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Those who now conversed intimately with Jewdwine were entertained no longer with the Absolute, but they heard a great deal about the "Return to Nature." Mr. Fulcher's pipings, therefore, were entirely in harmony with Jewdwine's change of mood. But Rickman, who had once protested so vigorously against the Absolute, would not hear of the Return to Nature, either.
Jewdwine was very free with his criticism and advice; but, beyond these high intellectual aids, it never occurred to Rickman that he had anything to gain by Jewdwine's friendship. Discipleship is the purest of all human relations. Jewdwine divined this purity, and was touched by it. He prepared to accept a certain amount of responsibility. He looked at his watch.
He had a horror of this forcing of the sensuous and passionate note. The author of the Prolegomena to Æsthetics recoiled from "too much temperament." He felt, moreover, the jealous pang of the master who realizes that he has lost his hold. This was not that Rickman who used to hang all flushed and fervid on Jewdwine's words.
And yet he knew that there could be nothing more sundering than such meanness, such corruptibility as Jewdwine's. Their friendship could never be the same. There was a certain relief in that. There could never be any hypocrisy, any illusion in their relations now. And nobody knew that better than Jewdwine.
"Good night. Good night. Take my advice and leave the fugitive actuality alone." Those were Jewdwine's last words, spoken from the depths of the hansom. It carried him to the classic heights of Hampstead, to the haunts of the cultivated, the intellectual, the refined. Rickman remained a moment.
"Well, if he knows, he doesn't care." "Oh, doesn't he. That's where Jewdwine's great. He cares for nothing else. He cares more than any man alive in his heart." "D n his heart! I don't believe he has one." "Would you oblige me by not talking about him any more?" Maddox obliged him.
For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred imperishable flame.
Jewdwine made no mention of having received that letter. And that he had not received it might be fairly inferred from the discrepancy between young Rickman's exaggerated account of the value and Mr. Jewdwine's more moderate estimate. Lucia and Kitty first looked at each other, and then away to opposite corners of the room.
And there, for the space of one hour, with his arm linked in Rickman's, he wrestled with Rickman for his body and his soul. Jewdwine's cry had been, "Beware of the friendship of little men"; the burden of Maddox was, "Beware of the love of little women." "That's all you know about it, Maddy. The love of great women absorbs you, dominates you. The little women leave you free." Maddox groaned.
He hardly cared to think what subtle but atrocious egoism of passion 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 raisonné was so bound up with the history of his passion that the thing had become a catalogue raisonné of its vicissitudes.
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