Jewdwine was another link.  And at that thought his heart heaved and became alive again.

CHAPTER XXXIX

In the act of death, as in everything else that he had ever done, Sir Frederick Harden had hit on the most inappropriate, the most inconvenient moment—­the moment, that is to say, when Horace Jewdwine had been appointed editor of The Museion, when every minute of his day was taken up with forming his staff and thoroughly reorganizing the business of his paper.  It was, besides, the long-desired moment, for which all his years at Oxford had been a training and a consecration; it was that supreme, that nuptial moment in which an ambitious man embraces for the first time his Opportunity.

The news of Lucia’s trouble found him, as it were, in the ardours and preoccupations of the honeymoon.

It was characteristic of Jewdwine that in this courting of Opportunity there had been no violent pursuit, no dishevelment, no seizing by the hair.  He had hung back, rather; he had waited, till he had given himself value, till Opportunity had come to him, with delicate and ceremonious approach.  Still, his head had swum a little at her coming, so that in the contemplation of his golden bride he had for the time being lost sight of Lucia.

As for marrying his cousin, that was a question with which for the present he felt he really could not deal.  No doubt it would crop up again later on to worry him.

Meanwhile he gave to Lucia every minute that he could spare from the allurements of his golden bride.  For more than a fortnight her affairs had been weighing on him like a nightmare.  But only like a nightmare, a thing that troubled him chiefly in the watches of the night, leaving his waking thoughts free to go about the business of the day, a thing against which he felt that it was impossible to contend.  For Lucia’s affairs had the vagueness, the confusion of a nightmare.  Details no doubt there were; but they had disappeared in the immensity of the general effect.  Being powerless to deal with them himself, he had sent down his own solicitor to assist in disentangling them.  But as the full meaning of the disaster sank into him he realized with the cold pang of disappointment that their marriage must now be indefinitely postponed.

To be sure, what had as yet passed between them hardly amounted to an understanding.  All Jewdwine’s understandings had been with himself.  But the very fact that he was not prepared to act on such an understanding made him feel as responsible as if it actually existed.  Being conscious of something rather more than cousinly tenderness in the past, he really could not be sure that he was not already irretrievably committed.  Not that Lucia’s manner had ever taken anything of the sort for granted.  He had nothing to fear from her.  But he had much (he told himself) to fear from his own conscience and his honour.