“Now you see. Now you understand all,” she said.
He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it.
“Now you see. Now you understand,” she repeated. “I do, Geoffrey.”
She had never called him by his name before.
His eyes now rested on hers.
“Let me tell you,” she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and calm. “Let me tell you that I see you and know you—and understand. Don’t ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I hardly feelanything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful nobility—your love. To see it—to know it—is worth the suffering.”
He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head—the dear, proud head—to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.
“How could he. To you.” It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, sickened wonder.
“He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn—and my pain; he didn’t love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him.” She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. “You thought he loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?”
“I?” Geoffrey’s stare was almost boyish.
“I?—who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?” it said.
“Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel—a thing to be tossed appeasingly to a rival.” Again she closed her eyes. “It makes me dizzy sometimes.”
Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.
Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice,holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice—how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting—seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet—was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice’s baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.
He did not turn from the window as he said, “You must go back to him.”
Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her. She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty eyes to him.
“I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how incapable, now, hewould be of it.” She made no reply. There was no reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a quiver of blind presage run through it.
“He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply—more deeply than you can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with Angela—well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela—and sorry for her, and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward—what of it? You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak as water—what of it? He adores you; I know it—and you loved him—once. You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything—everything.Youare his only chance. He will go to pieces without you.”
Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with the sense of fighting in the dark—he knew not what—but fighting some force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.
He walked away from her up and down the room. “Only the other night—how I understand it now—he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die without you.”
“Do you really want me to go?” Felicia asked.
Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. “I want what is best for him, and for you. You know I’m not a sentimentalist. I think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing life even with a husband she thinks she can’t care for, than drifting about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic roots—a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,—but a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial temperature, liable to shatterings—to witherings; not a flower well rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it.”
“Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is poisoned? You want me to go back to him—not loving him; do you want me to go back hating?—for I do hate him.”
Geoffrey still paused.
“I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love.”
That memory of the lighthouse flash could nolonger guide in this darkness where a blind and wilful giant’s hand steered for a shore of reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the open, unknown sea.
“Do you want me to go back, loving you?” she said.
“Loving me?” Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled round and fronted the tempestuous elements.
Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the others. She went on: “I wrote and told him that I despised him—hated him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you. He will get that letter to-morrow—perhaps to-day.”
Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice, Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had been too steady—in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic, shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back—back, and down—where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her.
She opened her eyes to him.
The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to emptiness; theywere near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking deeply into each other’s eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke.
“I felt it.”
“You did not know it, Geoffrey.”
“I touched something in the dark.”
“I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to him.”
“Why not, Felicia?”
Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused.
“It seemed to make things less simple—more difficult.”
“More difficult, perhaps,” said Geoffrey, “but more simple, too, I think. Have you known for long?”
“Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been there—oh—for long, long—since the beginning perhaps. I can’t tell. I can’t see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength.”
Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but, in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him.
“The threads go back and back—and they turn round one another. I can’t see them separately till now—when his is broken. You rememberwhen you kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then—it must have been then—that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been woven into my life—into my love for my husband—I don’t know what was you and what was I.”
His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to the window; turned to face him.
“Ah! Felicia,” said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you reproach me than listen to myself.”
“Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, too, was blindfolded,” he said, looking away from her.
His voice was the voice of frozen tears.
They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a word from her would unlock flood-gates.
And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper tumult roaredin her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative face.
She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she knew them black and dangerous.
But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the world’s wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a defiant happiness.
She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose to; a sad, colourless sky above;but there was a radiance in its whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.
Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying—
“And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want you to go back to Maurice.”
His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. “Nothing is really changed,” said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, hardly stooping to persuasion. “You and I are parted. He needs you as much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth—only I believe you have seen it, as I have. It’s a choice between taking up your old life—and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good thing out of it—or living the new life I described to you—the life of the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece—a life of constant danger. For you—I know yourstrength; but could it keep me from you, year in and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself—I would die for you, as you know; but to live without you—seeing you drifting—alone—in a sadness worse than any suffering—? I know that the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my sake—for your own I’d put it, too:—Felicia—for my sake—if I asked you as I could—you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn’t be the growing flower; you wouldn’t be the cut flower in the vase”—his face, white in its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would strip all illusion from her; “you would be like those snowdrops that I carry here—on my heart;—on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, dead.” He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw now, and as he had wished, without illusions.
“But go back to him!” she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the cup he held out to her.
“He loves you. He needs you.”
“Go back from fear?—fear of you?—of myself?”
“Turn from that thought then. Don’t let it be a question of you or me. Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife.”
“But after that letter!”
“Is a person’s moral deficiency to warrant thebreaking of such a bond? If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in disowning her?”
“Oh—a mother!” Felicia’s tears ran down.
“Remember, I wouldn’t urge—I wouldn’t ask you to fear me or pity him unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life. Felicia, it’s his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, that makes the barrier that holds me from you now—my memory of his face—his voice—when he said that you were his life—that he would die without you. He thanked me for his happiness—you and I had ‘made him.’ He said: ‘You shall never regret it—so help me, God.’ Felicia, you have given him his soul. You must not rob him of it.”
“Geoffrey! Geoffrey!” she said, pressing her hands against her eyes—for his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, wrenched and broken limbs—“I have given him no soul. He has found his soul through me, perhaps, but I can’t rob him of it.”
“You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do pity him. And you must—you must pity him—and forgive him.”
“How could we go on,” she whispered, “after my letter to him? after he knows?”
“He doesn’t return till to-morrow, you said?He has not read it yet. Besides, let him know the facts—but the facts from yourself. Tell him. Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest,” said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety.
“After his to her!”
“You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt. Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you will; let him have it straight; but don’t let him read it—alone. Poor old Maurice!” Geoffrey added.
The words, his comment on them, the “poor old Maurice!” that seemed a final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed suddenly before her a vision of Maurice—a piteous Maurice. The hatred of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey—so far away it seemed—saying, “Can you really bear to think of his reading that letter—alone?”
She went towards him—there was now no longer any fear in his nearness. He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.
Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehendingpity was the truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from the rapture of abandonment that had called to her—to him. What had he not conquered in himself—and her—to do this great thing for her?—to save not only her, but through her, Maurice?
But, though he had conquered, she felt broken.
“Life is so long, Geoffrey.”
He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of long years where they must walk apart.
“And life—founded on pity——“
“More will come. Something like a mother’s love.”
She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice’s terror-stricken face—reading her letter—had stabbed to more than pity. The protecting passion that had flung itself between him and the reading had in it a deeper quality. She could not analyze the fiercely defensive tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, “I won’t disappoint you, Geoffrey.”
He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet.
For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within her, a passion far other than the maternal passion that was to take her back to Maurice.
His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms.
And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in silence, they clung and kissed each other.
The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose, and moved away.
Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the mantelpiece.
“Just half-past three,” said Geoffrey.
Felicia went to the window.
“The rain has stopped,” she said. “We can walk to the station in less than an hour.”
Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. “Don’t you want something to eat? Some tea?”
“No; do you?”
“No, thanks.”
“I will put on my hat and coat; I will be only a moment.” She went to the door while Geoffrey said—
“We can catch the fast afternoon train. We shall be in London by six.”
ACOLD, evening sky was over London as Geoffrey and Felicia drove through wet squares and streets. Here, too, the storm had lifted, and between its darkness and the darkness of the coming night was the still moment of bleak and bitter twilight; strips of chill radiance behind the tattered trees; the pallid sky shining from the puddles of the roadway.
They had hardly spoken to each other during the walk; the wait at the desolate little station; the journey in the train. Geoffrey had merely expressed the hope that she was not cold; she had feared that he was hungry, had begged him to buy a sandwich. Once or twice from their corners of the railway carriage they had gravely smiled at each other. Now in the cab they neither spoke nor smiled.
Felicia’s mood was that of the bleak, still pause between the storm and the darkness. It had its peace, its colourless peace. She could not look back at the storm and the coming darkness seemed impenetrable, but already her thoughts stole towards it, seeing, as if in a dream, Maurice, comforted; feeling his hand in hers.
She had a dreaming, a sorrowing presage that he had already returned, already knew the truth, that she would find him waiting, hopeless, yet waiting hopelessly for help.
From her letter he would look up at her—returned to him. And, though the thought wept for his pain, in her weariness it had lost its fear. There was peace in its very sadness. For then there need be no horrid crash of revelation for her to face. In silence she would hold out her arms to him. And “poor, poor Maurice,” her heart whispered.
The river, when they reached the Embankment, had the sky’s cold stillness; a drowned face looking up at its ghost. Felicia, shivering a little, said that it was very chilly. A stir of fear came with the sudden hope that Maurice was not waiting for her. She would rather face crashes than have him waiting—alone—with her letter. Hope and its fear were like a rising of life, of eagerness in her. She leaned her head from the window of the rattling four-wheeler to direct the cabman; explaining: “They often take a longer way here.”
“I will see you up to the door of the flat,” said Geoffrey.
She nodded, then said, “But if he is there? If Maurice should come to the door?”
“But he doesn’t return till to-morrow.”
“He may be there—I think he is there.”
“Well—the maid would come to the door. Besides—if he did—what more simple than to shake his hand and say good-bye to you both?”
She said quietly, “We shall not see you again—for how long?”
“Oh, it will be quite natural that I should now gounder for some years,” Geoffrey answered as quietly. “Some day, when you and Maurice feel like seeing me——“
“Yes; some day,” Felicia answered, with her head again out of the window.
His dull ache of misery had been so steady that he was surprised to find it capable of a deeper pang. He had almost the impulse to ask her if her quiet were wrung from such agony as his. The next moment he was hating himself for the whimpering selfishness that could not feel gladness for her fortitude. Yet the plaint was there, and it dimly guessed at a woman’s capacity, strange in its sanity, its acceptance of compromise, for two lives; her absorption in response to the claim that she may listen to. He himself had helped to lock her into that smaller room of her heart and now she must live in it, since the high and beautiful chambers were closed to her for ever. In the smaller room, too, was the love cruelly wounded, wounded by her hand. Her whole nature was now an eagerness to staunch, uplift, console.
The cab drew up before the block of flats, and while Geoffrey, saying that he would walk back to his rooms, paid the man, Felicia went inside and rang beside the lift for the porter. Geoffrey had joined her when the man appeared.
Yes, he said, Mr. Wynne had come back that afternoon. No, Mr. Wynne had not been out again, though he had sent the maid away soon after arriving. He knew that he had not goneout for he had been sitting in the hall all day.
There had evidently been talk, Geoffrey saw. Felicia saw nothing, thought of nothing but Maurice’s presence above; her heart seemed choked in its beating. She made no objection to Geoffrey following her into the lift.
They stepped out together and, before the foolishly decorative little door that Maurice had so often jested over they paused, the porter still lingering.
“You can go,” said Geoffrey cheerfully; “I prefer walking down.”
The man reluctantly descended and then Geoffrey rang.
Felicia leaned against the wall, seeing Maurice’s eyes as he had said good-bye to her, hearing his, “It seems to me an eternity before I shall see you again.” He had read her letter, alone. Remorse gave her the sense of swooning to all about her.
With almost a start she saw that Geoffrey still rang; and now he knocked as well.
“Maurice must be asleep,” she said.
Geoffrey, his finger pressed on the electric bell, nodded.
She had answered, “The eternity will pass.” It seemed an eternity. And it had passed. Yes, here she was again, before the familiar door, and in a moment he would see her.
“I should think that by now he would be awake. Don’t you think that he must be awake by now?” she repeated the question almost irritably as he did not answer her; adding, “Perhaps he guesses thatit is we, and will not see us. Oh Geoffrey—Geoffrey. How could I have written such a letter!”
“It will be all right when you see each other. You must meet his despair, of course.” Geoffrey, his shoulder turned to her, continued to knock loudly. The draughty landing with its twilight square of window open to a damp brick wall, was vault-like in its cold; Felicia, clasping her arms, shivered.
Geoffrey presently said, “I shall have to break the glass and open the door.”
At this she started from her place, caught back his hand.
“No, no! He can’t have waked yet. He is worn out—tired—imagine how tired! Go on ringing. Knock again.”
Her face showed a horror that did not know itself.
“I think I had better break the door,” said Geoffrey, gently; putting her back.
She dropped to helpless submission.
The glass panel crashed in under the sharp blow and putting his hand through the aperture Geoffrey drew the bolt.
Inside was complete darkness. A touch at the electric button near the door and the little hall, its closed doors, its chairs, table, jar of laurel-leaves, flashed upon them.
Geoffrey still kept Felicia behind him.
“Let me go first,” he said.
“You! First! No, no, I must see him first.”
But firmly now he held her back.
“Felicia, you must wait here. Maurice may be ill.”
She had seized his arms to push by him and they stood clutching each other in the brilliant light.
“Ill!” she repeated. “And I am not to go to him! My husband!”
Something in her stricken face, her fixed eyes, made him yield.
“Come then, let us go together.”
“No.” Her thrust against him did not relax. “I must go alone; I must see him alone; I must speak to him alone.”
Geoffrey clasped his arm around her. “Felicia, understand me, you shall not go alone. We are too near to be separated—in this. We must go together.”
He saw that his words tore from her mind the veil that covered horror. She submitted, grasping, yet pushing from her, the arm that held her.
“To our room—first. The light is turned in the same place—near the door.”
Geoffrey flung open the door. It did not need the light to show them that the room was empty; the desolate evening sky again confronted them at the window. They drew back.
“The drawing-room—the studio—he could not easily hear in the studio.”
Geoffrey knew that her hope was desperate—almost mechanical. They looked into the drawing-room; went through the dining-room to the studio. All were empty. They retraced their steps. Her hand no longer grasped and repelled his arm. She leaned upon it.
“His dressing-room—across the passage,” she half whispered.
If only, Geoffrey thought, she would faint in his arms so that he might lay her down and go alone. But her swiftness equalled his. Neither could hesitate. He threw open the door of the little dressing-room.
Darkness again. The curtain drawn before the window with its courtyard aspect. Geoffrey’s hand felt for the electric button, trembled before it found it. Light came like a shock in the darkness. Maurice lay at their feet.
The pistol had not fallen from his hand, though the open fingers no longer held it. He had not shot himself through the head. Thank God for that, Geoffrey found himself trivially thinking; his head was unmarred and beautiful. One hardly noticed the breast’s tragic disarray.
As Felicia put away his arm and left him it was now Geoffrey who leaned, weak, nerveless against the wall.
He watched her kneel beside her husband, and, softly pushing the pistol from his hand, take the empty, open hand in hers.
With a look of tender wonder, like a mother with her sleeping child, she slightly touched his hair and brow. It was still with wonder that she looked up at Geoffrey.
“He is dead,” she said in a hushed and gentle voice, as the mother says: “He is sleeping.”
Geoffrey’s white, silent face, the tears so strangelyrunning down it, over his cheeks, into the corners of his lips, gave her a shudder. Her eyes turned again to the serenity, the slumbering serenity, of the dead face.
For long moments she sat still, while Geoffrey stifled his sobs.
“Is my letter there?” she said at last. He saw the open letter on the dressing table; near it was a sealed envelope.
He forced himself to cross the room to them. The dressing table was behind her; he lifted the letters above her head; the envelope was addressed to Mrs. Wynne. Hesitating, he glanced down, and saw that she had raised her head, that her eyes were on him. She put up her hand.
“Wait—not now.”
“I want it now,” she commanded with her emotionless gentleness. Now—while I am still stupefied; he understood. He gave it to her and turned aside while she read, down there, at his feet, beside Maurice.
The letter was not long. He heard her hand fall softly with it. She sat, the vacant hand before her face, bowed over her husband.
Geoffrey could not speak to her and he could not leave her. He stood looking down at the dressing table—empty but for its little ivory tray, its pin-cushion. Maurice had not unpacked his dressing-case. A photograph of Felicia was stuck into the glass; not the framed one; that was packed too; he had taken it with him. This was a profile;not good; making her too sad, as Maurice had said.
He heard now that she wept.
He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his presence by his grief.
And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her face still hidden she held up the letter to him.
“I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?”
“He is ours. It is because of you—because of you that I——“ She could not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He had given him back to her and her to him.
“Dearest Felicia,” he read, “I was a coward. But I always loved you most—even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for me but you. And I am unworthy of you—and of my friend. All I can do for you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck’s poem, darling? I do smile; not only so that you shan’t cry, but for pure joy that at last I can really do something not ignoble in your eyes. Darling—darling—it is only horrible because I can’t see you again, and because you hate me and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don’t, ah! don’t hate me. Loveme again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy, dearest one.—Maurice.”
A groan broke from Geoffrey’s lips. Had it been any other woman at his feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from herself.
“Oh, Maurice—my Maurice, I have killed you,” Felicia said. “How can I live?”
He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at Maurice.
And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she shuddered with dreadful sobs.
“He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness—so afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me—loving me—and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might always hate him. I can’t live. I can’t.”
Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift her yet.
And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life’s supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice’s, he stammered, “You must, you must. For me.”
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