Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father’s death, told her son of the spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender towards her husband’s memory, in the strength that had saved them all from his weakness.
Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. “It shouldn’t have happened had I known,” he said; “I could have made my way.”
“Made your way, my dear child!” cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. “Do your realize, I wonder, what it cost us to make you?—cost me, rather, for I did it all. Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from determines the height one attains.”
“No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible,” said Geoffrey.
He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.
Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness,or worked for it; but when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of it, poisoned all her happiness.
Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the rapacities only.
Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.
The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.
Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his sentiments towards this significant young relative, “I don’t like her. She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn’t ask her here any more.”
Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela’s fortune to back him, Geoffrey’s career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive seemed forthcoming.
She died before seeing that Angela’s affections were centred on Maurice Wynne. She could hardlyhave suspected Angela of such folly, seeing Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey’s, who had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him the barrier to her hopes.
At present, three years after his mother’s death, Geoffrey’s position in the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them, and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real supremacy.
The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston, the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his resources. Towards these rather undignifiedmethods of replenishment he had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed. Ingrained in Geoffrey’s nature was the sense that power was his, and that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him—though Geoffrey did not appeal to these dubious sanctions—that in a great man’s ends the world also found its best.
He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never blinded by this motive’s various disguises—idealistic, aesthetic, or philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by all means advisable thathe should wear fine apparel and be dull of sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation’s interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended that each should survive to the best of its ability.
So far only outer circumstances had opposed him—and been walked through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares for him.
Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, most exquisitely furbelowed—he granted her good taste in spiritual trappings—he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.
Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art was Maurice’s object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogetherinappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the arabesque in moments of leisure.
Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour, who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony. He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and looked to see Maurice’s future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall.
FELICIA was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience.
She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played and sang; Felicia’s place among them was an unimportant one. Miss Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a passionate ballad, her eyes fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss Bulmer’s shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer, flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean overher and watch her fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer said, “You really do improve so much,” to have some one, some one who knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with recognition, clapping his hands and crying, “Magnificent, simply magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn’t know that you really were a musician—I thought you merely played the piano!”
He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went, an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia with a new discernment.
“But you mustn’t stop,” said Maurice; “she mustn’t stop, must she, Mrs. Merrick? Why didn’t you prepare us for this treat? You never told us that your niece was a genius.”
Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice’s. “Is she not wonderful? We expect great things of her,” she said, for Mrs. Merrick was quick at adjustments.
Felicia’s placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment.
Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer’s place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her fingering, while she played.
It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience.
Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This view from Trensome Hall—the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like bands of flowers—was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne’s.
He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one.
“Come down,” said Maurice. “How good of you to be up early. Let us have a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time.”
Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view—as far as he could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes thepages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take hard.
“Do you ever have moods of despondency—despair?” he asked her, as they went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen far above, beyond the sparkling green.
“Moods? No; I don’t think so,” said Felicia; “but I am sometimes horribly discontented—and when I am I can’t imagine anything that would content me.”
“Not anything?”
“Not anything—except everything. I mean being sure that everything is significant, worth while.”
“But it is worth while as long as it lasts.”
“But it doesn’t last!” She smiled round at him, for she was leading the way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet grasses on either side. “The sense of impermanence often poisons the worth.” She added, “Do you have moods?”
“Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It’s funny that I should talk to you about it; no, not funny that Ishould talk about it to you, but that there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me out, put me on my feet, and, once I’d done gasping, set me running, as it were, got up my circulation. He didn’t argue; but he wonderfully understood, and he promptly acted.”
“And do you have them, the moods, because things don’t last?” Felicia asked, looking ahead into the wood’s translucent green.
“No; not so much that as that things don’t come. I want so much more than I ever get. I want to feel everything—to the uttermost. I never get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see, rather than loss that I dread.”
They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him, showed a gravity, a little perplexity. “You don’t understand that?” he asked, when she stepped down beside him.
“No; I dread both.”
“I am awfully human,” said Maurice; “and I want the whole human gamut—but that’s all I ask.”
“But what is the human gamut?”
“That question from your father’s daughter! Your father, I hear, is a great positivist.”
“Well, his daughter asks the question.”
They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall field flowers.
“Do you know,” he asked, “how, after this, I shall always personify faith to myself?”
“Faith?”
“Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The key-note of your life is a question.”
“Do you call the asking of a question, faith?” Felicia smiled.
“It’s faith to think it worth asking.”
Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it. He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy, yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented unfavourably upon her companionship with Maurice. And with the intuition came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers. Really, Mr. Daunt’s head, so high against the blue sky, with its classic white and gold, was ridiculouslyhandsome. She nodded a smilingau revoirto Maurice and left them.
The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret. Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice.
“That’s a very pretty girl,” Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the symptom.
Maurice’s shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable repudiation.
“Pretty! Don’t be so trivial!”
“Well—what was it Angela called her yesterday?—alluring, elusive?”
“Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela’s lips the terms would savour too much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is a wild rose open to the sky, dewy,un peu sauvage; anything less alluring in Angela’s sense of the word was never seen.”
Geoffrey, who had heard a multitude of wild-rose raptures, received this one with composure.
“I assure you, Geoffrey,” Maurice went on, growing the more confidential for his momentary reticence, “I assure you that if I could afford it I would fall in love with that enchanting girl.”
“And since you can’t afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical. Meanwhile, what of Angela?”
“You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag in Angela?”
“Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you. Don’t flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela’s affection too far.”
Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably.
“My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn’t that sort. One flirts in the boudoir—not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela’s affection.”
“Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this last year of dallying meant?”
“Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us.”
“Yet you came down here——?”
“To go on dallying. I own it. But I’ve never yet made up my mind to find my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven’t any reason to believe that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it rather nicely.” Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and as though by holding the matter at arm’s length he were keeping it from the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.
The latter’s composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said, “Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don’t find the culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material considerations as well as I do, so I’ll not urge them, but add to them the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it—and they might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision.”
“Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don’t show me the nuggets under the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction—must charm me into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn’t jar upon you as it would upon me. When it’s got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to fall in love so completely that I shan’t be able to write a sonnet about it. Now, I’ve written several sonnets to Angela.”
Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, “I don’t urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is, I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don’t allow an emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You’ve had quite enough of these experiments in feeling.”
“Ah! but suppose—suppose,” laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind him, “suppose that this were the permanent emotion.”
“In that case,” Geoffrey answered, “I should be very sorry for you, and for Angela and for the wild rose.”
“YOU and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia,” Mrs. Merrick said to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick’s mind was of the order that infers matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano and violin—whatever Mr. Wynne’s projects, Felicia ought not to count upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece’s worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not quite of bread and butter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure establishment.
These were Mrs. Merrick’s thoughts while she sorted the papers and remarked upon the rapid friendship.“You know,” she said, laying the one magazine upon the other, “that he is very poor. I fancy he has no settled income at all.”
It had come, the inevitable grunt in the midst of the pastoral. Even in her displeasure, Felicia could feel some amusement in the sudden simile that suggested Aunt Kate as the unobserved pig in its pig-sty among the orchards and rose-hedges where she had been happily strolling. She could almost see a flexible, inquiring snout pushing between the palings, above it the scrutiny of an observant eye. The simile so softened the displeasure that her voice had all its indolent mildness as she asked, “What has his poverty got to do with his friendship, Aunt Kate?” After all, it was easy to lean over the palings, and with a stick, indulgently to scratch the creature’s back.
“Ah! nothing—nothing at all, no doubt, especially since it is said that he is all but engaged to Lady Angela. He has admired her for years.”
“And what then? Are any of his friendships a menace to his engagement do you think?”
“Of course not, Felicia. You jump at such odd conclusions. And I did not say that he was engaged, merely that he had admired her for years. It’s improbable that Lady Angela would accept him.”
“At all events, a friendship of two days’ standing can hardly be affected by anything you may or may not have heard.Youmustn’t jump at odd conclusions, Aunt Kate.” Felicia could not repress this as she put her book under her arm and stepped from the window on to the lawn. In spite of the lightnessof her tone, the grunt had come as an ugly interruption in a melodious mood. To hear such things did affect the two days’ friendship, though she did not believe them. She had known him for only two days, but the two days had been hers so exclusively that any other “admiration” must mean very little. Not that the two days meant much to either of them, she assured herself. They had only strolled among rose-hedges. A pity, though, that the pig-sty had to be faced.
On the lawn coming towards her were Angela, Maurice and Geoffrey. They personified the new life into which she seemed to have entered. To see them together pushed her back once more into the place of spectator. Felicia had time to recognize her own hurt and almost angry mood as she approached them and smiled at them in passing. But Angela, with a winning hand held out, detained her. “You are so fond of walking. Won’t you come with us? Just about the grounds?” she said. She drew Felicia’s hand within her arm. “I am not very strong, so I can’t make magnificent expeditions as you do—Maurice tells me—with him before breakfast. But even a little walk has twice the value if it’s a talking walk, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it has,” said Felicia, feeling a slight confusion as she walked between them.
“Though a silent walk, with a companion one cares for, has even more, perhaps,” Angela added. “Don’t you love silence?”
“I have had so much of it,” said Felicia.
“So much silence; how exquisite! Isn’t that a picture, Maurice, that she makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness, much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me of it.” Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between them. “Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very little?”
“Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could have so much silence as not to care much about it.”
Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the shrinking irritability be simply—she asked it of herself with quite a pang of self-disgust—a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her eye in going over her went with something of a child’s large coldness.
Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitelyundressed—a wan Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock, stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew—a frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm. Let the contrast be as obvious as possible—as unbecoming to herself as possible.
“You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am here again,” Angela went on; “may I? I can’t tell you how people interest me. I have always loved to look at other people’s lives—haven’t I, Maurice?” Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking; none of her pretty appeals included him.
“To meddle as well as look, you think—don’t you?” and her smile was now half sad in its humour.
“Oh, you meddle quite nicely,” Maurice said; “Let her meddle with you, Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do you no harm.”
“Rather scant encouragement for you!” laughed Angela, looking down, for she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; “but may I? What I really want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to be done; and somuch apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn’t think me a Don Quixote—tilting at other people’s windmills; but wherever I go I confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there to live for?”
“I don’t help anybody,” said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness, for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady Angela’s signature; “I don’t know anything about the charities here. We never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can’t be of much use, except as warnings, I suppose.”
It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them.
The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification.
But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand,was speaking. “May I helpyou, then, to be of more use?” she said; “I know how circumstances—material circumstances—interfere. You live so far from the village, and your father’s interests, your interests, are intellectual, not ethical. You haven’t had an opportunity for thinking about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should love to talk to you about it all—the giving of oneself, the life for others, which is the only true living. You haven’t seen the spiritual and practical side of things—for practical and spiritual are one in reality. We know, only to do.”
They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind their palings to seraphs in laces.
“I know very little,” she said; “I certainly do nothing.”
“Oh, come now!” Maurice broke in. “You talk to your father; you make a beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doingnothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved giving in the garden to the village children—pets of yours. I have no doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized charities.”
“Ah! you do interest yourself then!” Angela turned on her a look of bright reproach. “How can you say you do nothing? I am sogladyou have the children—so glad that you don’t shut yourself away in a palace of art; nothing is more dangerous than that.”
“That’s a hit at me,” Maurice declared; “I inhabit the dangerous palace, and don’t intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always sounding her trumpet at its gate.”
Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, “Might not a shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?”
The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr. Daunt was a half-insolent coxcomb, and she did not want Maurice to defend her motives.
Angela’s eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. “My dear Geoffrey,” she said, “you say things at times that make me wonder whether you have not very delicate perceptionsas well as a ruthless will. I don’t quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the suffering of life—so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?”
“It depends upon what’s in it, my dear Angela.” Geoffrey watched his last, and very perfect ring, float softly against the blue.
“A shrine implies some sanctified presence.”
“I am afraid that I haven’t much faith in miraculous healings.”
“In anything, Geoffrey?”
“In no words,” the Olympian answered. The sun glittered upon his golden head as he turned to smile at Angela with, Felicia felt, implacable indifference. Their walk had brought them near the house again.
“I must go and finish my book,” said Felicia; “after these shrines and palaces I shall feel that I am creeping into a ditch when I return to it. I hope that ditches aren’t dangerous, too.”
“Why do you also pretend not to be clever?” Angela asked her softly, suddenly, smiling closely into her eyes. “What is the book?” She bent her head to the title, looking up at once gravely. “You like him?”
“I said it was like creeping into a ditch. But there is a certain splendour to be found even in ditches—he shows it to one, I think.”
Angela put a hand on her arm; “Don’t read him. A lily should not look at ditches.”
“I am going to crawl to the very end of mine—muddy ordeal though it is,” Felicia declared, trying to keep defiance from her smile, and aware that the Olympian was looking at her and that she was flushing. Her detached student’s interest was probably branded in all their eyes with some crude and ugly interpretation. Well, let them think what they liked of her. She turned and went into the house. This had not been a melodious afternoon.
“Poor child!” sighed Angela, “poor child! What amilieu! An infidel papa and decadent literature.”
“Well, it has raised a lily, you see,” Maurice remarked.
“Has it?” said Angela. “Poor child. I long to help her.”
ANGELA BAGLEY wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality, like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coarse desires; she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to her—though she did not know that they were only tools—tools in a complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools used always for an egotistic end.
In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened.
Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she would be the noblest influence in his life, not knowing that to gainthat influence she would abase herself to any ignobility. Again and again she had almost thrown herself at his head—oh! ugly phrase!—Angela did not use it—shown him her heart, rather, though with a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the giving of deep friendship if other givings were ignored. Again and again Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that kept the clasp of friendship, a smile that salved her pride by recognizing only friendship in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the self-immolation of this love—for Angela was well aware of its romantic indifference to vulgar considerations—now when she was almost sure that she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against Felicia.
She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now whispered in her heart, and she armed herself.
The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And while fully conscious of the nobility of her own attitude in its stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was by no means conscious that shehad armed herself and that the attitude was her weapon.
The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr. Merrick.
Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey’s calm gaze at him, in Maurice’s kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man’s genial patronage—an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement; she saw these things in relation to Felicia’s attitude towards them, her placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him, she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed, came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia’s stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a halo.
“How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick,” Angela said to her hostess; “I see so the difficulty of yoursituation. Your brother-in-law is an intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he must jar upon you and your husband—could I fail to see it? And yet how kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I suppose, their only outlook on life.”
Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was now enabled to see him with Lady Angela’s clearer vision. She saw herself, too, as very kind indeed.
To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. “What a type! That’s what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of the century!” Since coming into the country she had not been so near Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.
“He encouraged me magnificently this morning,” Maurice in his mirth confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile, understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was failing her; she couldn’t tell herself with truth that she was indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt’s derivative discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her newlittle air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging as of appreciating him.
Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor—he was always taking the floor—got up and strolled away, quite as if he were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela’s sad and vacant eyes, and Maurice’s deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.
Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye that, seeing through her evasions, said, “I understand everything. Command me, you charming friend.” To keep silence towards him, to escape for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.
It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father’s arrival, while at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.
Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his brother’s vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, ready to bubble up.
Maurice’s eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much against her all the rest.
“It’s an age of sham, of conformity,” Mr. Austin announced. “There seem no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old faiths into vaporous metaphors—metaphors accepted literally by the masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a candlestick—the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy water!” His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in even more impressive tones, “Don’t, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide.With a fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I think, Guyau said.”
He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.
“Ah well,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “all that’s beside the mark. One must have custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week,” he added, looking genially around the table.
“Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting,” Mr. Jones went on to Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder of Mr. Merrick’s denunciations to roll by.
“Godersham on faith. I’ve no doubt of it.” The thunder rolled again. “You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As for the country going to pieces, that’s rubbish. It shrivels in its stiff shell.”
“I have the greatest regard for Godersham—the very greatest,” Mr. Cuthbert said temperately.
“I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You don’t follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a gooddeal less theism than Voltaire—let us say. I consider such a man morally culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a menace to the national welfare.”
Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia’s attention turned from him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr. Merrick’s flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt’s face that arrested Felicia’s attention.
Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm. To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true, true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at all of them. “Hear! hear! papa.” She flung into the emptiness a flaming little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her. Hereyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face, steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across the table. Geoffrey’s hand continued automatically to break his bread.
“Hear! hear! Miss Merrick.” Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing her eyes from Geoffrey’s. “I put your glove in my helmet. But really, you know, Mr. Merrick—“ his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship—“we shall plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about faith.”
“Metaphysics!” Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at Felicia’s banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the task of forcing a way into his brother’s comprehension—overlaid with “crusts of custom.”
“A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia,” said Mrs. Merrick.
“Miss Merrick isn’t an infidel; she’s only a loyalist,” said Maurice.
Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued—
“Don’t you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all attacks?”
“I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps,” said Angela, who still leaned on her hand and still looked down; “but to me mere disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose itself, is sacred to me.”
She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt; yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.
Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.
She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently, clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.
Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on. Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. “Youweremore a loyalist than an infidel—I understood. Only your father pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain, pain you?”
Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over amazement, still kept thelook of steely steadiness. “I am sorry that any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger’s opinion of him could hardly give me pain.”
This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected. She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick intelligence, might savour of meanness—a stroke under cover of darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest; indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant.
“You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?” There was a real quiver in her voice.
“Do you count me as more?” Felicia asked.
“I want to count you as a great deal more.”
A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness of attitude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with Felicia’s sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then slipped over to Felicia’s sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile, now, on the two men.
“I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was,” she said; “we all understood, didn’t we?”
Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She broke through it, regardless of rents. “Idon’t understand,” she declared.She rose, drawing her hand from Angela’s, confronting them. “I think trivial things had best be left alone.” With this, picking up her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice’s. Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is assured. At once he understood and answered.
“May I come too?” he asked.
“Do. I am going for a walk.”
This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of two women over a man. Felicia’s face kept its hardness as she and Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion, and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in merely following her.
Maurice’s tact, as delicate as a woman’s, forced no sympathy upon her by an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they wentthrough the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.
“Do you know,” he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, “to-day you are not a bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows and eyes is all Romney—Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that you only remind me of beautiful things?”
Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. “Nowdoyou consider such a remark impertinent?” Maurice demanded. “You frighten me, you know. I feel in you such afarouchefastidiousness. Our idealist in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments.”
“Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be called that,” said Felicia, biting into her pear; “I suppose I hardly know how to accept compliments gracefully—never having had any made me before.”
“It’s too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you. You know that, don’t you?”
“How can I tell? I have known you just five days.”
“Still—you do know me.”
“Doesn’t Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider your compliments to her blaring?” Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at him now with her dryad-like malice.
“Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all trustworthy.”
“No, no,” Felicia protested.
“No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn’t know me as well as you do—in spite of your nipping reference to five days—and for the simple reason that she doesn’t know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one’s outer vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her—she is, on the whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she means—and that’s so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you intend to mean.”
The memory of Aunt Kate’s grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this frank analysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular garden—finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar—had made its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely pleasing in the delicate desecration.
This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him, should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked.
And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed, intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals, whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her on and there was no time to pause, to analyze, to weigh her heart. She only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart might ache at the loss of the dear companion.
Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing.
THERE must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn’t much care what it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden was Maurice’s philosophy.
He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father’s articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the accumulation of material. German idealism had been abandoned. “Why attack these castles of sand?” said Mr. Merrick.
From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down at Maurice.
“To-day you are not to escape me,” he declared. “I claim all to-day. You will practise?”
“I will. Why do you say I escape you?” She had to smile at his acuteness.
“Since the other day—in the garden—you have. Angela irritated you, Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn’t it a little true?” He leaned against her steps, answering her smile.
“Perhaps a little,” Felicia owned. “I felt, perhaps, rather out of it.”
“So you are—out of it, with me.” His words were light, too, but she felt the underlying emphasis. “You see we feel things in the same way, see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to bar me away from you—even for a day or two—and two days is a frightfully long time in a mere week.” His voice lifted itself from the almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences looked at and effaced, he went on. “I’ve something here I want you to see and feel with me.” He showed her the volume he held, Maeterlinck—delightful dreamer.
“At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that’s an unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather than in darkness.”
“This isn’t nightmare, but it’s not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn perhaps—or perhaps twilight; you must say.”
“I saw Mr. Daunt pass outside just then. He always spends the morning here. Shall we read it somewhere else?”
“Ah—let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey would take it.” Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the twilight dreammight carry him too far. “You dislike him? Really?”
“Frankly, I don’t like him—but I don’t want to exclude him from the reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-assured makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him. He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad.”
“Ah!” Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. “You have seen the best thing in Geoffrey—the single-minded directness of his quest—its object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty.”
“And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It’s a touch of human tenderness that makes him less chilling.”
“Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre. I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I got broken.”
“No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don’t believe he has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How grey and rigid his life must be.” Geoffrey walked in as she said it.
Maurice greeted his friend gaily. “Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit of poetry. I’m going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once.” He turned his pages.
Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to Felicia’s side.
“You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?”
Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a lollipop—and without consulting the child’s preference as to size, shape or colour.
“Sometimes,” she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. “Not too often.”
“I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young woman. Surely you can’t get too much of—Browning for instance?” and Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull’s-eye was being kindly offered.
“Easily,” she retorted; “but let’s hear Maeterlinck, who has been waiting for you.”
Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read—