Then, without looking up, he knew that something had happened. His first feeling was that it had happened to himself. He could not say how or why or what was the precise moment of its happening; he only knew that she had been talking to him, listening to him, smiling at him, and that then something had swept him on one side and carried her away, he did not know where, except that it was beyond his reach.

He looked up, startled by a sudden change in her breathing. She was standing opposite him; she seemed to be keeping herself upright by her hands pressed palms downwards on the table. The telegram was spread open there before her; and she was not looking at it; she was looking straight at him, but without seeing him. Her mouth was so tightly closed that it might have been the pressure of her lips that drove the blood from them; she breathed heavily through her nostrils, her small thin breast heaving without a sob. In her face there was neither sorrow nor terror, and he could see that there was no thought in her brain, and that all the life in her body was gathered into her swollen, labouring heart. And as he looked at her he was pierced with a great pang of pity.

She stood there so, supporting herself by her hands for about a minute. He was certain that no sense of his presence reached her across the gulf of her unknown and immeasurable anguish.

At last she drew her hands from the table, first one, then the other, slowly, as if she were dragging a weight; her body swayed, and he sprang to his feet with an inarticulate murmur, and held out one arm to steady her. At his touch her perishing will revived and her faintness pa.s.sed from her. She put him gently aside and went slowly out of the room.

As he turned to the table the five words of her telegram stared him in the face: "Your father died this morning."

It would have been horrible if he had told her.

His first thought was for her; and he thanked Heaven that had tied his tongue. Then, try as he would to realize her suffering, it eluded him; he could only feel that a moment ago she had been with him, standing there and smiling, and that now he was alone. He could still feel her hand pushing against his outstretched arm. There had been nothing to wound him in that gesture of repulse; it was as if she had accepted rather than refused his touch, as if her numbed body took from it the impetus it craved.

There was a sound of hurry and confusion in the house; servants went up and downstairs, or stood about whispering in the pa.s.sages. He heard footsteps in that room above him which he knew to be her room. A bell rang once; he could feel the vibration of the wire down the wall of the library. It was her bell and he wondered if she were ill.

Robert rushed in with a wild white face, shaken out of his respectful calm. He was asking Rickman if he had seen this month's Bradshaw. They joined in a frenzied search for it.

She was not ill; she was going away.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of wheels grating on the gravel drive, of the front door being flung open, of her voice, her sweet quiet voice, then the grating of the wheels again, and she was gone.

That, of course, ended it.

Now for the first time he realized what Sir Frederick's death meant for himself. In thus s.n.a.t.c.hing her from him in the very crisis of confession it had taken away his chance of redeeming his dishonour.

If he had only told her!

CHAPTER XXVIII

He did not go back to town on the seventh, after all. He stayed to finish roughly, brutally almost, with the utmost possible dispatch, the disastrous catalogue, which would now be required, whatever happened. Until every book in the library had pa.s.sed through his hands he was hardly in a position to give a just estimate of its value. His father had written again in some perturbation. It seemed that the old song for which he might obtain the Harden library went to the tune of one thousand pounds; but Pilkington was asking one thousand two hundred. "It's a large sum," wrote Isaac, "and without more precise information than you've given me yet, I can't tell whether we should be justified in paying it."

That confirmed his worst misgivings. He answered it very precisely indeed. "We shouldn't be morally justified in paying less than four thousand for such a collection; and we should make a pretty big profit at that. But if we can't afford the price we must simply withdraw. In fact I consider that we ought to hold back in any case until we see whether Miss Harden or any of her people are going to come forward.

It's only fair to give them the chance. You can expect me on the twentieth."

Beside writing to his father, he had done the only honest and straightforward thing that was left for him to do. He had written to Horace Jewdwine. That was indeed what he ought to have done at the very first. He could see it now, the simple, obvious duty that had been staring him in the face all the time. He hardly cared to think what subtle but atrocious egoism of pa.s.sion had prevented him from disclosing to Jewdwine the fact of his presence at Court House; even now he said nothing about the two weeks that he had spent working with Jewdwine's cousin. The catalogue _raisonne_ was so bound up with the history of his pa.s.sion that the thing had become a catalogue _raisonne_ of its vicissitudes. Some instinct, not wholly selfish, told him that the least said about that the better. He wrote on the a.s.sumption that Jewdwine knew (as he might very well have done) the truth about the Harden library, briefly informing him that they, Rickman's, had been or rather would be in treaty with Mr. Pilkington for the purchase; but that he, Savage Keith Rickman, considered it was only fair to suggest that Mr. Jewdwine or some other member of Sir Frederick Harden's family should have the option of buying it, provided it could be so arranged with Mr. Pilkington. As Jewdwine was probably aware, the library represented security for one thousand pounds; whereas Rickman estimated its market value at four or even five times as much. But as Mr. Pilkington was not inclined to let it go for less than one thousand two hundred, Jewdwine had better be prepared to offer a little more than that sum. If Jewdwine felt inclined to act on this suggestion Rickman would be glad if he would let him know within the next ten days; as otherwise his father would be obliged to close with Mr. Pilkington in due form after the twenty-seventh. Would he kindly wire an acknowledgement of the letter?

Jewdwine had wired from London, "Thanks. Letter received; will write."

That was on the seventeenth, and it was now the twenty-seventh and Jewdwine had not written. Rickman should have been back in London long before that time; he had allowed himself four days to finish his horrible work; and he had finished it. But as it happened the end of twelve days found him still in Harmouth. Seven of them pa.s.sed without his being very vividly aware of them, though up till now he had kept a strict account of time. Two weeks once struck off the reckoning, he had come down to calculating by days, by hours, by half hours, to measuring minutes as if they had been drops of some precious liquid slowly evaporating. And now he had let a whole week go by without comment, while he lay in bed in his room at the Marine Hotel, doing nothing, not even sleeping. For seven days Mr. Rickman had been ill.

The broad term nervous fever was considered to have sufficiently covered all his symptoms.

They were not improved by the discovery that Jewdwine had failed to give any sign; while the only reply sent by Rickman's was a brief note from his father to the effect that Keith's letter should have his very best consideration, and that by the time he saw him he would no doubt be in a better position to answer it. There was a postcard written on the twenty-first, inquiring the cause of his non-appearance on the twentieth. This had been answered by the doctor. It had been followed by a letter of purely parental solicitude, in which all mention of business was avoided. Avoided; and it was now the twenty-seventh.

Rickman literally flung from his sick-bed a feverish and illegible note to Horace Jewdwine. "For G.o.d's sake, wire me what you mean to do," an effort which sent his temperature up considerably. He pa.s.sed these days of convalescence in an anxious watching for the post. To the chambermaid, to the head waiter, to the landlord and landlady of the Marine Hotel, to the friendly commercial gentleman, who put his head twice a day round the door to inquire "'ow he was gettin' on,"

Mr. Rickman had during his seven days' illness put the same unvarying question. These persons had adopted a policy of silence, shaking their heads or twisting their mouths into the suggestion of a "No," by way of escape from the poignancy of the situation. But on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, Mr. Rickman being for the first time up and dressed, Tom, the waiter, replied to the accustomed query with a cheerful "No sir, no letters; but a lady was inquiring for you this morning, sir."

In Tom's mind a lady and a letter amounted to very much the same thing.

"Do you know who it was?"

"Yes sir, Miss Palliser."

"Miss Parry? I don't know any Miss Parry," said Rickman wearily.

"I didn't say Miss Parry, sir I said Miss Palliser, sir. Wanted to know 'ow you was; I said you was a trifle better, sir."

"I? I'm all right. I think I shall go out and take a walk." The violent excitement of his veins and nerves gave him the illusion of recovered strength.

His walk extended from the hotel door to a seat on the seafront opposite. He repeated it the next morning with less difficulty, and even succeeded in reaching a further seat beyond the range of the hotel windows. There he sat looking at the sea, and watching without interest the loiterers on the esplanade. At last, by sheer repet.i.tion, three figures forced themselves on his attention; two ladies, one young, the other middle-aged, and a clergyman, who walked incessantly up and down. They were talking as they pa.s.sed him; he caught the man's steep-pitched organ monotone, "Yes, I shall certainly go up to the house and see her," and the girl's voice that answered in a hard bright trill, "You won't see her. She hasn't seen any body but Kitty Palliser."

The blood boiled in his brain. She? She? Was it possible that they were talking about her? He sat there debating this question for ten minutes, when he was aware that he himself had become an object of intense interest to the three. The two ladies were, in fact, staring rather hard. The stare of the younger was so wide that it merely included him as an unregarded detail in the panorama of sea and sky; but the stare of the elder, a stout lady in a florid gown, was concentrated, almost pa.s.sionate; it came straight at him through a double eye-gla.s.s elevated on a tortoisesh.e.l.l stem. The clergyman endeavoured to suggest by his att.i.tude that he took no part in the staring or the talk; he smiled out to sea with an air of beatific union with Nature.

Harmouth beach is a safe place for scandal; for even a steep-pitched organ monotone with a brilliant feminine flourish on the top of it are lost in the accompaniment of the sea. So happily for him no word of the dialogue reached Rickman. All the same, to have a pair of blank blue eyes, and a tortoisesh.e.l.l binocular levelled at him in that fashion is a little disturbing to a young man just recovering from a nervous fever; and Rickman got up and dragged himself to the other end of the esplanade out of the reach of the enemy's fire. Therefore he did not see that Miss Palliser, who had been watching the scene from a balcony on the front, had come down and joined the group; neither did he hear her cheerful replies to a volley of inquiries.

"Yes; I've seen her. Nice day isn't it? What? No, I wouldn't if I were you. I say, what a swagger eye-gla.s.s! Jolly, those long stems, aren't they? You can stare for ever without pinching your nose or gouging your next door neighbour's eye out with your elbow--Oh yes, rather; he's a friend of Horace Jewdwine's. Do observe Tubs bathing; his figure is not adapted--Did you say a gentleman? Yes, no, yes; ask somebody else. It entirely depends on the point of view. He's an awfully good sort. _Really_, Tubs ought to be made to bathe before breakfast, when there's n.o.body about. Yes, of course she did. She gave him the work to please Mr. Jewdwine, I suppose. He's been ill, poor little beggar; I must go and speak to him."

After having thus first harried, then effectually baffled the enemy, Miss Palliser started with a swinging stride in pursuit of Mr.

Rickman. He sat alone in an att.i.tude of extreme dejection, on the stones of an unfinished and forsaken jetty that marked the farthest western limit of the esplanade. Having turned his back on that public rendezvous, he was unaware of Miss Palliser's approach until she stood beside him.

"Glad to see you out again," said she.

He sprang to his feet and raised his hat. At the first sight of his face Miss Palliser had a shrewd idea of the cause and nature of his illness.

"Thank you so much for your kind messages. I'm all right again, as you see."

"I see nothing of the sort, as yet." She had meant to tell him that it was Lucia who had sent her to inquire; but she thought better of it.

"Oh, well, I ought to get round in this bracing air."

"Harmouth air," said Kitty, "is not particularly bracing. In fact it's very relaxing. It probably helped you to break down."

"Well, I shall be out of it soon, anyway." He sighed. "Miss Palliser, can you tell me if Miss Harden has come back?"

"She came back the day before yesterday."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes, I've seen her."

There was a long pause, filled by the insistent clamour of the sea.

His next question was less audible to the outer than to the inner ear.

"How is she?"

Miss Palliser was seldom at a loss for a word; but this time she hesitated. "She--she is very plucky."

There was another and a longer pause in which neither had the courage to look at the other.