming to that," said Sir Joseph. But he never came to it. Horace,
however, was in some way aware that the same idea had occurred to
both of them. Whatever it was, the old man had died happy in it.
There was no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and
vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If
she had not adored him he might have been urged to something
irretrievable and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing
could have been more soothing than the golden concord of that
understanding.
Needless to say if Lucia had been anybody but Lucia, such a solution
would have been impossible. He was fastidious. He would not have
married a woman simply because his grandfather wished it; and he
could not have married a woman simply because she inherited property

that ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman
who would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry
a woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing
jarred, nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The
very fact that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It
followed that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined
harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for Court
House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking of
Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be
added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir
Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable
possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about played
himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!
From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of the
music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a hot July
afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its utmost. Lucia began
with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through Schumann into Chopin,
a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused, and wound up
superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."
And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to
Jewdwine to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour
and the passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud.
He rose and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light
of wonder and of worship.
"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."
"I am tolerably happy, thanks."
"So am I."
"Yes, but you don't look it. What are you thinking of?"
She turned, and they walked together towards the house.
"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about

that friend of yours."
"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"
"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want to
be kind to him?"
"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to
everybody. It really doesn't do."
She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.
That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.
CHAPTER II
It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was
coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow
streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain
bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank
Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling
the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.
The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with a
decorated façade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish
cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its
neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed
cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary's. Whether
you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west,
you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so new.
Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over the
pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal