“One gets one’s breath like this,” said Geoffrey. He had not looked at her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick up again a weapon. A hope,stern in its determination, hardly concealed itself.
“Don’t think me impertinent,” he said; “you understand that one must grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?”
The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone. She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her despair—the seeing of it stripped to him—her self-control gave way.
She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into helpless sobs. “I am not engaged,” she said.
“Ah!—then——,” She heard Geoffrey’s voice near her, above her, a voice whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality—soaring, noble, yet seeing from afar a triumph.
That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him. She must shoot down that soaring hope.
And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, “The some one is Maurice—we cannot marry—we love each other,” the silence near her was, indeed, like a slow throbbing to death.
She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: “Last autumn when he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is hopeless. He sets me free.” Her sobbing shook her again, and again the thought of what Geoffrey’s suffering must be smote too unendurablyupon her own wound. “Forgive me—I am selfish. But to have you ask me that—this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me. And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!”
From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again. And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after hearing—sharp on its indrawn breath—that “We love each other,” not a flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice’s situation—verging on the desperate as he well knew;—of Felicia; of their love for each other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster, but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea’s deep moan in caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly.
Felicia wept on: “If I could only see him!—it’s been so long. If I could only appeal to him!—I know—I know it’s for my sake; but if only I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on without him.”
Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest of her words.
A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her only splendid truth and courage.
Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch.
“That is pure fairy-tale, you know,” he said. “People can’t marry on only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to understand.”
“We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know—it is part of my own suffering—it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and die of suffering than not have known—not have had him tell me. At least now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy.”
Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all reserve; but, with his newinsight, he felt in it, too, the helpless abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support.
“Sit down here,” he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood. “All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it.”
She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face.
He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground.
The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous, melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds. Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head.
How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her. Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers, the sad sunset, and Maurice’s sad face.
The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection.
“See,” she said, in a shaken but different voice, “the snowdrops; they are all out.”
Geoffrey smiled. “I hadn’t noticed them.” He watched her as she stooped to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.
Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished in his fear and adoration. Yet his man’s training availed him. He could have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.
She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held them to him. “Will you have them?”
For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.
“I shall always think of you when I see them,” she said, looking away from him. “And you, when you remember to-day, don’t let it be a memory only of sadness; but of my gratitude—my wonderinggratitude.” She paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, “I never dreamed you cared for me.”
“It came slowly—the knowledge that without you the world would be empty,” said Geoffrey.
“And is it empty now?”
“Oh, no,” he answered, raising his eyes to her; “you are here.”
Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for him—for herself—urging her, she asked, “But does loving me—knowing how deeply you have made me care for you—does that keep the pain from being too great?”
Geoffrey again had his half smile. “Ah, if I don’t talk about it, you mustn’t think it’s not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so miserable.”
“Do you mean that if I were happy—married to Maurice—you would be happier too?”
Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he was thinking.
“Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness with him would be happiness.”
“You love him—you are sure—so much?”
“You know; you must see.” She leaned her face into her palms, not weeping, with a wearinesstoo deep for tears, and again her tragic sincerity made her seem far from him.
“You must have courage,” said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it. “You are both young. Maurice has talent.”
“Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to myself, ‘He will come to-day; he must come to-day!’ How I waited—how I hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don’t know how I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I could wait—and could hope.”
Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing.
“Ah! don’t suffer so!” he pleaded.
“But I want to suffer,” said Felicia. “The time will come when I won’t mind. Haven’t you that fear—the worst of all—that even the suffering will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember larger hopes.”
“No, no,” said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; “you don’t really believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won’t be because you’ve grownlittler. Things must come to you. You will keep things. And,” he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, “you have your feeling for beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see snowdrops.”
Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, seemed entering a still harbour at evening.
“How you think of me. How dear you are,” she said softly. She had that image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling shores, and the evening star. “You make me ashamed. I have thought only of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you—really see you—for the first time.”
She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.
He rose, flushing a little. “Thanks,” he said; “you won’t forget me, I know.”
She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go home, she, too, rose.
Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The tattered sails could sleep.
They left the woods near Felicia’s garden wall.
“And now I go back to those scuffles that don’t interest you,” said Geoffrey.
“But they do now, because of you.”
“I may come again? I shall never trouble you—you know.”
“Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so utterly. You are my dear friend.”
Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face. He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must be helped. And helped soon.
He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on the forehead.
Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into thegarden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.
Geoffrey’s kiss, Maurice’s desolate, farewell face, were both far away. Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled in sleep.
GEOFFREY, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.
Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of vagueness, Felicia’s figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by the thought of her. What cruel tricks one’s brain played upon one, and how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms. Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one couldfeel more keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him. This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of necessity—in Maurice’s philosophy all past fact became necessity—and not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.
There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room, with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from his boyhood’s home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity and composure, Geoffrey’s quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he satat his spacious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal, to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There lay Geoffrey’s strength.
“Sit down, Maurice,” said Geoffrey; “I want a talk with you.” He still held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again.
He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep secrets—though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy—how he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing question; and when Geoffrey’s matter was over, he might as well tell him that the culminating romance had at last been achieved.
The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he could take for granted her shrinking from the world’s prying eyes; her love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each othersurrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief. Anything that took him out of himself was a relief.
“Maurice,” Geoffrey said deliberately, “I went to see Felicia Merrick this morning.”
Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion, and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. “I have seen her several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me.”
Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief; but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia—hisFelicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of suspense.
“I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her.” Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his sentences. “She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has suffered. Shetold me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that she loved you.”
Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia’s faith his own faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the beating of his heart.
“She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her free. Do you love her?” Geoffrey asked.
“My God!” Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them, and burst into loud weeping.
Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his hope had clung to, that Maurice’s attitude would show some obvious unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that would make of Felicia’s love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered. There was simply no more hope.
Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: “I adore her; I have from the beginning. Don’t you remember?” Through his grief the resentment showed itself.
“Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferentto you as I thought, our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn’t have stood for a moment between my wishes and her.” Before this firmness Maurice’s resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs again.
“You adore her, and you give her up?” Geoffrey asked.
“What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry me?”
“Why did you ask her?”
“Don’t turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don’t be ungenerous. I was a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn’t help myself. I hoped that something might turn up.”
“Why don’t you still hope?”
“I can’t, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living—far more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed? Looks terribly——?”
Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend.
“She looks terribly ill.”
“And she sticks to me, the little darling!”
“She certainly stuck to you,” said Geoffrey, still looking down into the fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, “You surely would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn’tbe here this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking.”
For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey’s voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, “Maurice, do you want to marry her?”
At this Maurice started to his feet. “What are you talking towards, Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell me the truth—do you hope to marry her?”
“I told you that I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I’d had any hope.”
“To marry her I’d sacrifice anything and everything,” said Maurice, altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream.
Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no consciousness of superiority in his claim.
“To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice,” he said; “I will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her happy.”
Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to white. “Geoffrey,” he gasped.
“Willyou make her happy?” asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed, as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man’s responsive soul.
“Before God I will,” he said.
In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the table and sat down at it again. “I can pay off your debts—I have made some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money on my property—its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife; what you have now, once it’s free, will do the rest, and her father no doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me back, well and good; but don’t bother over it. I shall get on well enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always lucky with my speculations; I shan’t be pinched.”
“Do you mean it, Geoffrey?” All that was best in Maurice rose in the solemn gratitude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question.
With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the half-passionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the difference between Angela’s boudoir and a country meadow in spring. Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music, Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliestlark and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was really best in him—his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-glass idealism. He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to veil her.
Geoffrey had answered with an “Of course I mean it,” while Maurice’s mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. “But how—how can I accept all this from you, Geoffrey?” he said at last; “it is splendid of you; it’s a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I accept it?”
“As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either side—for her sake.”
“And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?” Maurice asked with a half-sad, half-whimsical smile.
“Perhaps a little for you. If I didn’t care for you, didn’t think you worth her caring for, I wouldn’t do it; but that would probably be for her sake again. Candidly, I don’t feel for you much just now, or think much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand that, of course, in another lover.”
“But it’s in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I shouldhave thought capable of such self-immolating idealism.”
“It’s the best thing I can do for myself, isn’t it?” said Geoffrey, with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. “I wouldn’t do it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I would rather have her happy than miserable.”
“But, dearest Geoffrey”—the tears again rose to Maurice’s eyes as the wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy—“how can you tell that—with time—you couldn’t have hoped? People do outgrow their griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing—she would have seen that I wasn’t really worthy—and have recognized that you were.” That it was, apart from Felicia’s future attitude, a fact already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of Angela—ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with Felicia—this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, breaking his voice.
Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future possibility. He answered Maurice’s inner fear and his own inner regret with a brief “She might die before she outgrew it.”
The fact soothed Maurice’s qualms. “Dear,dear old Geoffrey,” he said brokenly. “How we will both love you. It won’t hurt you, I hope, to see a lot of us.”
“I’m not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it’s between you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a lucky speculation, a legacy—what you will. Her father will expect nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I’ve thought about it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in her cup.” He put his hand on Maurice’s shoulder as the young man stood beside him: “Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better.”
AND Angela? This was Maurice’s first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glaston’s opportune entrance had saved him from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his escape—and hers. But with the day Angela’s personality unpleasantly reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia’s had been. Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Aboveall, how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure he would cut in Angela’s eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, in kissing her, accepting her avowal.
By the time that he went to Geoffrey’s he had decided in a definite recoil from the pain and humiliation—for both of them—that he simply could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must not see her face to face when she learned the fact—this despite an undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.
He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand?
The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound—so mild and unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their feet, and the assurance of a very small but secure income irradiating the future. He suspected that Geoffrey’s future, in consequence, had become uncertain, but under the circumstances submissiononly was open to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there was no danger of Geoffrey’s losing office.
When Maurice was on the point of leaving—he had been slightly ill at ease during the interview, and Geoffrey’s calm perhaps a little forced—the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, “I wrote to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is the copy.”
Maurice, flushing deeply, read—
“My dear Miss Merrick,—“I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you know. Everything, now, is all right.“Yours devotedly,“G. Daunt.”
“My dear Miss Merrick,—
“I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you know. Everything, now, is all right.
“Yours devotedly,“G. Daunt.”
“I’ll go at once,” Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. “My dear old Geoff.”
“You mustn’t make me ridiculous by your gratitude,” said Geoffrey. “And, my dear Maurice, I’m not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me happy.” He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look of affection that Maurice knew so well.
But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound opening again as he droveaway from Geoffrey’s, and on reaching his rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small, pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand—Angela’s oddly large and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive attitude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read, while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet—
“Dearest, dearest Maurice(can one saymore than dearest?)—“Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now how much I needed happiness.“YourAngela.”
“Dearest, dearest Maurice(can one saymore than dearest?)—
“Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now how much I needed happiness.
“YourAngela.”
Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger—for even in the extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.
He took up the pen, feeling that no further delaywas possible; at all events he would not see her face; and—
“My dear Angela,” he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic trust of her “dearest,” tore the sheet across, took another and began again with—
“Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick.” Maurice paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday morning—Angela’s tears, the kiss, the embrace—surged over him. “I did not know this yesterday,” he went on, writing rapidly. “We must forget yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She doesn’t take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half serious trifling is not to her what it is to us.”
Maurice’s forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of Angela. She, though not a “dear, simple little girl,” did not take things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew it. But shewould accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But having so smoothed her way—and at Felicia’s expense—stabbed Maurice with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the messenger’s ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn’t what he had said really truer than that? Had not Felicia’s dear image grown dim? Was it not Felicia’s feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia’s sake? Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found? He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was in a sooty atmosphere one couldn’t escape smudges. By degrees the deeper truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, had always been, for Felicia; but the realizationwould come quietly, endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia’s sake, he would be brutal enough, yes, he would—to intimate this even now.
He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. “You must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am necessary to her happiness—perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.
“Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I call myself
“Ever your devoted friend,“M. Wynne.
“PS.—Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at once destroy this record of it.”
Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia. The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met. How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!—how oddly things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near he turned from it with impatience—almost with resentment.
In Felicia’s garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.
The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.
Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatnessof her emotion drew all expression from her face.
A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.
They were together, and for her—for him—the past was forgotten. Yet as Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for him?—for herself? The love in Maurice’s eyes drew her from dreams; yet in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it breathed.
MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK looked about the little room with a scrutiny cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia’s marriage, but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther shore it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr. Wynne’s income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the drawing-room offended her, as Felicia’s garden had done. She could sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs. Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh and spotless as a white sea-shell, the austere suavity of eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious consolation in the dowdiness of some ofFelicia’s guests; Mrs. Merrick knew that duchesses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called “smart.” It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more gratification after deciding that it did not apply here.
Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia’s tea-table, and Mrs. Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as her furniture. Mrs. Merrick’s brain had bubbled with conjecture during those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome Geoffrey Daunt’s potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush.
Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft unobtrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend, Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her.
“Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn’t it very charming, very exquisite?” said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided past him. “Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?” She detached herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk.
People were going—only a group remained about Maurice at the other end of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and Felicia’s first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as she smiledand talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone, really to see and speak to him.
When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a deeper flush.
“Is this your first meeting, too?” asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey to Felicia, as she held the latter’s hand. “Geoffrey has become a greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are no doubtau courantof all his news?”
“Yes; he kept us posted,” said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness, making no allusion to depths.
“He hasn’t keptmeposted,” said Angela, taking a chair beside Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in an attitude habitual with her—an attitude at once sibylline and saint-like. “I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey—only heard of you. How are you?”
“All right. And you?”
“Wearing out my scabbard,” she said with a fatigue that made no attempt at lightness. “That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to anything, isn’t it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn’t it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn’t it? It does one good,” she repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.
Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the boredom, at all events, showed itself in his “To be with people who aren’t wearing out their scabbards.”
“Yes,”—Angela did not look up from her tea-cup—“people who have in their lives what one longs to put into everybody’s life.”
“You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?” Felicia smiled, a little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey’s manner of mild ridicule.
“No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and Maurice’s be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not? just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a London season enjoyable.”
Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she arranged her tea-cups, “What quest do you mean?”
“Why, the quest of youth and happiness—success in life. It is a pity that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing ofthings. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies.”
Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey’s cup and helping herself to a slice of bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not let it pass. “What do you mean by life?” he asked.
Angela still seemed to muse. “Oh, in this instance, I don’t mean life in its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the bread-and-butter sense, in fact,” she added, raising her eyes to Felicia and smiling.
“Why notpâté de foie grassandwiches?” asked Felicia; “they are even happier. Do have one.”
“Yes, thepâté de foie grassense, too. My first impression of you was that—None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. Wynne eating sandwiches?—five, I think you made the number—and isn’t it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want her to let me give her all I may.”
Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on Angela a look both firm and gay. “Why do you think such things of me?” she asked.
“Things?—what things?” Angela’s smile was neither firm nor gay. She felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered Felicia’scrude disposition for forcing issues just when one most intended avoiding them. Geoffrey’s cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice’s wife. Yes, she was again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice’s letter had spoken the truth—if Felicia’s love and Geoffrey’s charity had forced him into marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self enabled her to hide.
“What things?” she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before something blinding.
“Horrid things!” Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered.
“My dear child!” Angela breathed with a long sigh. “What have you been thinking ofme? What doyoumean?”
“I haven’t set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don’t ask for either. You don’t really know me at all, so please don’t talk about me as if you did.”
Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed Angela’s discomfiture.Unless she showed her hate, what should she say? Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go, murmuring, as she took Felicia’s hand: “I am sorry—sorry. You have not understood.”
“It seemed to me that you did not.”
Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight arrested, Angela rejoined: “I am afraid that you hardly want me to understand.” Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered from rejoinder by his eagerness.
“You are not going, my dear Angela?” He took her hand, speaking very quickly. “I haven’t seen you. Do stay.” Meeting his eyes where a shallow sincerity seemed to glitter over depths he could not show, Angela recovered herself and could again take up a weapon.
“I am afraid that I am not really wanted, my dear Maurice,” she said, standing between husband and wife, still holding Felicia’s hand as he held hers, smiling from one to the other, a brave, kind smile. “I am afraid that I am a quite unnecessary fourth here. Our old trio has another head. I had hoped that I might, as a friendly hangeron, not be in the way; but I am. I feel that I am.”
“Trio? Oh, you mean Geoffrey?” Maurice was perplexed, yet spoke with a gallant lightness—the concealing glitter emphasized, while Geoffrey, all placidity, queried—
“Was I ever one of a trio? That’s news to me.”
Angela turned her head to glance at him.
“So you will forsake me—even in the past? Well, I abdicate all claims.”
“But we don’t—we don’t, my dear Angela! We don’t abdicate our claims to you. It’s not a trio,” said Maurice, “it’s a circle—isn’t it, Felicia? Let us all join hands. Come in, Geoffrey.”
“No, no,” Angela softly echoed his laugh. “I will come again—and look at you all. But indeed I abdicate all my tiny claims. Remember me, my dear Mrs. Wynne, if I can ever be of any use.” She pressed Felicia’s hand and turned away. Maurice went with her into the hall. Her wrap lay there and he held it for her.
“You may trust me, Maurice, for ever,” she whispered, as she slid into it. She did not meet his glance of helpless confusion; but she knew that all glitter had left him.
Driving away in her carriage, she leaned her head back in the corner, where she shrank and burst into tears.
In the drawing-room the last people were going, Mrs. Cuthbert among them. “I hear your father is coming to live with you, Felicia,” she said.
“Yes. It is too lonely for him now.”
“He won’t be able to let the house, I fear.”
“For the present the house is to be shut up, and we may go down to it for week-ends.”
“It is always a rather dangerous experiment, you know, Felicia, a third person between a young couple.”
“We must risk it,” Felicia laughed.
When, after this final grunt, her aunt had gone, she and Geoffrey were alone.
He was standing at the window, and she joined him there and looked out at the silver river with a slow russet sail upon it. The sense of peace and confidence, felt on the day of their last meeting, was with her; but it was more easy to speak with perfect openness since she need not speak of themselves.
She repressed the impulsive “How she dislikes me!” that might seem to claim his sympathy for her painful part in the recent little drama; she need never claim his sympathy; and a curious sense of loyalty to Angela made her substitute, “How I dislike her. You must know it, so I may as well say it.”
“That explains her unpleasantness, you think?” Geoffrey’s voice was as detached and impartial as if he were questioning the validity of a dubious clause in a dubious bill.
“Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps she didn’t mean to be unpleasant.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know that she meant it.”
“But it’s pitiful—if she thinks she has lost friends.”
“Pretty brazen of Angela—that assumption.”
“But aren’t you rather cruel?” She tried to smile, but a glance at her face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was.Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he recognized a complacent vindictiveness—“She is furiously jealous of you.” Accepting her reproach he merely said, “Angela makes me cruel. I enjoy showing her her own real meaning.”
“That is indeed cruel—to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I’m more sorry than I can say for it all—for her being in my life in any way. Yet she is in it. She is the centre of Maurice’s old life. Most of his friends are hers, and she was his nearest friend—next to you. She blights everything.” Her voice had a tremor.
“That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn’t have suspected you of such weakness. She doesn’t really make you sad?”
“She does, rather.”
“Only on her own account then—not on your own.”
Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela’s deepest pathos. “Oh, on my own, too,” she said. “I am quite weak enough for that.” She added: “You always make me show my weakness. I seem to find strength in showing it to you—your strength, I suppose.”
“Do you? Thanks.” Geoffrey looked at her. “You do remember, then, that I’m always there?”
“Always.” She looked back at him.
Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange moment, he had kissed her good-bye.
The little silence that followed her “always,” was unbroken when Maurice entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking down.
Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the words she had said to him at the door—words how well left unspoken! Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear and self-reproach.
For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no longer the hunted, unstable—yes, the base man who had written that letter. He was Felicia’s husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.
When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise. He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that he still was slightly linkedto it, in Angela’s consciousness if not in his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more equanimity. After all, Angela’s very coming proved how such fruitless episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen tears in her eyes and kissed her—it had not been then, with her at all events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her—for Angela’s sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of something indefinable and dangerous.
He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year’s sunshine almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden blackness.He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him take a long breath.
“How good this is!” he said.
They both smiled at him.
Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; gratitude was for Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize like Maurice’s felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend’s tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret, for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river.
FELICIA did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly knew.
It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion—to see that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger, surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her. She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality. Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking backon her despair when she had almost lost him, she saw the something passionate and reckless, the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful requirements of life.
The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain. It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a loneliness that now—and this was the secret of achievement—meant strength and not weakness.
In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never inspired. She had moments—and in them the loneliness was ghastly—of seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm; but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain of his adoration she would always be alone.
A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures.
“Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let’s just enjoy them now—while we are young and can. You don’t want me to be a County Councillor, do you? You don’t want, yourself, to sit on committees and be useful—like Angela, do you? There are such quantities of useful people in the world.”
Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy.
The goad was gone—the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and water.
“Ishall work, then,” Felicia declared; “it’s only fair that I should. You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must prove to you that I meant what I said—do you remember?”
Their tiny income just sufficed. “If a pinch comes I’ll set to,” Maurice affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn’t need to be pinched; she wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and she found some translating to do. Through Maurice’s numerous literary relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, and she persisted in ploughing it. Mauricelaughed at the determination with which she shut herself up every morning.
“You must wait for inspiration,” she retorted; “but there is no reason why this hack-work of mine shouldn’t keep off a pinch for ever.”
Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.
But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice’s strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice’s attitude of bright acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick’s dogmatic intolerance could only weary or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little tangles of silent misconceptions on one side,of discernments on the other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her father.
She went into Maurice’s studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.
“Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on ‘Credulity’?” she asked.
“It isvieux jeu, you know,” Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his deep chair.
“DoI know?” said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.
“It is all true enough, as far as it goes,” said Maurice, hardly recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. “Sit down on the arm of the chair, dear, and don’t stand so still, so stiff, so disapproving.”
“All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as shallow, as trivial as possible.”
She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm.
“He takes a very crude view of religion,” Maurice owned. “One doesn’t approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of contest has been shifted.”
“Exactly. Why didn’t you tell him so?”
“Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn’t that have hurt you?”
“Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be foolish,” said Felicia, looking over Maurice’s head and feeling that vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he said: “You are displeased with me?”
Alarm was such a new note that Felicia’s breast echoed it, transforming it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his.
“Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased.”
“Please forgive me,” said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering her smile and irradiating his face; “I thought you would like me to please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did.”
“I know. I know you did it for me. But I don’t like you to do anything that isn’t absolutely——“
She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice supplied “True?”
“Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn’t be your standard. You must have your own.”
“Ah, you mustn’t ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I lacked.”
“But I do ask it of you,” said Felicia, and, leaning against his shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little knot, she went on: “You see, in your kindness you aren’t really fair to him—nor to me either! He was quite crosswith me just now when I tried to dissuade him—quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it to the magazine you recommended—oh, Maurice, Iwasdispleased!”
She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated, with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, “Please forgive me. I’ll never do it any more.”
Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay on “Credulity” was accepted, and Mr. Merrick’s assurance, which had been rather pricked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to its unstable placidity.
Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards herself.
“The old sword isn’t rusty yet,” said Mr. Merrick; “it can still do execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods.”
Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice’s new endeavour “not to do it again,” that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon.