“There, child,” he said, rising as he spoke, “don’t feel like that about it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real harm is your irrational hatred,—don’t stare like that, Felicia—your irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against and must always protest against.”
Still she was silent, though her gaze had droppedfrom him. Her silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, “Think it all over; think better of it all.” Pausing at the door, he added, “Shebears no grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself, my poor child.” She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence proved as much; and he had done his duty.
Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going; the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes; when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above her.
This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man. Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow, impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps, steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her that for a long time she had been trying to love him, andthat now the effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion, were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn—scorn, the distorter of all truth—as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness, the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the thought close.
Some one entered, and she opened her eyes on Maurice. He had worked all the afternoon. The sitter was gone. He beamed with conscious merit, deserving her approbation, quite like a child let loose from school; smiling and radiant.
He came to her as she lay sunken in the chair, leaned to her for a kiss, and paused, meeting the hard fixed look of her eyes.
“What is the matter, dearest?” he asked, and his heart began to shake.
“Why did you tell papa that lie?”
He hardly understood the question, but her tone struck through him like a knife. “What lie?”
“You told him that I talked to Lady Angela of my dislike for his article.”
“Didn’t you?” Maurice asked feebly, for hisbrain was whirling. The added baseness did not urge her voice from its horrible, icy calm.
“I, Maurice? When you—you only talked to her of it?”
“Felicia, I swear you have mistaken it. Don’t kill me in looking like that. Let me think. I told him—yes—I had to explain how it happened—your anger towards Angela, your sending her away. I muddled into the whole thing. I suppose I let him think that you had talked. How could I tell him that it was I? For Heaven’s sake, be merely just, darling,—Felicia,—how could I tell him that, when I am half responsible for his publishing it? You remember the mess I got into to please you?”
“To please me? You are a coward, Maurice.” She turned her eyes from him.
Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by, and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict; it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if, now, he were a thing put by and forgotten.
But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words—“a lie,” “a coward,” echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went through her; and suddenly the surging senseof her own cruelty, his piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a stifled moan to her lips. “Maurice!” She covered her face with her hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by sudden hope. They clung together like two children. “Forgive me; forgive me,” she repeated. “Forgive me. Nothing—nothing could deserve such cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn’t love you. I was so cruel that I didn’t love you any longer.”
She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities; they engulfed the vision of herself—dry, bitter, bereft of her love for him. It flitted away—a bat—in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who, holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had been bewildered, weak. “And weakness is more forgiveable—so far more forgiveable than cruelty, dear—dear,” she said. “Horrible I! to have had such thoughts.” She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone.
Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparinghimself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick’s red displeasure rather amused him, so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia’s eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father’s wounded vanity and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him.
“You have behaved in a way I don’t care to characterize,” Mr. Merrick remarked, when Maurice had finished with “If I had only had Felicia’s courage at the beginning—only frankly told you that I didn’t like the article—if I hadn’t been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn’t have got myself into such a series of messes.”
And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned, replied that he deserved any reproach.
“Maurice has been weak, too complaisant,” said Felicia, “but there has been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of hurting you. Forgive us both.”
“You have nothing to forgive in Felicia,” said Maurice; “she has been the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab.”
“Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach. If she has been a target you have hidden behind it.”
“Exactly.” Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity. “In future you’ll rememberthat whatever I say she can never deserve reproach.”
Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr. Merrick interrupted her with “I only beg that in the future you will not whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only slightly.”
Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of this scene of dauntless penance.
“Smile, smile, darling,” Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips, and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by peril bravely fronted.
“Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you—that it was what you would have hoped of me.”
“Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He is like a hurt child, Maurice.”
“He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?”
She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered, “Don’t ever remind me that you were not.”
THE news of Geoffrey’s resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice’s new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he accepted another order—a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a cathedral town—an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all inspiration.
“I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight,” he said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party. Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined.
Maurice had carried out his project of “petting” his father-in-law, but in spite of his butterfly manner of gaiety Mr. Merrick’s mood showed little relaxation; his wounds were deep; they rankled; and now he received the news of guardianship, which Maurice imparted with an air of generous self-sacrifice, gravely.
“It’s our first separation,” Maurice added. “Youwill have her all to yourself. My loss will be your gain.”
His smile left Mr. Merrick’s gravity unchanged. The opportunity seemed to have come for the discharge of a painful duty.
“That I am to have Felicia all to myself, I question,” he said, looking ahead at the swift lights of the moving town; for he did not care to meet his son-in-law’s eyes while he seized the opportunity.
“Well,”—Maurice good-humouredly yielded to his funny exactitude—“not altogether; her friends will relieve guard now and then.”
It was wiser to reach his purpose by slow approaches; Mr. Merrick evenly remarked, “My guard shall be unbroken,” adding, “It will be doubly necessary.”
He was rewarded by a light note of wonder in Maurice’s voice. “You seem to take it very seriously, my dear father.”
“I take it seriously, Maurice.”
Even from Mr. Merrick’s complacency such magnified significance was perplexing; Maurice turned an inquiring gaze upon him.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I regret this departure of yours, Maurice. I beg you to reconsider it.”
“My dear father, whatareyou talking about?”
“You should not leave Felicia. She is exposed to certain influences—to a certain influence—that I deeply disapprove. She is unruly, reckless. I pretend to no further authority. She defies me.”
“Will you explain yourself?” The patience of Maurice’s tone was ironic.
“I will speak plainly, since you force it. Mr. Daunt is too much with Felicia.”
“Geoffrey! He can’t be too much with her.”
Maurice’s nerves, since the last scene with Felicia, had been on edge. Only a contemptuous amusement steadied them now. Mr. Merrick’s paternal anxiety, alloyed though it was with the latent desire to hit back, was sincere; Maurice saw in it only a pompous, an idiotic impertinence.
Mr. Merrick’s voice hardened to as open an hostility as his son-in-law’s.
“People notice it. There is talk about it. I will not stand by and see my child’s name become the plaything of malicious gossip.”
“Who notices it? Who talks about it? What utter and damnable folly!”
“I decline to enter into an unbefitting altercation with you, Maurice. Your friend is obviously in love with your wife, and Felicia allows him to be too much with her.”
“Is this pure imagination on your part? I know, of course, that there’s never been any love lost between you and Geoffrey.”
“I have been warned,” said Mr. Merrick, reluctant, yet with redoubled dignity.
Maurice’s smouldering nerves struck to flame, and an ugly illumination glared at him. “This can be no one but Angela,” he said.
It was difficult to keep dignity under eyes that seemed to take him by the throat; in the struggle to look firmly back Mr. Merrick was silent.
“Come. Own to it. The venomous liar!” Maurice added in a low voice, studying the revelations of the other’s wrathful helplessness.
“I have no wish to deny it, and I must forbid you to speak in that manner of a woman who honours you by calling you her friend.”
“I know Angela better than you do,” Maurice laughed. His fury almost passed away from its derivative object.
“The fact remains that people talk, and that truest kindness warned me of it.”
“If people talk it’s she who makes them. I’ve known—ever since I married her—that Geoffrey loved Felicia.” Maurice flung him the truth scornfully.
“Yet you speak of lies!”
“I know my friend, and honour him, as you don’t seem to know or honour your daughter.”
“I know human nature as you don’t seem to know it. It’s a dangerous intimacy. I insist on my right to protect my daughter.”
“You insult her by claiming such a right. Don’t speak to me of this again.” Maurice, as he said it, grew suddenly white with a new thought. “And never dare,” he added, turning eyes that quelled even Mr. Merrick’s fully-armed championship, “never dare tell Felicia that you have discussed her with that woman.”
“You may be sure that I would not expose Lady Angela to Felicia’s misconception.”
Mr. Merrick, in his realized helplessness, cast about him for some retaliatory weapon. He seized the first that offered itself. “And since my meaning as Felicia’s father seems gone, I had better go myself. I am not needed, since you say so, by either of you.”
It was the idlest threat. In utter astonishment he heard Maurice answering, “I’ve thought more than once of suggesting it. By all means.”
“I will remain with Felicia while you are away.”
“As you please.”
“I will leave directly after your return.”
“When you will.” Maurice’s voice was quieter. The unexpected prospect of relief mollified him. “It’s a pity, for Felicia will suffer, but she herself must see that it doesn’t do. You have made life too uncomfortable for both of us. And after this! Well, you’ve made things impossible. For a time you had better realize what your daughter is away from her, realize how little she needs any one’s protection. It’s settled then; you go, on my return.”
Mr. Merrick bowed. He was aghast, outraged, more than all, wounded. The hurt child whimpered and then fairly howled within him, while, in silence, he smiled ironically. They reached their destination, Maurice in a growing rage that for once obliterated his fears. It was like strong wine that uplifted, made him almost glad.
He left his father-in-law and made his way throughthe crowded rooms in search of Felicia. He needed to look into her limpid eyes after this hissing of serpents. But instead of Felicia he found Angela.
For the distasteful monotony of these assemblies Angela had always an air of patient disdain; and to-night, under a high wreath of white flowers, her face more than ever wore its mask of languid martyrdom. She was in white, perfumed like a lily.
Maurice felt a keener gladness on seeing her. His wrath, running new currents of vigour through him, carried him past any hesitation. At last he would have it out with Angela.
“I want to speak to you,” he said. “Is there any place where one can get out of this crowd?”
Angela saw in a flash that a crisis had arrived; and in another that she had been working towards such a crisis, living for it, since Maurice had cast her off. For a moment, beneath the rigour of his eyes—to see Maurice unflinching was a new experience—her spirit quailed, then soared, exulting in the thought of final contest. Since he wished it—yes, they would speak openly. He should at last hear all—her hate, her love, her supplication. She was an intimate in the house where Maurice and Felicia were formal guests; her quick mind seized all possibilities. “Yes,” she said, “there is a little room—a little boudoir. No one ever goes there on nights like these.” Her self-mastery was all with her as she moved beside him through the crowd. She was able, over the tumult of hope and fear, to speak calmly, to smile at friends her weary, fragile smile.
“Aren’t these scenes flimsy and sad?” she said. “How much happiness, how much reality do they express, do you think?”
Maurice forced himself to reply. “They express a lot of greediness and falseness; those are real enough.”
“That is true, Maurice,” she said gently; “so true that I sometimes think I would rather be a washerwoman bending in honest work over my tubs; one would be nearer the realities one cares for.”
They left the reception-rooms, and she was silent when faces were no longer about them. She led him down a passage, across a book-filled room, a student’s lamp its only light, and softly turning the handle of a further door, opened it on the quiet of a little room, discreetly frivolous with the light gaiety of Louis XV decorations, empty of all significance but that of smiling background for gay confidences or pouting coquettries. Not exactly the background for such a scene as she and Maurice must enact, yet Angela triumphed in the contrast. Tragic desolation, splendid sincerities would gain value from their trivial setting. Her passion, her misery, would menace more strangely, implore more piteously among nymphs and garlands.
She dropped into a chair, and put out her hand to a jar of white azaleas. She asked no question, but she looked at him steadily. Maurice had closed the door and stood near it, his back to it, at a distance from her. The sound of the world outside—the world that smiled and pouted—was like the faint hum of a top.
“How have you dared warn my father-in-law against Geoffrey?” asked Maurice. He was nerved to any truth.
Angela made no reply, her long, deep eyes on him while, automatically, her hand passed over the azaleas.
“How could you betray my confidence in you? What a fool I was to trust you!”
“Betray you?” she murmured.
“You pursue me and my happiness!” Maurice cried, and hot tears of self-pity started to his eyes. Her eyes dropped. That his hand should deal this blow!
“I pursue you?—and your happiness, Maurice?” she repeated.
“Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison in our lives.”
She was struggling with the moment’s dreadful bitterness. Over the bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a retort: “I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice. You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me.”
“Great heavens!” Maurice dropped his forehead on clenched hands, “it was to spare you!”
“I guessed it,” said Angela, while her hand still passed lightly over the azaleas.
They were silent for a moment, and presently in a voice, steady, even gentle, she went on, “I havewished, sincerely wished, to be your wife’s friend. Even after she refused my friendship, I have wished to guard her, at least, from malicious gossip. You know what London is. You and I and your wife live in among people who regard old-fashioned scruples intellectually, not morally; but your wife’s position is not great enough to allow her to be reckless. Even without such knowledge as mine to reveal it, Geoffrey’s love for her makes her conspicuous. They are here together to-night. I saw them at a concert the other day; met them in the Park before that. When last I went to your house I found them together, alone, and—I understand your wife, Maurice—she would think no harm of it—I think she had just kissed him; no harm, Maurice,”—before his start her voice did not quicken, “she would imagine that she kissed him as a brother. He held her hand, I think. I felt it my duty to put petty conventions and reticences aside, and for her sake, for your sake, Maurice, to warn her father, with all delicacy, all caution. I believe it, with all my soul, to be a perilous intimacy. That is my betrayal.”
Maurice’s brain swam with the picture she flashed upon it. Only for a moment;—Felicia’s smile went like a benison over it. Even if it were true, he could look at the picture, after that first pause of breathlessness, steadily. Even if it were true, he could smile back, understanding.
“Geoffrey has all my trust,” he said; “I have all Felicia’s love.”
“You think so,” said Angela quietly. Again her eyes fell before his, but her face remained fixed in its conviction of sincerity.
“How dare you, Angela.”
Still looking down, she went on as steadily as before, her voice anchored with its weight of woe,—how he loved Felicia!—“I dare because I believe that she loves him most. Her love for you and your weakness is maternal by now. I know it, I feel it; I can see it when she looks at you and at him. She loves him as she has never loved you. And I! Oh, Maurice—Maurice—I!” She suddenly cast her arms upon the table, her head fell upon them; terror, regret, and passionate longing swept over her; her voice broke and she burst into sobs. “Couldn’t I have let her go from you? Has it not been nobility in me to guard her—for you? She has never loved you, and I—Maurice, you know, you know—how I have loved you, how I love you! Forgive me! Have pity on me!”
Maurice, frowning darkly, sick with unwilling pity, hating to feel that she deserved pity and that he hated her, turned his eyes away. She had terrified him too much; had dared to lay desecrating hands on the thing dearest to him in the world. Something, and not the least best thing in him, froze before her cry for pity and made him incapable of forgiveness. For once in his life he hardened into resistant strength.
His silence was more horrible to Angela than anylook, any word. She raised her head and saw his averted eyes. Only humiliation remained for her. She rose. Her wreath of flowers, loosened, had slipped to one side, she put up a vague hand to it, moaning “Maurice!”
Still he looked away, with odd, startled eyes that did not think of her. The wonder of the shot that had passed through his heart was still felt more as a surprise than as a pain.
She knew that she would always see him so—erect, beautiful, startled from a shot. She tottered to him; she fell before him and grasped his arms. “Oh pity me! Don’t be so cruel. What wrong have I done? Despise me—but pity me.”
“I cannot,” he said.
“Then kiss me—once—only once.”
“I cannot,” he repeated, still not looking at her.
“Have you never loved me? Never really loved me—as you love her?” she said, shuddering and hiding her face as she crouched at his feet.
“Never!”
Swaying, trembling violently, she arose. She threw wide her arms, seized him, and closing her eyes to his look of passionate repulsion, kissed him on his brow, cheek, lips, before, almost striking her from him, he broke from her, burst open the door and left her.
“GEOFFREY, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?” On the steps, after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his hand through Geoffrey’s arm. “I’ve had a row with my father-in-law—would rather not see him just now.” They crossed the square together. Maurice was feeling no reaction to weakness after his strength. The scene was like a distant memory, and that strange shot that had hurt, had pierced him with such a pang—not of suspicion, not of foreboding, but of wonder, deep, sad wonder.
He felt a sort of languor after pain, and, as they walked, went on dreamily: “Such a queer evening, Geoffrey, horrible!—yet no, splendid too. Facing things is splendid isn’t it? I want to tell you something, Geoffrey—to confess something—I want you to know. That winter—when I thought I could not marry Felicia, I went pretty far with Angela. I thought everything was up with me; I didn’t care much where I drifted. And I did drift. Nothing much more than there has always been, Geoffrey; with Angela it was never a case of playing with fire, the danger was of getting frozeninto the ice. It was abominable of me—caddish;” Maurice’s dreamy voice had a dignity that seemed to hold all other reproach than his own at arm’s length, a dignity so strange and new that Geoffrey even at the moment’s great upsurging of bitterness, regret and question could repress it as unworthy, not only of himself, but of Maurice. “Abominable—abominable,” Maurice repeated, “for I let her think—more than ever—that I cared—something. She is odious to me, Geoffrey. I can’t be just to her.”
Geoffrey said nothing, but his quiet profile made confidences as easy as peaceful breathing; the confidences that could be told. The others—ah! that distant wailing of regret. But in this dreamy mood even that was very distant. “Perhaps, dear old fellow—if I’d told you—on that night, you wouldn’t have cared to help me.”
Maurice stated the fact calmly, looked at it calmly. “In that case—what would I be, Geoffrey?—if you and Felicia had not made me?”
In the still, sleeping town, chill with a coming dawn, they were as near as spirits, walking together through old memories.
“I would have cared to help you—and her,” said Geoffrey.
“Ah! well; perhaps;” Maurice sighed a little. “While I’m away, Geoffrey, see a lot of Felicia, and, Geoffrey, see that Angela doesn’t get near her. Her silly old father dislikes you, but you won’t mind that. He suspected you of being in love with her,so I informed him that he was right. Dear old Geoff! You will see after her?”
“I don’t mind the father; I would mind making it difficult for her to get on with him.”
“Oh! you won’t. He’s had to accept it. I wouldn’t like to go if you weren’t here to see after her. So you don’t regret making me?”
“Making you and her so happy?” Geoffrey smiled, humouring his child-like mood.
“I do make her happy? You see it. It’s your reward, my dear friend. That’s what I want to say to you. I’ve said it often enough to myself. You shall never regret it, so help me God.”
Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice’s, pressing it firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a peace, a thankfulness.
“You see,” Maurice stammered, “I should die without her. She is life to me, Geoffrey. You don’t know what you’ve given me—I hardly knew. She is life to me—that’s all; and I should die without her.”
The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not real; Maurice’s conscience could not call such faint confession real. Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of safety.
Felicia, when she heard of her father’s proposed and accepted departure, acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and whenMaurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick’s resolution to protect her, she said that she had suspected that. “I am glad you let him know the truth, too. It’s really better to let him see that he has only discovered what no one wishes to conceal.” She looked musingly up at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted—faint and far—across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey—the memory of it was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel passion, that horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the dark?
Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought.
“I can’t blame him—really—either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact nor to recognize the calibre of such a love.”
It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey’s love that kept Maurice’s faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy. Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true; it beautified her—that kiss of reverentpity and tenderness. The toad Angela flung became a flower on Felicia’s breast; that he could smile at such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm—colourless, serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, “You don’t mind, so much then, his going?”
“I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits.”
The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of lassitude, a little indifferent to her father’s pathos. Before this placidity his sadness became a sudden throb of gloom.
“You do mindmygoing?” he asked.
Felicia was sitting on the window seat and had looked down into the street far below for his coming cab. She glanced up quickly at him as he stood beside her, seeing the shadow in his eyes.
“Dear goose!” She drew him down on the seat, her hand in his, “Mind your going? I hate it. But it’s only for a fortnight—less, if you are lucky with your work.”
“Only a fortnight!” Maurice repeated, half playfully, but half fretfully too. “You can say that! It’s our first parting, Felicia. It seems to me an eternity before I shall see you again.”
She still looked into his eyes, seeing, under the playfulness, the fretfulness, all that he had suffered during these last weeks of entanglement. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she said dreamily: “Don’t go.”
“Really?” Sunlight streamed through clouds, “Really you say don’t go? And my duty? my work? all the virtues you make me believe in?”
“I want to keep you near me, to comfort you for it all,” Felicia said. He understood the reference to his pain. The very sweetness nerved his growing strength, the resolution to be worthy. With his arms around her he whispered that he adored her and that he would go and work so well that she should be proud of him. She listened, her eyes closed, yet, when he had spoken, still dreamily she repeated, “Don’t go.”
“Are you tempting me? because if you are, if you really want me to stay, I can’t go.”
She did not reply for a long time, lying quietly against his shoulder, her hand in his. They heard the cab drive up.
“I suppose you must go,” she said, “Yes, of course, you must. Only, isn’t it happy, sitting here together? You must go, though I want you to stay, for I really am sensible; I know there is a grown-up world; but sitting here makes it seem unreal, and I think of sweet, silly things, like children’s games on a long summer afternoon.”
She straightened herself, sighing, smiling, then as she looked at him, she saw that his eyes were filledwith tears. In her eyes sudden tears answered them.
“It’s that we have been rather unhappy, isn’t it, dear Maurice?”
“Never, never again,” he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back to such a distant day; “Do you remember once, long ago, when I first knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded—it’s only loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly dread of loss. I’ll never make you unhappy any more.”
“Ah! but what about me? It’s I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive me everything. You shall have no more dreads.”
She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go, smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must nerve his growing strength.
“Never, never again,” she repeated. “So go, dear, have all the virtues. We will both work. The eternity will pass.”
MR. MERRICK, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her friends. The days passed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded, harassed.
Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard. Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a frightened silence. Mr. Merrick’s foundations seemed giving way beneath him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela’s defection was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by accusing himself of over-imaginativeness—nerves on edge—no wonder—and went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice’s fortnight was nearly over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had meditated a retreat on Paris, aweek there to make the descent from London to the country less of a horrid jolt.
Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick’s sharpened suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his virtual dismissal from his children’s roof. After all, as he reflected, it was in a sense Angela’s doing. She might now at least from the frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him comprehension and compassion.
“To speak plainly, I’ve been turned out,” he said, stirring the cup of tea she had handed him.
“Turned out?” repeated Angela, with an impersonal vagueness, quite as if it had been a stray dog of which they were speaking.
Mr. Merrick’s suspicion grew past alarm to resentment, and resentment cowered under a more sturdy manner of pathos as of one who faced fate’s unjust bolts with erect bearing and unconquerable gaze. “Our friendship, it seems, is unforgiveable. It was a choice between it and them. I couldn’t submit to such intolerable dictation.”
Angela felt as if, after a long drowning swoon under water, she were being resuscitated to painful lifeby blows upon her head. She, so blameless, having done no wrong except love with a fatal fidelity; she, crushed, humiliated, was to feel another lash. Even her kindness to this pompous fool was to be made a scourge for her.
Mr. Merrick saw that she grew more white as, with folded arms, she drooped her head and looked up at him from sombre brows. “They can’t forgive you that? They hate me so much?”
“Apparently,” said Mr. Merrick, his growing sense of the indignity of his situation giving him a deeper gloom of manner. “The crisis was brought about by my venturing to warn Maurice on the subject you have spoken of.”
“And you told him who had warned you? I see.”
Mr. Merrick took hasty refuge before the cutting quality of her voice. “He sprang at the conclusion and defied me to deny that it was you. He was outrageous. I have had to defend you as well as myself, Lady Angela.”
“He accused me of falseness?”
“Insolently.” It was well that she should know how much he had had to champion her. “I don’t care to recall the terms.” But Mr. Merrick was feeling an odd satisfaction in recalling them. His heart, before this rebuffing friend, before her icy eyes and icy voice, was calling out for Felicia—Felicia whom he had lost because of this,—did she not suggest something snake-like? His wounded affection, his wounded vanity, longed for such comfort as Felicia alone could give. It would be wellcould he believe Lady Angela—if not a liar, at least a presumptuous busy-body. His first impressions of her were flooding his mind again.
“I could not forgive the insolence,” he said, “although I can conceive it possible that you and I have been to a certain extent mistaken. Such a mistake must naturally wound Maurice and Felicia.”
Angela leaned back in her chair, her long eyes on him, and he felt, like a palpable atmosphere, the enmity between them.
“As it happens, Maurice told me that he had always known of his friend’s love for Felicia,” he pursued. “It’s in no sense an ordinary case of attraction, you see. A Dante and Beatrice affair. He has absolute trust in his friend, Maurice has, and I, of course, have absolute trust in Felicia. Not that I approve; I would have felt it my duty to protest in any case.”
“You think that I imputed some wrong that was not there, and that owing to me this breach has come between you and your daughter?” said Angela.
“I hold you in no way to blame. Without a full knowledge of facts—Maurice’s knowledge the most important of them—one may naturally draw false inferences. We were both a little hasty in judging.” Mr. Merrick essayed a generous smile.
A deep flush passed over Angela’s face. For a long moment she was silent, her eyes on him; then, in a voice harsh and monotonous she said—
“I hardly know what facts may mean to you—or inferences. Maurice, before he married your daughter, told me that Geoffrey had paid him to marry her. They live upon Geoffrey’s money. He has ruined his career for your daughter’s sake. These are further facts, Mr. Merrick. Have I indeed been a little hasty in my inferences?”
Mr. Merrick, his tea-cup in his hand, his face with as yet merely a look of wonder on it, sat dumb.
“You now see the knowledge that underlay my warnings. What Geoffrey’s motives were I cannot say; purely disinterested, perhaps; apparently your daughter was dying for love of Maurice. Whether they have remained so disinterested is for you to judge. But I hope you will acquit my warnings of hastiness.”
“Maurice told you?” Mr. Merrick repeated. He chiefly felt a deep, personal humiliation.
“As he told me everything at that time.”
Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table. “The scoundrel!” he said.
“Which one do you mean?”
“The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him.”
Angela’s eyes glittered.
“I think it well that all the truth should be known,” she said.
THAT evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. “Will you come to me,”—the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an arrow—“and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation.”
Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her mind of unwavering benevolence. “I will be with you at eleven to-morrow morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the truth as I to speak it.”
She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or unsteadiness.
Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the interview next day Angela’s mind, like a wreck, was tossed from shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had crawled at Maurice’s feet her image of herself had been broken, unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching suppliant. What she had further done—that final, passionate abandonment where vindictive fury, worship, and desperate appeal to the very rudiments of feeling were indistinguishablymingled,—she could not look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and appalling, she could just snatch a vision of a not ignoble Angela. There had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she must veil her eyes from it.
Most terrible of all was the seeing of herself slip and slide from a serene eminence down into a slimy, warring world. The betrayal of Maurice had not been in her ideal of herself; it forcibly abased her to a level of soiling realities—hatreds, jealousies, revenges. With sick revulsion she could imagine herself feebly turning—though bones were broken—feebly crawling up again from the abyss, either by some retractation, or by withholding from Felicia the ultimate humiliations she could inflict upon her. She might evade the cruellest truth; spare her the deepest wounds and so hug once more the thought of her own loyalty to the man who had struck her from him, a loyalty crowned with a halo of martyrdom.
But so to turn would be to own herself abased; to see herself in the mud; and Angela could not for long see herself in the mud.
Then, in the swing of reaction, her head reeled with the old illusion of height; she was again on her illumined pinnacle, ruthless through very pity, wounding with the sharp, necessary truth; stern to the glamour of a loyalty grown craven, saving Felicia from a falsity that must corrode her life. A pitiful, relentless angel. She saw the sword,the wings—white, strong, rustling, the splendid impassivity of her face.
Yet on the pinnacle the darting terrors of the abyss went through her. Was not the truth what Maurice had said—what he had looked—so horribly looked—and not what he had written; that he had written to spare her; had never loved her? She turned shuddering from the thought as she had shuddered at his feet. If that indeed were truth he must convince Felicia of it. The fact of his written words was there, surely unforgiveable; the fact of Geoffrey’s love was there; was not the fact of a dim, growing love for Geoffrey there too? She had said it; she believed it; and again, upon the pinnacle, the hands of miry hopes clawed at her. Hardly could Maurice forgive the betrayal. Yet—had he not once loved her? The memory, sweet and terrible of that far-away spring day—his kiss and his embrace—faltered, “yes,” though it wept in saying it. Should Felicia prove to him that Angela had only spoken truth might not the showing of the letter be one day forgiven by a man scorned, abandoned? She had been forced to the showing by all their guilty incredulity, and to save Felicia from the trap laid for her, to save her from Geoffrey’s scheming passion—so could she dress her motive—had pointed out the trap, the danger. Where lay her guilt, if, after this, Felicia chose to verify all her prophecies by walking straight into the trap? It had not been to kill her love for her husband, but to warn her of Geoffrey’s lovethat the letter was shown. So her thoughts groped in the dubious future; and when despair flung her back again on the black present, hatred, hatred for Maurice, and the recklessness of hatred, caught her, clasped her, sustained her from falling, and hurried her on all trembling with the final thought that if hope were dead, there was nothing to lose in betrayal, nothing to gain in loyalty.
As she drove next morning to Felicia, the day’s clear sunlight, the almost wintry freshness of the air, lifted her mood once more to steadiness. She beat off debasing visions, pushed away miry hands, told herself that neither hope nor hatred was with her. And she felt herself standing high in sunlight as she waited for Felicia in the little drawing-room, its windows open on the blue, the brightness. She felt herself in tune with purity and radiance. Dressed from head to foot in spotless white, the long flowing of her fur-edged cloak monastic in simplicity, the white sweep of a bird’s breast about her head, she was as pitying and as picturesque as a sculptured saint looking down through centuries of woe from the lofty niche of a cathedral; and a more human but as consolatory a simile showed her as a Dorothea waiting in all her tender strength and helpfulness for a fragile, tawdry Rosamund.
But when Felicia entered, and as she turned to her from the window, a mood as high, as inflexible as her own,—higher, more inflexible, she felt, in a crash that had a crumbling quality—met her in Felicia’seyes. For a moment Angela was afraid, felt herself rocking in her niche; in the next the recollection of her truth upheld her. Truth, pity and tenderness; with these she would meet this stony, hating creature.
“You see,” she said, “I have not refused to come to you.”
“You had to come, after what you had said,” said Felicia.
It was a preliminary only; the pause before conflict. Angela’s eyes went over her. Felicia wore her customary blue serge, her lawn collar and black bow. In her place, Angela thought, she would have felt the effectiveness of an unrelieved black dress; a comment followed by a further recognition of Felicia’s indifference to effectiveness that left another little trail of fear. She had slept; well, perhaps. Her eye-lids showed no languor. Her face was white, cold, composed. Hardly fragile. Certainly not tawdry. From this re-adjustment to reality Angela glanced out at the sky. She must grasp at all her strength. She must pray for strength. With her eyes on the sky her mind sped hastily through the uplifting supplication—haunted as it sped by a thought of pursuit that gave a shadow-simile of a fleeing through caverns.
But she brought back gentle eyes to Felicia. “Mrs. Wynne, you have never understood me; never believed me; you have always misunderstood, and mistrusted me, as you do now. I have been forced to this,” said Angela, keeping all herquiet while Felicia stood before her with her stony face. “I have watched you like a child wandering in the dark. I have seen you come to the brink of a pit in the darkness. I have put out my hand to save you. That is all my fault.”
“By the pit, you mean, I suppose, Mr. Daunt’s love for me. As my father told you, I have known, my husband has known, from before my marriage, that he loved me. You did not only warn. You lied. About my husband,” Felicia’s eyes did not change, as she said the word, looking straight at Angela. Since the night before when her father had told her vile falsehoods she had felt not one doubt of Angela’s falsity. A white heat of utter scorn had never left her. She would have scorned her too much to see her had not her father’s frenzied belief pushed her to this elemental conflict. She would tell Angela again and again that she was a liar.
“How you hate me,” Angela now said.
“And how you hate me.”
“I do not. I pity you. I want to help you.”
“I will pity you if you confess that you have lied.”
“If it were to help you I could almost do it—though that would indeed be to lie. I believe that truth is the only helper. Your husband was paid to marry you.”
Felicia’s eyes received it unflinchingly.
“It may be so. Geoffrey is generous enough; Maurice is enough his friend to accept his help. I will ask him to tell me all the truth. Your implication was that my husband married me through pity.”
“You are very sure of people’s love for you.”
Angela saw herself lashed by the hatred of these two men, by the scorn of this woman whom they loved. Her voice shook.
“I am perfectly sure of their love.”
“Yet your husband’s love was not always yours.”
She was horribly unmoved by half truths; this again she accepted. “Maurice may once have cared for you. Since he has known me he has loved me. I cannot spare you when you come between me and my husband.”
“Since he knew you he loved me—loved me most!” Angela could scarcely draw her breath. “He married you from pity—it is not a lie—loving me. And I loved him—I love him now! It is the cross of my life! It crushes me!” Her breast panted with the labouring breath; she threw her cloak back from her shoulders and kept her hands at her throat, even then conscious of the gesture’s dramatic beauty. “He is unworthy of it—that I know. He is incapable of the sacred passion I feel. He loves most the one he is with, and when he was with me—before you took him from me—he loved me most—before God I believe it—and with the best love of which he is capable. I would have lifted him—inspired him—he used to say I would. He told me that he loved me and that only my wealth had kept him from me—the day that Geoffrey came with his news of you. I would have redeemed him had not you made a claim on his weakness, his pity.”
“I know that you are lying,” said Felicia. Butas she listened, as she spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past.
“Then,”—Angela’s breath failed her; she drew Maurice’s letter from her breast and put it in Felicia’s hand—“read that,” she half whispered.
And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment’s supreme vengeance. She stood watching her rival—her victim—yes, yes, those voices from the abyss were true—watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like.
But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen contemplation of Maurice’s perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: “My husband’s words.” Then at last identity whispered “of me.”
They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly, washis love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to know—for she knew it—that he indeed loved her. An acted lie—while he could betray her to another woman—would have made him less odious to her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror.
She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and they saw more than the loss of love.
With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the passion of her shattered pride, she hated him.
Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she could not feel that she hated her.
She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly—“This was home.”
“You see—I did not lie to you,” said Angela. That Felicia should show no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck,made her wonder—in another of those crumbling flashes—whether indeed her foot was upon Felicia’s neck. She had struck her down, she had humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was seeing her in the mire?
She repeated: “You see I did not lie to you.”
“No,” said Felicia, folding her husband’s letter as she spoke, “you didn’t lie.”
Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned out of it.
“And can you not believenowthat I never hated you?” said Angela.
Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. “I don’t care. It makes no difference to me.”
Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other’s consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. “How cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only tried to help you.”
Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela’s words.
“And then how human;—after all I am human. See how intolerable it was to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good, when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I loved him.” It comforted her to feel the tears running down hercheeks and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem noble to herself in her avowed abasement. “Perhaps I have been jealous—oh, how can I tell? Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can’t you pity me? Can’t you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?”
Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous attitude; she knew it, although she could feel nothing.
“Yes, I am sorry for you. It has been horrible for you,” she said, but with the weariness that a soldier, lying shattered, helpless, upon a battlefield, might show towards the tormenting clamours and lamentations of a wounded enemy beside him. She wished to be allowed to bleed quietly to death. These alien hands plucked at her for a help, a sympathy she could not give. She was sorry; but when one was shattered one could only know that one was sorry and be tired.
Angela’s weeping was stilled for a moment. After all, it was not pity that she wanted. She wanted to be lifted from the nightmare of abasement; to feel herself looking down once more; to be the consoler, the binder of wounds—not the suppliant; not the recipient of an indifferent dole. She approached Felicia, putting out her hand to her.
“And you know—dear—dear—child, how I pity you. Ah, let this pity, this mutual agony unite us, Felicia—you who have lost only an illusion, I whohave lost a reality. Can we not see each other more clearly now? Can we not understand—and kiss each other—like sisters?”
Maeterlinckian visions—a tower, a sad blue sea, a great blue sky, white birds, wandering, beautiful souls in pain—crossed her mind, enhancing her consciousness of beauty. It was beautiful, what she said, and she must look beautiful, leaning in whiteness, with her outstretched hand, the tears of her deeper sorrow upon her face, towards this fallen comrade. This would atone for all, be the spiritual significance of all the tragic drama, this union of suffering sisters. She drooped softly upon the figure in the chair, encircling it.
But with a violence that made Angela reel back, almost losing her footing, Felicia started to her feet. Staring, white, shuddering, she looked at the other woman.
“Don’t touch me. You must not touch me.—Go away—you are horrible,” she said. “You fill me with horror.” Her voice was hoarse, shaking.
Angela had retreated from her, and while they looked at each other across the room, a strange struggle and change showed itself in her face. Felicia’s conviction entered her. She felt herself evil. She felt herself horrible.
With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in silence, she went from the room.
Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her.
FELICIA stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.
Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, before the blaze, she would sit and rest—and sleep; there had been no sleep last night in her desolate room betweenthe blankets of a hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets. Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to do now. Chintz-covers—she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just before her father’s arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.
Felicia’s mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future—the writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he returned to-night—or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause between a dagger’s uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, went with a sullen quiet—much like the flames among their logs—through the well-remembered words.
“I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now. That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see onlyfalseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey as he is—and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that your honour—a strange word to write to you—is safe between our hands; but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that you shall ever see from me.”
This letter was lying on Maurice’s dressing-table waiting for him.
There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night—the cold, calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly in her mind. “To him? From me?” She would think it dizzily; and dread clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.
But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would suffer—for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer there to call forthhis response the fancy would soon die. His love for her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.
She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.
The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees shook in the rising gusts of wind.
There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.
As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the road, a tall man’s figure under an umbrella.
Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to plead andexpostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.
It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be Geoffrey?
Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and pedestalled—strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!—lifted high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched her.
But to see Geoffrey now—now that she was his—and knew it.—The thought shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.
It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird’s nest ina shaken tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the strength of her own avowal?—come to claim her?—to take her away?
She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises—what they implied of disillusion in him—or to look at the rapture that ran a dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be rapture was perhaps the terror’s root. She heard him in the hall ridding himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final question—in a gasp—as he came in.
His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the window, looked silently at him.
“It’s true, then, you have left him?”
His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in her.
“Yes, I have left him. Who told you?”
“Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All I could grasp was that.”
He did not know then, and any revelation of what his attitude would be when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into the deep old chair before the fire.
“Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There was no fly?”
“No. I didn’t mind the walk.” Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn or two up and down the room.
“Your father said that you would never go back to your husband.”
“I never will.”
“You have ceased to love him, then?”
“Absolutely ceased.”
Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, “May I ask why?”
The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos—like the spring’s—like the day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him everything.Mighthe ask?
“What may you not ask?” she said. “There is nothing that I have a right to keep from younow. This is why. Lady Angela showed me this—yesterday.” Without turning her head she held out the letter. “It was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together—when you told me that you loved me—when I told you that I loved him.”
Geoffrey’s hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand.
He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair, he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering—would he discover it? Should she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward—though such a tragically belated one—had at last come to him? Even to hesitate seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly—was it the possible rapture that made the real dread—the rapture of seeing him claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost lassitude she thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question. Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes. Suddenly she thought sharply, “I must not tell.” She wondered if it was an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most logical thingin life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter.