“I am proud,” said he, “to have served so luminous a purpose.”

His readiness seemed to have disarmed the formidable Fielding.  He leaned back in his chair and looked at the young man a moment or two without speaking.  Then the demon stirred in him again with a malignant twinkle of his keen eyes.

“You see I was determined to treat you honourably, as you came to me through a friend of Miss Gurney’s.  But for her, you would have gone where your contemporaries go—­into the waste-paper basket.  They serve no purpose—­luminous or otherwise.”  He chuckled ominously.  “I had the knife ready for you.  But if you want to know why I paused in the deed of destruction, it was because I was fascinated, positively fascinated by the abominations of your illustrator.  And so, before I knew what I was doing (or I assure you I would never have done it), I had read, actually read the lines which the creature quotes at the bottom of his foul frontispiece.  Why he quoted them I do not know—­they have no more to do with his obscenities than I have.  And then—­I read the poem they were taken from.”

He paused.  His pauses were deadly.

“You have one great merit in my eyes.”

Rickman looked up with a courageous smile, prepared for another double-edged pleasantry more murderous than the last.

“You have not imitated me.”

For one horrible moment Rickman was inspired to turn some phrase about the hopelessness of imitating the inimitable.  He thought better of it; but not before the old man divined his flattering intention.  He shook himself savagely in his chair.

“Don’t—­please don’t say what you were going to say.  If you knew how I loathe my imitators.  I shouldn’t have sent for you if you had been one of them.”

His mind seemed to be diverted from his present victim by some voluptuous and iniquitous reminiscence.  Then he began again.  “But you and your Saturnalia—­Ah!”

He leant forward suddenly as he gave out the interjection like a growl.

“Do you know you’re a very terrible young man?  What do you mean by setting my old cracked heart dancing to those detestable tunes?  I wish I’d never read the d——­d things.”

He threw himself back in his chair.

“No, no; you haven’t learnt any of those tunes from me.  My Muse wears a straighter and a longer petticoat; and I flatter myself she has the manners of an English gentlewoman.”

Rickman blushed painfully this time.  He had no reply to make to that.

“I didn’t mean,” Fielding went on, “to talk to you about your Saturnalia.  But On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of Confession—­those are great poems.”

Rickman looked up, startled out of his self-possession by the unexpected words and the sudden curious vibration in the voice that uttered them.  Yet he could hardly realize that Fielding was praising him.

“They moved me,” said Fielding, “as nothing moves me now, except the Psalms of David.  I have been a great poet, as poets go nowadays; but” (he smiled radiantly) “the painful conviction is forced upon me that you will be a greater—­if you live.  I wanted to tell you this, because nobody else is likely to find it out until you’re dead.  You may make up your mind to that, my friend.”