CHAPTER XXXVIII

Rickman, it seemed, was doomed to inspire that sense of agonizing uncertainty.

It was the second evening after his return.  The Dinner was not going off well.  Miss Walker was depressed, Mr. Spinks was not in his accustomed spirits, and Mrs. Downey had been going about with red eyes all day.  Mr. Rickman had confided to her the deplorable state of his finances.  And Mrs. Downey had said to herself she had known from the first that he would not be permanent.

He didn’t want to be permanent.  He desired to vanish, to disappear from the boarding-house and the boarders, and from Poppy Grace on the balcony next door; to get away from every face and every voice that he had known before he knew Lucia Harden’s.  Being convinced that he would never see her again, he wanted to be alone with his vivid and piercing memory of her.  At first it was the pain that pierced.  She had taken out her little two-edged sword and stabbed him.  It wouldn’t have mattered, he said, if the sword had been a true little sword, but it wasn’t; it had snapt and left a nasty bit of steel inside him.  Her last phrase was the touch that finished him.  But the very sting of it created a healthy reaction.  By his revolt against that solitary instance of her cruelty he had recovered his right to dwell upon her kindness.  He dwelt upon it until at times he entered again into possession of the tender, beautiful, dominating dream.  So intense was his hallucination, that as he walked alone in any southerly direction he still felt Muttersmoor on his right hand and Harcombe on his left, and he had waked in the morning to the sound of the sea beating upon Harmouth beach.

But these feelings visited him more rarely in the boarding-house than elsewhere.  That was why he wanted to get away from it.  The illusion was destroyed by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table.  Not that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before.  He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker.  And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there.  After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even Spinks and Flossie as people he had once intimately known.  Miss Roots alone, for some inscrutable reason, seemed familiar, in keeping with that divine experience to which the actual hour did violence.  It was almost as if she understood.

A shrewdly sympathetic glance went out from a pair of hazel eyes set in a plain, clever, strenuous face.  Miss Roots was glad, she said, to see him back again.  He turned to her with the question that had never failed to flatter and delight.  Was Miss Roots doing anything specially interesting now?  But there was no interest in his tone.