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Read Ebook: The Divine Fire by Sinclair May
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Ebook has 4831 lines and 222960 words, and 97 pages
BOOK I DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE
BOOK II LUCIA'S WAY
BOOK I
DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE
Horace Jewdwine had made the most remarkable of his many remarkable discoveries. At least he thought he had. He could not be quite sure, which was his excuse for referring it to his cousin Lucia, whose instinct in these matters was infallible--strangely infallible for so young a girl. What, he wondered, would she say to Savage Keith Rickman?
On Saturday, when he first came down into Devonshire, he would have been glad to know. But to-day, which was a Tuesday, he was not interested in Rickman. To eat strawberries all morning; to lie out in the hammock all afternoon, under the beach-tree on the lawn of Court House; to let the peace of the old green garden sink into him; to look at Lucia and forget, utterly forget, about his work , that was what he wanted. But Lucia wanted to talk, and to talk about Rickman earnestly as if he were a burning question, when even lying in the hammock Jewdwine was so hot that it bothered him to talk at all.
He was beginning to be sorry that he had introduced him--the exciting topic, that is to say, not the man; for Rickman you could scarcely introduce, not at any rate to Lucia Harden.
"Well, Lucia?" He pronounced her name in the Italian manner, "Loo-chee-a," with a languid stress on the vowels, and his tone conveyed a certain weary but polite forbearance.
Lucia herself, he noticed, had an ardent look, as if a particularly interesting idea had just occurred to her. He wished it hadn't. An idea of Lucia's would commit him to an opinion of his own; and at the moment Jewdwine was not prepared to abandon himself to anything so definite and irretrievable. He had not yet made up his mind about Rickman, and did not want to make it up now. Certainty was impossible owing to his somewhat embarrassing acquaintance with the man. That, again, was where Lucia had come in. Her vision of him would be free and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence.
"And it was you who discovered him?" Her voice lingered with a peculiarly tender and agreeable vibration on the "you." He closed his eyes and let that, too, sink into him.
"Yes," he murmured, "nobody else has had a hand in it--as yet."
"And what are you going to do with him now you have discovered him?"
He opened his eyes, startled by the uncomfortable suggestion. It had not yet occurred to him that the discovery of Rickman could entail any responsibility whatever.
"I don't know that I'm going to do anything with him. Unless some day I use him for an article."
"Oh, Horace, is that the way you treat your friends?"
He smiled. "Yes Lucy, sometimes, when they deserve it."
"You haven't told me your friend's name?"
"No. I betrayed his innocent confidence sufficiently in showing you his play. I can't tell you his name."
"After all, his name doesn't matter."
"No, it doesn't matter. Very likely you'll hear enough of it some day. You haven't told me what you think of him."
"I don't know what I think--But then, I don't know him."
"No," he said, roused to interest by her hesitation, "you don't know him. That's the beauty of it."
She gave the manuscript back into his hands. "Take him away. He makes me feel uncomfortable."
"To tell the truth, Lucy, he makes me feel uncomfortable, too."
"Why?"
"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up and stake your reputation on him--and all the time you can't be sure whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire."
"Only two and twenty?"
"That's all. It looks as if he were made for immortality."
She turned to him that ardent gaze which made the hot day hotter.
"Dear Horace, you're going to do great things for him."
The worst of having a cousin who adores you is that magnificence is expected of you, regularly and as a matter of course. He was not even sure that Lucia did not credit him with power to work miracles. The idea was flattering but also somewhat inconvenient.
"And why didn't you?"
"Well, you know, one gets rather crowded up with things in term time."
Lucia looked thoughtfully at the refined, luxurious figure in the hammock. Horace was entitled to the hammock, for he had been ill. He was entitled also to the ministrations of his cousin Lucia. Lucia spent her time in planning and doing kind things, and, from the sudden luminous sweetness of her face, he gathered that something of the sort was in preparation now.
It was. "Horace," she said, "would you like to ask him here?"
"No, Lucy, I wouldn't. I don't think it would do."
"But why not--if he's your friend?"
"If he's my friend."
"Pardon me, I said he was my find."
"Where did you find him?"
"I found him in the City--in a shop."
She smiled at the rhythmic utterance. The tragedy of the revelation was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.
"The shop doesn't matter."
"No, but he does. You couldn't stand him, Lucia. You see, for one thing, he sometimes drops his aitches."
"Well, if he does,--he'll be out all day, and there's the open country to drop them in. I really don't mind, if you'd like to ask him. Do you think he'd like to be asked?"
"There's no possible doubt about that."
"Then ask him. Ask him now. You can't do it when father's not at home."
Jewdwine repressed a smile. Even now, from the windows of the east wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique. It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil. If all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was, if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.
And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself would not be staying at Court House. Really, he reflected. Lucia ought to get some lady to live with her. It was the correct thing, and therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it. An expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.
"Father won't mind," she said.
"No, but I should." He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the question.
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