Maurice’s geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an assault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio, heard in the adjacent dining-room her father’s pugnacious tones: “The fellow is merelyan ass; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him with his winking virgin!”
“My dear father,” Maurice’s voice returned, and she wondered whether her father felt to the full its cutting quality, “we are all of us asses to one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my house.”
“Oh, very well; by all means,” said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but hesitating to express his full resentment. “I will merely vacate your drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity.” The words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper.
“I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other people’s beliefs; it’s not a seemly thing—a bludgeon in a drawing-room.”
Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a touch of anxiety.
“Did you hear, darling?” he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were alone.
“Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit of bludgeoning—he thinks it right.”
“Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged.”
“Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak.”
“Only I did not intend you to hear.”
“Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say.” She smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight discords if their own harmony were perfect.
But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child, and Felicia felt her husband’s eye upon her as, in all his encounters with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she desired of him.
“WHAT ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!” said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia’s unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela’s world, and in the consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.
But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its first thin veil of ice.
For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him the right to put her outof his life. Following the short ease of the hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, he felt himself growing hot.
“No,” he said, beginning to eat his soup, “we have both been busy, haven’t we?”
“Have you, Maurice?” Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised spoon—eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. “I haven’t seen the great picture or the great book yet.”
Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of burning cheeks. “Not as I should have been,” he confessed. His confusion was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played with her fork, “Do you mind this—so much? Don’t on my account. I am completely seared, Maurice.”
And as he could find no answer: “We must meet, you know. Can’t you pretend calm, as I do?”
She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had been atrifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding between them.
“You make me feel like a felon,” Maurice murmured.
“It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that,” Angela returned quietly; “the retaliating attitude is not mine, Maurice.” Then, as the talk about them cloaked them less, “What have you and Mrs. Wynne been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of her—so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever”—Angela leaned forward to look down the table—“and so Geoffrey evidently finds her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?”
Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of treacherous little hints and warnings. “Not much,” he answered; “he drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know,” Maurice added, “so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either.”
“Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than for power,” said Angela, “and not only as a means to power but as an end in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn’t it, if the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar.”
She spoke with a musing vagueness. Mauricewas not looking at her, and her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the cruel, vague words.
“Dear Maurice!” she murmured, “I didn’t mean that! Indeed, I forgot for a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain in it for you—beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what you let me know;—I can’t get over that habit of frankness with you. But Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career.”
“He knows,” Maurice stammered, “that if he were to feel a shackle I would abandon——.”
“Ah, but would you?” said Angela as he paused. “Though that is why, for your sake, more than his—I know your sensitiveness—that is why, dear friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is—I want to see you free. I wish—I wish,” she smiled with quite her old sweet lightness now, “you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no longer?”
But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find no words.
“Dear Maurice, how you distrust me,” she murmured,“how you forget that such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn’t hurt you if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read to-day his article on ‘Credulity.’”
In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.
“Isn’t it appalling!” he laughed—he would have laughed at anything said in that normal voice—“it’s unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield.” Angela also laughed. “My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There’s a pathos in it, so far as you and she are concerned.”
“Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the eighties,” Maurice said. “I am afraid Felicia and I find the grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;” and with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked with their sense of peaceful confidence.That she made the music of his life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.
She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so staunch, so living, so moving onward.
They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to glance down these innocent vistas in each other’s lives. Felicia told of the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve herself to death, in passionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had remained there through a night of lonely horror.
Geoffrey’s reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never been very passionate or resentful. “I was a conceited little beggar and always kept cool.” At a very early age, after a whipping from his mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, “Do you want to go on?” “I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an exceedingly disagreeable child.”
Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in thedinner-table talk, were conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred upon.
After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know Geoffrey’s secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her, and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought sudden, sincere words to his lips. “Angela, you have really forgiven me, haven’t you?” he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe, Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they were quiet and she said: “I have forgiven you—if what you said was true.”
“True? How could it not be?” Maurice stammered, conscious at once that his impulse had been unwise.
“It could not be if you loved her most.” He was silent, struggling with his thoughts.
“You love her most—now,” Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of questioning.
“She is—my wife.”
“And therefore you love her most: for the past—loyalty to your wife must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard—hard to forgive, Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my life, the blotting out—for a time—of my heaven. And how could I forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead joy?”
“But—I told you—that I was unworthy—that I was undependable; that I couldn’t depend on my own feeling——“ Maurice stammered on.
“You tried to help me so,” said Angela quickly, “and it was that that I could not forgive—your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there.”
Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling that she must leave him or burst into sobs. “I understand,” she said. “You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won’t ask further. Now I will go and talk to her.” She went across the room to Geoffrey and Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.
Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was there—the truth Angela clung to as her right—that he had loved her, too, if only for the moment; could he,in the name of the larger truth, rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or regretted—that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.
Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, repeating to herself, “Cheap, alluring little creature.” It helped her to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia’s beauty. Oh, yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won her husband’s shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and pain.
“At last I can escape to you,” she said. “You have been so surrounded all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, it seems, find you quite alone”—she smiled at Geoffrey—“but Geoffrey hardly counts, does he? Isn’t it odd—have you noticed it—that I have hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, Geoffrey does count—a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his cynicism, and it’s difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve atête-à-tête.”
“How selfish, my dear Angela.” Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. “You don’t get rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you.”
“Isn’t that a palpable evasion?” Angela turned her smile from him; “we must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may be misinterpreted.”
Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the wall’s stubborn presence. “I can’t urge him to miss you. If he is cynical we will simply leave him—planté là. He is more the schoolboy, though, than the cynic.”
“You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, don’t let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have you been doing all this time?”
“Simply jogging on,” said Felicia, finding in Angela’s application of her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey’s ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.
“Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must spur him; it’s fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is the racer type. But your father hasn’t been jogging,” Angela continued, telling herself before Felicia’s not very responsive look that she must try some other interest—any allusion to Maurice would rouse the hostility of thisjealous little wife. “What a gallop, indeed, his article on ‘Credulity’!—Maurice and I have been talking about it.”
Felicia’s eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: “Have you?”
“Yes,”—Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her—“I do understand. Only I don’t feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don’t feel it either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It’s a thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about.”
Felicia’s stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly and gently.
“As an old friend of Maurice’s—as a friend of yours—you allow me to understand—and be sorry for the pain, don’t you?”
Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like.
“No, I don’t allow any pity that divides me from my father,” she said. “You misunderstand my husband—and the privileges of your friendship for him.”
She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at her father, she turned and went across the room to him.
Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her fan, trembled as she said, “Mrs. Wynne has a talent forcoups de théâtre.”
“And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that walls might be useful.”
“You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My sympathy was real—a sympathy that any friend might have expressed—I supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her.” The pathos and nobility of her words seemed to Angela her own nobility and pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears.
“Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you can’t speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable, you’d better give up trying to speak at all.”
Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he walked away.
“WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?” Maurice asked. He and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone, for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded hansoms, and the long silence had been unbroken. Leaning back in her corner, her cloak folded tightly around her, Felicia had gazed blankly at the powdery blue of the sky, the thickly sprinkled lights beneath it, her heart a chamber of angry misery. Maurice’s question, its light curiosity like the aimless fumbling of a key, suddenly unlocked and threw open the door.
“Maurice—Maurice,” she said under her breath, yet it was like a cry, “why did you talk to her about papa’s essay?” Maurice’s curiosity, had been a little less aimless than its lightness implied, but he felt now as if she had fired a pistol at his head.
“What did she say?” he asked quickly and sharply, revealing his fear.
“She said that she was sorry for us, and understood it—that you had told her we disliked the article.”
“We did—you know,” said Maurice after amoment, and, as he saw the pale oval of his wife’s face turn upon him: “She spoke of it; I didn’t think of concealing what we felt. I can’t think that she meant to be impertinent.” It struck him, even now, as odd that he should be venturing an excuse for Angela at the moment that his thoughts were assailing her with a passionate vindictiveness.
“Maurice, Maurice,” Felicia repeated, in a voice empty now even of reproach. It was a deep, a weary astonishment.
“Dearest, don’t misjudge me; don’t make a mountain out of a mole-hill. You know how one slips into such things.” He leaned forward on the apron of the cab to look his insistent supplication into her eyes, but hers refused to meet them. “And she is an old—old friend, my precious Felicia; one can’t mistrust one’s friends. It seemed perfectly natural to talk it over.”
“Oh, Maurice, how miserable you have made me!” They were in the smaller streets nearing Chelsea, and she covered her face with her hands. In an agony of remorse he put an arm around her shoulders, beginning now to see his culpability with her eyes, exaggerating it with his magnified imagination of her contempt. He—who had encouraged his father-in-law to publish the wretched thing—he to jest about it with a woman whom he fundamentally distrusted! He could find no further words. They reached the house in silence. Mr. Merrick, who had arrived just before them, was inclined to talk, but, kissing him good-night with a certain vehemence,Felicia went at once to her own room and after a few moments Maurice followed her.
She had already taken off her dress, and, in a white dressing-gown, was hastily unpinning her wreath of hair. Maurice, in the mirror, met the deep look of her eyes. His face was pallid as he stood hesitatingly near the door, not guessing that anger was already gone and that the anguish at her heart was dread of loss of love for him, dread of some insurmountable barrier—would treacherous weakness be such a barrier?—coming between them. Now she turned, and seeing him standing there, white, not daring to supplicate, she stretched out her arms to him. He sprang to her.
“Oh, Maurice, don’t—don’t—don’t,” she stammered incoherently, not clearly knowing what she wished him not to do. She dropped her face upon his shoulder. “Don’t let me ever—not love you. Hold me always.”
“Felicia, you almost kill me.”
His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need, such love, and her?
“My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do understand. With her one can’t be straight. She led, you followed; how could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!”
She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her, leaning like a little child his head upon her breast.
“It is one of my horrors,” he said. “For a moment I saw myself as you might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you.”
“Darling Maurice—never, never. I hated her so—that blinded me. I hate so to think that she was ever near you—has any claim. Perhaps it is almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it.”
In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing, rose—rose and shook him. “Tell her now, tell her all.” Terror quenched longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed her, his eyes still closed, saying, “Don’t take your arms away until the horror is quite passed.”
THE spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Wynnes, after their round of country visits, had returned to London, usually finding Felicia alone, for Maurice was really working at a portrait, and Mr. Merrick spent most of his time at his club, watching life from its windows with an ironic eye. At tea-time Maurice would appear, tired yet merry, from the studio; friends came in, the quiet shining hour broke into sparkling facets; but the hours alone with her were personal possessions to Geoffrey, jewels that strung themselves in a rosary through his weeks and months. They talked, or Felicia played to him, declaring that his taste for music grew; they often sat silent, she sewing and he watching her. The thickets had been thorny of late, he had discovered that a curtailed and uncertain income could make life curiously nagging and difficult, but from these brambles it was comforting to look at the atoning cause of them. The hours with her so justified his first groping simile of the sunny opening among trees, grass, clouds and sky. Hisconfidence in her happiness irradiated his own problems.
This afternoon the confidence received a little shock. He came late, after tea-time, and walking before the maid into the drawing-room had time, before Felicia saw him, to grasp the disturbing significance of her attitude. She was sitting alone near the window, her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. For a moment he thought that she was crying, and, like a pang, the memory of sunlight among young birches, snowdrops, a distant bird-song, went through him.
Felicia, however, was not crying; and as she looked round at him, he saw that the attitude might have been one of merely momentary weariness.
“I was almost asleep,” she said.
Taking up a bit of sewing she began to talk about the political prospects. “I hear that you are not altogether in sympathy with the Government,” she said.
“I’m not—not altogether.”
“I even hear that you may resign.”
“Perhaps I would,” said Geoffrey, leaning back and smoothing his hand over his hair, “if I could afford it. I serve my own purposes better by remaining in office.”
“Do you mean that you can’t afford—financially—to risk failure?” Felicia asked. “I never associated you with compromise.”
“It’s not my own failure, but the failure of the policy I believe in that I might risk by refusing tocompromise. One fights for one’s cause in politics with all sorts of weapons. As for personal failure, I may not be put to too stringent a test; I may make enough money to float me to absolute independence. Did you know that I was a ferocious gambler—and not only on the Stock Exchange, but with cards?”
The placidity with which he showed her his faults always amused Felicia, even when she could not share it. He made no effort to win good opinion—not even hers.
“I have heard, and to tell you the truth I am sorry about the cards.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like the idea of a pastime becoming so significant. To say the least of it—it’s not fitting.”
“Well,” said Geoffrey, laughing, “I won’t do it any more. You are quite right.”
“Oh, not on account of what I say, please,” she protested, slightly flushing; “you must judge for yourself.”
“So I do. I have judged. You may be sure I would never yield anything I believed in—even to please you. I have always disliked the significance cards might come to assume, so I yield, and gladly, since it does please you.”
“That is a relief. I could not bear to be a standard. And I can’t believe,” she added, “that your winnings at cards can have any significance for your career.”
“Ah, any stick counts in the raft that keeps one floated. But as for my career, if I’ve an object,you mustn’t think it a career. I don’t bother much about my career. I’m a converted character, you see.”
“Converted! You? From what and to what?”
Felicia’s face, on its background of sky and river, turned on him the look he loved—fond and mocking. He returned it, smiling, but gravely. “It is quite true. It’s not that I care less for my ambitions, but differently. My goal has shifted, and everything is at once more simple and more complex; the aims are bigger and far simpler; the fight is bigger, too, but more complex than when the fight was personal. I shouldn’t mind failure, really, or beginning over again. You converted me, you see.”
“I?” said Felicia, with more sadness than surprise.
“Yes, you. Your courage, your sincerity, your faith, that wasn’t the least blind but counted the costs and took the risk every time. Oh, don’t protest; indeed, I hardly know how or why I felt it of you; merely my whole interpretation of things began to twirl on another axis. The idealistic philosophies of my college days came back to me—with all sorts of personal meanings in them. I began to trust life and its significance, since I trusted you so utterly.”
“You almost terrify me,” said Felicia; “would the world turn round the other way again if I proved horrid?”
“Oh, no, that is done with. If you proved horrid I would suffer, but the world would continue to turn in the right direction—despite your wrongness.”
“Ah, that’s a real conversion then.” Felicia rose, laying down her work. She was touched, near tears. Standing beside him and looking down at him she said, “Shall I play to you?”
“Do,” said Geoffrey, but taking her hand he held it for a moment, adding quietly, in almost a matter-of-fact voice, “Dear.”
He had let go her hand as quietly when Angela was ushered in.
Angela and Felicia had not met since that night of the past spring, and the parting then made future meetings improbable.
Felicia had put Angela and Angela’s meaning behind her, and had not doubted that Angela would acquiesce in mutual forgetfulness. It was astonishing and very disconcerting to see again this spectre rise, and rise, as always it seemed, in Geoffrey’s presence.
She advanced into the room, smiling vaguely—vaguely hesitating, an intentness under the hesitation.
Felicia still stood beside Geoffrey, and before he, too, rose, and faced the unwelcome guest, their attitude almost implied the clasp of hands that Angela had not seen.
Her eyes fluttered quickly from one to the other and then fixed in a long gaze on Felicia.
“Dear Mrs. Wynne, I wanted to see you alone,” she said.
Geoffrey, at this, turning his back, strolled to the window.
Angela’s purpose swiftly put him aside, would notlinger; “I won’t wrangle with Geoffrey; besides, he really makes no difference,” she said. “For such a long time I have wanted to see you—ever since that night—but you have been away, and so have I. I have been wretched about that night. I could not bear to think that you misunderstood me so cruelly. I have come to beg you to forgive me. It was presumptuous of me to think for a moment that you would care for what I thought or felt, or that my sympathy could be anything but indifferent to you. It was only a blunder. I did not realize that you disliked me so much.”
Felicia’s amazement struggled between a dim belief and a vivid disbelief. The uppermost feeling came out, but in a dismayed voice, for that half-belief plucked at her—“I think that you have always disliked me—really I do.”
“I have longed to love you!” cried Angela; “longed to love you—if you would let me;” and, as she heard the intolerable beauty of these words, she burst into tears.
Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey; his back to the window, he leaned on the window-sill, folding his arms. Stupefied, Felicia’s eyes questioned him, “Shall I believe her? Shall I put my arms around her?” It was her impulse, the quick response of her tenderness to suffering. But under the impulse something strong held her back, something that made it a false one, partaking of the falseness that aroused it; and Geoffrey’s sombre look at her seconded the distrust. She stood silent and helpless.
Angela uncovered her eyes. “Don’t you believe me?” she asked.
“I will try to,” Felicia stammered, “if you will give me time—help me to——“
“You are very pitiless,” said Angela in a voice that had caught back its full self-control. “Very hard and pitiless.”
“What can I do? I cannot trust your affection; really I cannot. That is the truth.”
“It is that that is hard and pitiless—to think of one’s truth more than of another’s pain.”
“You always say the right thing,” Felicia answered gravely; she could but recognize the other’s seeming right; there was no irony in the words.
“I have come to you with love,” said Angela, controlling an anger that made her voice tremble slightly, “and you have rejected me. I have given you my best. But sincerity and love shrivel before such cruel scepticism as yours. I am sad, sad for you, because to the sceptic all life must turn to ashes. You are the spirit that denies: I don’t distrust my own flowers because when you look at them they die. I am sorry for you. You live in a world where I cannot breathe. Good-bye.”
She had turned away, thrilling with her spiritual splendour. From apparent failure she sprang to triumph. And, with a final flashing vision of a Pilgrim’s Chorus marching past Venusburg to a kingdom of the sky, she added, resting eyes of saintly solemnity on her antagonist: “God bless you.”
She was gone; and not moving, not looking at Geoffrey, Felicia said, “I have been horrible. I could not help it.”
“You are all right,” said Geoffrey, coming from the window, “you seemed pretty horrible, and that gave her one of the best times of her life. You positively buckled the wings on her shoulders. But she knows you’re right, and she won’t forgive you for it, either.”
“To have a person who hates you say ‘God bless you’—it frightens me.”
“Nonsense. It was an ugly missile, I own; but it’s the worst she can shy at you. Now come and play for me,” said Geoffrey.
ANGELA walked away breathing quickly. Her exaltation still floated her above her anger, but through the anger and through the exaltation a deep sense of injury and humiliation rose again and again, bringing tears to her eyes. And under what circumstances had Felicia rejected her outstretched hand, striking down its patient pitifulness? The suspicions of her first entrance into the room gathered around her, cloaked her warmly; there was a shiver in that sense of humiliation. Exaltation, too, was a cold thing if one suspected that others did not see one as exalted. Angela hardly knew that the hot currents of feeling that poured through her heart were those of hatred.
And hardly had she walked five minutes than she met Mr. Merrick, strolling in all his handsome dignity down the street.
There was no project in Angela; only the blind instinct to seize him, to use him; a weapon, perhaps an avenging weapon.
A fire was blazing in her, and by its glare through darkness she saw only fitfully her own desires. She held out her hand with a quick smile. “Dear Mr. Merrick, I had hoped to see you to-day. Will you walk back with me a little?”
She realized that Mr. Merrick’s slight knowledge of her could not be a very friendly one, but she guessed him to be susceptible to atonement.
Firmly and quickly she went on, “I have always wanted to talk to you and always missed the chance. We disagree, I think, about many things—and disagreement always attracts me. I long at once to get the larger sight, to test my truths by other’s truths. I so respect honesty, conviction, talent, even when used for purposes that oppose my own.”
Mr. Merrick, feeling a deep surprise and, perhaps, a touch of suspicion, bowed gravely and turned to walk beside her.
“I have so wanted to ask you about your life, about the steps of thought that have led you to your present position; for you must recognize that it is a position—and that to have achieved it implies responsibilities.”
Still with large gravity Mr. Merrick inclined his head, finding no ready words in answer to such comprehensive interest.
Angela was not wanting in humour, and a malicious thought ofMaître Corbeau, sur un arbre perchê, flashed through her mind. He evidently accepted her implied homage as a making of amends fully due to his distinction.
“I have tried so often to really know you,” Angela said, smiling plaintively, though lightly; “especially since reading your essay on ‘Credulity’ last spring. But I can never find you.”
“Ah, yet I am often at home at this hour.”
The touch of surprised suspicion was gone; Mr. Merrick spoke with benignity.
“Ah, but it’s difficult, you see.” Angela’s smile gained at once in gaiety and plaintiveness. “I had so hoped to see more of you all; I hoped when your daughter came to London that as an old friend of her husband’s—he is like a brother to me—was, I perhaps should say—she would let me be her friend too. London is a big, ugly place for a fresh young creature. I know it so well. I should have liked to hold her hand as it were, while she made her first steps in the muddy, slippery world.”
Mr. Merrick looked now a trifle perplexed, and Angela felt that she had gone a little too fast as he said, “I have been with Felicia from almost the beginning of her London life; and since I fancy that I know the world better than any young woman can know it”—he inclined himself to Angela with a slight, paternal irony of manner—“she has had her hand held. I have watched over my young nestlings,” Mr. Merrick added, smiling kindly upon her.
“Yes, yes,” she hurried to say, “a man knows more, of course—can guard from anything obvious; but the things to be guarded against in our complex modern life are not the obvious things; they are breaths, whispers, vague touches in the dark. Dear Mr. Merrick,”—her gentle look had now its rallying touch of boldness—“men do not hear or feel the things I mean. And, again, you are a man of the world, but your daughter is not a woman of the world. I know what you have wished for her—tokeep your rose-bud sheltered, the dew still upon it; so often the ideal of the father when he has seen life in all its dangerous reality. You have succeeded; she is a rose-bud with the dew on it. Dear Mr. Merrick, keep it dewy.” Her smile straight into his eyes was grave, steady. Maître Corbeau was flattered by her words, her look. The vague self-distrust that often fluttered in him, that fear of perhaps lacking what she so delightfully saw in him, was still. He had hardly grasped the significance of her allusions.
“You see,” Angela went on quietly,—she was by now quite sincerely in the very frame of mind her words fitted, warning, protective, benignant, exalted in his eyes so that the mood of that final “God bless you” was with her again, a mist that shut out flames,—“You see, your daughter is younger than I am. In one sense—it may sound odd, but I am very clear-sighted in all matters of sympathy—in one sense I doubt whether she could understand you as I do.”
Angela’s voice was as mild and smooth as milk and honey as she glided to another turn of her labyrinth. “There is an inevitable narrowness, intolerance, in youth; something cruel in the clearness of young minds, unable to see beyond their own acuteness. It didn’t surprise me that neither she nor Maurice appreciated your essay. I disagreed with it, but I saw the bigness of my opponent, saw all the thought and life and suffering that underlay every sentence; and when I realized that they saw only the little superficial things, that they laughed at theshrubs and thickets and didn’t even look up at the mountain, I felt all the strange situation, all the pain it must be to you; felt, forgive me if I say too much, your loneliness.”
Mr. Merrick was amazed, perhaps more amazed by this revelation of some unkind disloyalty in his children, than gratified by Angela’s sympathy. But though he could feel little gratitude he felt no distrust; and his injuries suddenly lowered, even larger than he had fancied. Maurice too! There was treachery then as well as disloyalty. The sudden grievance could not be kept down.
“I am surprised at Maurice. He urged me to publish, seemed to see nothing but the mountain,” he said.
Angela felt a hasty recoil from this false step; she had imagined the dissuasions both Felicia’s and Maurice’s.
“Oh, about Maurice I don’t know,” she said quickly; “it was in my talk with her about it that I saw her dislike—and only inferred his.” She felt that she had dogged all sorts of funny, half-hidden little dangers—Maurice’s aroused enmity was the plainest of them—and what was she racing towards? what her object? She could not see. Felicia took all from her, would share not a jot or tittle of her rich possessions; well then, she would keep what came. Besides, Felicia was in peril. Yes, there was the object. She heaved a sigh as it emerged once more before her.
Mr. Merrick, after a silence not without its dignity,forbearing further comment on the revelation, went on: “Yes, loneliness is the lot of age. Youth is narrow. I don’t complain; one can’t when one understands. Before her marriage Felicia was my complaisant little echo. I filled her mind with all it owns. Now other interests have pushed me out.”
The object, the beneficent object, was now so clear, that the dubious meaning of that sudden dodge was comfortably obscured; with one’s eye on a beacon one could no longer glance at these wayside mishaps. She had a look of quiet homage for his generosity, as she said, “As to interests that push you out I hardly care for one. Your daughter’s feeling about your essay could hardly have been spontaneous in your complaisant echo; it’s the rarest women, the strongest only, who do not echo some one; I imagined that in this case she echoed her husband, but I see the larger influence. My Cousin Geoffrey was with your daughter when I came this afternoon. I hoped to see her alone—to see you; but I felt that I was interrupting. He admires your daughter greatly. The dewy rose attracts after dusty, practical life; it’s pleasant, after turmoil, to inhale the perfume. As I say, frankly, it is an influence that I regret.”
“He is Maurice’s most intimate friend,” said Mr. Merrick quickly.
She felt his involuntary clutch at the answer to an intimation he hardly recognized.
“Yes, he is,” she assented, “but not the friend I would have chosen for Maurice either. Maurice wants an ideal in life, an impetus away from dreamsand dilettante dawdling into noble action. Geoffrey is pinned to activity, indeed, but hardly in its noble forms; pinned rather to the practical, the expedient, the continual compromise of political life that tends, I think, to eat away all sense of moral responsibility. Not a good influence for either of your nestlings. I am very frank, Mr. Merrick, but I have known both these men so well, since boyhood. Geoffrey is strong, and Maurice, with all his charm, is weak; the contrast must tell. Geoffrey predominates over Maurice and will, I fear, over your daughter. Already we have found his influence working. Women echo the strongest. Here I am, at home. It was so good of you to come with me. I am so glad of our talk. Won’t you lunch with me and my father on Friday? Lord Challoner is to be with us—a clever man; he will be delighted to meet you. You and he will talk while papa and I listen. I love to watch minds striking sparks. You will come?”
“With pleasure.” Mr. Merrick’s varying emotions culminated for the moment in gratification. Lord Challoner was a very clever man; Lady Angela well known as a very clever woman. The responsibilities of his recognized worth wrought in him as he walked homeward.
THE talk had been as suave as the ascent of a rocket; and once its destined height attained its transformation into successive explosive shocks swiftly followed. Felicia, shortly after her father’s return, burst into Maurice’s dressing-room. She had known a tormenting doubt of her own distrust; now her indignation was sure of itself, her distrust was justified; there was almost a relief in the fulness of her anger.
“Maurice, what do you think has happened?” she demanded.
Maurice was just finishing his dressing. He looked round at her inquiringly, laying down his brushes. Felicia’s indignations were rare, and therefore rather alarming; but seeing that this indignation was in no way connected with himself—Felicia’s whole aspect irradiated a sense of union, a conviction that he was to second her in her indignation—he took up the brushes again and put a finishing touch to his hair. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if Mr. Merrick had suddenly become insufferable, and rather hoping that such was the case and that Felicia would initiate a movement to get rid of him. “Nothing to bother you about your father, dear?” he added.
“Exactly. You remember last summer—Lady Angela and papa’s article? She came here this afternoon and asked me to forgive her. I couldn’t; it seemed cruel, I know; but I felt through and through me that I must not trust her. She went away, forgiving me, and now papa tells me that she met him and has been talking with him, and that he finds her charming, and that he is going to lunch with her! Imagine the audacity!”
Maurice, looking at her in the mirror, had turned white, feeling serpent-coils tightening about him again.
“How astonishing!” he ejaculated. But more than astonishment, he felt a sickening fear. What had Angela intended? What did she now intend?
“We must prevent it,” said Felicia. “I hate, dear, to bring you into it, but you must see as I do that it’s impossible. Try to explain it to papa; try to make him feel that she cannot be trusted, that she will poison everything; that in trusting her he divides himself from me.”
Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was a hope, clutched at, that Angela’s proffered friendship had been sincere, a dread lest Felicia’s rejection of it should call down upon her Angela’s revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the circumstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon she held—and withheld—the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It was thethought of this weapon, turned against his wife’s breast, and murdering there her love for him, that made him white.
“I will tell him, dear, anything you like,” he said, in a voice she recognized as strange. “And she was here, you say, this afternoon? Felicia, dearest”—he had managed now to draw through the loop of the white tie—“weren’t you a trifle hard on her?—a trifle cruel, as you say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been unconsciously—through taking too much for granted. You know you misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did.”
Something like terror was freezing Felicia’s anger. She steadied herself with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice’s point of view. “I said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me—that I am hard, cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can’t think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false, and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don’t know, except that she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates me.”
“Dearest,”—Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief—“I know all you feel; but you do grant,don’t you, that your dislike of her, instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her? I don’t think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it’s caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that that’s the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all, as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her utterly.”
“We must, we must,” said Felicia, “for her sake as well as ours, we must.”
“Why, dearest?” Maurice tipped some perfume on the handkerchief.
“It can only be more pain and more bitterness for her if we don’t. What can I mean to her? What can you mean to her? And I have broken with her. Oh, Maurice, surely you see that it must be.”
He turned to her now, and saw that tears were running down her cheeks.
Caution left him. “Dearest!” he exclaimed, his arms about her in a moment, “rather than hurt you I would walk over ten thousand Angelas. Dearest, don’t cry; I will do my best. I’ll try and dissuade your father—an ugly task for me. Poor Angela was my friend.”
“Oh, Maurice, say that I do not come between you and anything real.”
Hiding her face on his shoulder, it comforted her to think herself weak, and he, with his larger, kinder comprehension, strong.
“You are the only real thing,” Maurice answered. He felt that he forced her to imply herself wilful in wrongness; and his fear lest she were more right than she guessed made his triumph seem dangerous.
Felicia said that she would not come in to dinner, and Maurice walked slowly to the drawing-room, pausing for a moment over his thoughts in the little hall. Felicia’s parting kiss had quieted his worst fear—the fear lest her love suspected past wrongs in him, a baseless fear he now saw, and with this steadying of the nerves he could see the other fear as baseless too. Angela would never turn despicably on him; besides, even if she did, Felicia would never believe her, her jealousy would piteously interpret her desperation. There was further relief in thinking Felicia unjust. The thing must be patched up, and Felicia brought to see that common fairness demanded a certain toleration of Angela.
Mr. Merrick was reading a paper with a pretence at absorption, and Maurice guessed that he was very angry. Neither commented on Felicia’s absence, and they went in silence into the little dining-room.
“So you are going to make friends with Angela,” Maurice observed lightly, when the servant had gone.
“Felicia has spoken to you, I infer,” said Mr. Merrick, sipping his soup in slow and regular spoonfuls. His father-in-law’s aggressively noisy manner of imbibing soup had long been a thorn in the fleshto Maurice. It was peculiarly irritating to-night. He could but hold Mr. Merrick responsible for all the vexatious situation. Silly, gullible old fool! He could almost have uttered the words as the sibilant mouthfuls succeeded one another. How obvious, in looking at him, that Angela could only have captured him as a tool. To think that, again cast the danger-signal on the situation, made it more than vexatious. Maurice forcibly quieted his mental comments, since to think his father-in-law a silly old fool roused again his worst suspicions of Angela.
“Naturally, she has spoken to me,” he said.
“I trust that you do not share her morbid hatred.”
“I don’t know about a morbid hatred,” Maurice answered, controlling his impatience with the more success now that the soup was done. “I see a very normal antagonism of temperament. Angela is all artificiality, and Felicia all reality; but I do think,” he added, “that Felicia has the defects of her qualities. She scorns artificiality too quickly. Her scorns outshoot the mark. I don’t think that poor Angela, with all her attitudinising, meant any harm this afternoon. Why should she? It was, I own, rather hard on her to come to beg for forgiveness, and to have Felicia refuse to forgive her.”
Mr. Merrick had not dared openly to express his angers and grievances, for then he must reveal their source, and that he felt to be inadvisable; but the latent angers only awaited their opportunity.
“Upon my word! Forgiveness for what?” he demanded.
Maurice recoiled as Angela that afternoon had recoiled. He had intended a cheery, mending talk, and he had not intended that it should lead him to this. He could not tell Mr. Merrick the cause of Angela’s visit—that he had jested with her over the very article he had urged him to publish.
“I don’t quite know what happened,” he said, searching his mind for a safe clue. “Felicia, as you know, didn’t like that article of yours; Angela spoke to her about it—it was in the summer—there was some misunderstanding; Felicia resented her sympathy.”
Matters were becoming clear, luridly clear, to Mr. Merrick’s mind, and Angela gained all that Felicia lost. “Indeed,” he said, ominously, “she criticizes her own father and resents the frank and more intelligent criticism of a friend.”
“No, no!” Maurice was feeling a rush of stupefaction. What had he done? This was not the clue. “Felicia, as far as I understand, didn’t initiate the criticism—resented Angela’s.”
“I see; I understand. It is the proffered friendship she rejects; the community, not the criticism.” Mr. Merrick felt that in Angela’s interpretation of the scene he held a touchstone of its real significance, invisible to Maurice. And how noble had been her further reticence. His anger rose with redoubled vigour over the slight obstacle Maurice had thrown before it. “I see it all,” he repeated; “the quixotic generosity of Lady Angela’s seeking for reconciliation, and Felicia’s rejection of her. As I say, amorbid hatred, and that only, explains it, and it explains it all.”
Maurice was silent, with a sort of despair he felt that so, in its false truth, the situation must rest.
“At all events,” he said, “I don’t suppose that under the circumstances you will really care to accept this invitation of Angela’s.”
“I have accepted it.”
“Grant that it’s a bit indelicate of her to steal such a march on Felicia. It looks like retaliation, you know.”
Mr. Merrick flushed. “I do myself and her the honour to think that it looks like friendship for myself.” Fresh lights were breaking on him every moment. Dewy roses in danger; perilous influences. “I do her the further honour,” he went on, “to believe that Felicia’s rejection of her does not alter her wish to do well by Felicia. For my part I will do my best to atone to her for the cruel affront that she has received at my daughter’s hands.”
Maurice, after the uncomfortable meal was over, almost feared to go to Felicia’s room with his news of defeat. He feared, too, with this new weakness born of his new self-disgust, that her love already had taken on that shadow of suspicion and distrust that he dreaded. He was feeling a sort of giddiness from the hateful pettiness of complexity that enmeshed him. He even imagined he might find her crying in bed, and dinnerless, a horribly effective form of feminine pathos that he had never yet had to face in her. The sight of a tray outside her doorreassured him as to the dinner, and it was with a sense of exquisite relief, a sense of dear, sane, commonplace effacing silly doubts that he found her engaged in the very feminine but very unpathetic occupation of tidying her drawers.
She sat—her lap filled with gloves, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and was folding and rearranging, apparently intent on her occupation. Her eyes, as she looked round at him, gave him once more that sense of quiet security. She had faced the situation, seen its triviality, recovered her humour and her calm. Maurice at once saw the situation as only trivial too.
“Well?” Felicia asked, laying a lawn collar in its place.
“Well, dear, I’m afraid he is unmalleable. He is going.”
Felicia’s face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself.
“He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?”
“Try not to mind, dear. You’ll find that it will adjust itself.”
Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange disintegrating longings to justify Angela bythat self-distrust, to own herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her—to what bogs and quicksands? Under the shifting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as she answered now.
“I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to me. I shan’t oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn’t come between you and me, it’s really all right.”
“YES, it had become impossible,” said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. “I couldn’t submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction.” He smiled a little as he added, “So you see before you a ruined man. Are you pleased with me that I’ve embraced failure?” Lightness of voice went with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a sugar-plum to a child.
Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the playful key.
“You are not a ruined man,” she said; “I’m not pleased that you should call yourself that. You really can’t afford to re-enter the House as an independent member?”
“No,” said Geoffrey, shortly; “I can afford nothing but drudgery.”
“Drudging with you will only be a stepping-stone back to power.”
He was studying her as he stood before her, seeing suddenly after his momentary self-absorption, her pallor and thinness. She almost reminded him ofthe ghostly Felicia, the Felicia of tears and helpless grief; the Felicia of that distant day among the birch-woods. This Felicia was not helpless, not weeping, not quite so wan, but her looks made an ominous echo. He took a seat beside her. “Your father still goes constantly to Angela?” he asked.
Felicia nodded gravely, yet without plaintiveness. Geoffrey made no comment on the affirmation. In silence for some moments, he told himself that this daily growing alienation accounted for the air of pain and tension.
“I must actually seem to you to whine over myself,” he said, presently. “Of course, I know that the drudgery is only a stepping-stone. I must fill my pockets with ammunition; find the pebble for my sling before I confront Goliath again. But tell me something.... I may ask it?” He hesitated. Under his light firmness he knew a shattered, groping mood. He could not think with clearness either for her or himself, and only felt that he must ask.
“Anything you like,” Felicia answered gravely.
“Are you happy?”
He had never come so near as in asking the question; they both felt it. Some barrier was gone; the barrier of her happiness, perhaps. Felicia knew that the little moment suddenly trembled for her with that sense of nearness; in another she felt that her sadness would be a stronger barrier.
She looked up from her sewing.
“You know what I feel about papa and Lady Angela. I feel it foolishly perhaps.”
“Apart from that, it’s a pain, I know, but one can adjust oneself to pain.”
“Apart from that, am I happy? What do you mean by happiness?”
“Are you satisfied? Is your life growing? Is it glad?” Each question was a stone thrown into a deep, deep well of sadness, but she answered with serenity over these shaken depths, even smiling at him with a flicker of the old malice. “It would not grow if I were satisfied, nor, perhaps, if I were altogether glad.”
She saw by the look of accepted gloom that came to his face that he knew himself banished from that moment of nearness, and over the barrier felt herself putting out a hand of tender compunction and comradeship, as she went on more gravely, “I think I am happy, but happiness is not a thing one can look at. It’s like a bird singing in a tree—one parts the branches to see it and it is silent.”
“You hear it singing, then, when I don’t ask you questions?” He had grasped the metaphorical hand, understanding and grateful; understanding, at all events, as much as she herself did.
“Yes; and when I don’t stop to listen for it.”
They talked on again: of his situation, his projects, but these things were now far from their minds. The fact of his broken life no longer held Geoffrey’s thoughts; they were in a chaos of doubts and surmises. He had ruined himself, then, that she might hear the bird sing, and it was silent; and was it only silent? Had it flown? For the first time since hehad played the part of a happy fate in her life he knew a passionate regret for what he had done. No doubt, no surmise, touched her love for her husband. The regret was for the chance he had lost—that other chance of making her happy. Why hadn’t he ruthlessly held on to the advantage circumstance gave him, the advantage not only over Maurice’s poverty, but over Maurice’s weakness? A lurid thought went over that weakness. Would he, Geoffrey, whatever his poverty, have given her up? The “no” that thrilled sternly through his blood told him that to his strength the triumph might have come. He only quelled the tumult by remembering her strength. Dubious peace—to think that her strength would never have let him hope; her strength was great, no doubt, but was it as great as he had imagined? And would it have held her faithful to a finally fickle Maurice? Above all, would it have outmatched his own through years? The tumult was rising again, and he saw that the sudden, wild regret had been like the opening of a flood-gate to such tumults. He must endure them with as much composure as he could muster from contemplation of the fact that the past was irrevocable, that he had given her to her husband, and that she loved her husband; the last fact in particular laid a chill, sane hand on retrospect.
He and Felicia were still talking when Mr. Merrick entered.
Far from assuming a culprit’s humility, Mr. Merrick’s demeanour of late showed, towards Mauriceand Felicia, an aggressive indifference, and towards Geoffrey a portentous gravity. He had made a habit of coming in upontête-à-têtes, taking up a book, and seating himself, with a frosty nod and air of remonstrant determination that was more than a hint for Geoffrey’s departure.
Geoffrey had ignored the hint on several recent occasions, continuing to talk until Maurice’s appearance seemed to relieve Mr. Merrick from some sense of grim obligation; he would then arise, with no word, and stalk away. Geoffrey felt amusement in watching these manoeuvres, giving very little thought to their significance, and finding a schoolboy fun in the conviction that he annoyed Mr. Merrick very much by outsitting him. But to-day he was in no mood for annoying Mr. Merrick; Mr. Merrick’s appearance, indeed, annoyed him too vividly for him to feel the fun of retaliation. He got up at once, and before the other had taken his place near the window.
“Good-bye,” he said, taking Felicia’s hand; his eyes lingered on her pallor, her wanness. “I won’t silence the bird any more. I’ll see you soon again. Tell Maurice I’m sorry to miss him.”
He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused, book in hand, on his way to his chair.
His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and opened the book, observing, “I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send any of your guests away.”
Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father’s appearance. She had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it.
Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick resentment, she asked, “Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you could not do that.”
Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust, real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot, speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, “I shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable intimacy.”
Felicia’s quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now, after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous shook the anger to sudden laughter.
“Papa! how ridiculous!” she exclaimed.“Really, your prejudices shouldn’t make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr. Daunt is my dearest friend—Maurice’s dearest friend.”
“It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt is strong; he dominates you both.”
“What folly, my dear father!”
“Very well, Felicia, folly be it. I can only say that your conduct in this, as in other respects, deeply distresses me. You are altogether changed.”
“I changed? In what respect?”
Mr. Merrick paused to review swiftly all the respects, before saying, “You have become cynical, ungenerous, disloyal.”
Felicia’s amusement hardened to stern gravity. She grew even paler, laying down her sewing as she said, “Ungenerous? Disloyal? I?”
“You, Felicia. It has given me the very greatest pain.”
“How have I been ungenerous? disloyal?”
Her father did not meet her eyes.
“You have been ungenerous to a very noble woman, who only asked to be your friend. You have been disloyal to me.”
“To you!” Her interjections were like swift knives, cutting at his careful deliberateness. “What do you mean?”
“You thought fit, moved by this influence that I deplore—quite apart from its open antagonism to my claims on you—to scoff and jeer at my essay. Itwould have been enough to have expressed your dislike to me alone.” His eyes now turned to her.
She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose. As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,—“That horrible woman!” she cried.
“It was your husband who told me,” said Mr. Merrick quickly.
“Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?”
Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own steady.
“Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don’t fancy you can deny, is the truth.”
Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick’s displeasure with a slight compunction.