Only one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that
afternoon--the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little
Gothic church--where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never went,
and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate and
derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia
saw every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely
perhaps, for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely
decorous well-being of the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her,
wings that would fly to risks, a faith that could be won only by
fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most things, she found it every
morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the symbol that rejected
her.
Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than those
of their formal intercourse. He wasn't at all a jackass, and he probably
thought her father one, and as Felicia's place was beside her father the
barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and
smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous
daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin
Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr.
Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his defiant infidelity; he would
have cheerfully waived the relationship of parson for that of mere
neighbour; and he did not ask Mr. Merrick to listen to his sermons; he
knew that they were poor; he counted for more as man than as parson; but
the personality of this recalcitrant, wandering sheep, his vanity and
patronizing superiority of manner made even a neighbourly tolerance
difficult. It was with an impersonal courtesy that he bowed to Mr.
Merrick's daughter as he rode by.
Soon after Felicia went in to give her father his tea. He was sitting in
the small room that was, at once, library and drawing-room. Above
book-filled shelves the walls were whitewashed, and against this
background tall porcelains and bronzes showed their delicate outlines,
and some fine mezzotints after Reynolds and Gainsborough their harmonies
of golden-greys and blacks. In a corner stood an ivory-coloured cast of
the Flying Victory of Samothrace, and above it the thoughtful bust of
Marcus Aurelius looked down upon its arrested swiftness, its still and
glorious strength. From open windows, where white curtains flapped
softly, one looked over the garden and pinewoods and valleys to the sky
of luminous gold.
One note, only, jarred; a charcoal drawing of a woman's head, hung
prominently. Feebly ill-drawn, its over life-size exaggerated its
absurdity; the eyes monstrously large, not well matched, all beaming
high light and sentimental eyelash; the nose and mouth showing a rigid,
a cloying sweetness. This production was the result of one of Mr.
Merrick's rare fits of active self-expression, and, excellent judge of
art though he was, he was completely blind to the grotesqueness of the
caricature of his dead wife. He had drawn it, many years ago, from life,
and claimed to see in it a subtle and exquisite likeness. Felicia
suffered, though with the silent and humorous resignation characteristic
of her, from living with it, even when a photograph of her mother,
standing near, corrected its travesty of her charming countenance.
Mr. Merrick was sitting in a deep armchair, his attitude of complete
ease harmonizing with the tranquil room, though his eyes, as he looked
up from the review he was reading, were irate. "The modern recrudescence
of mysticism is truly disheartening, Felicia," he said. "Have you read
this article?"
Felicia, on her way to the tea-table, glanced at the title he held out,
and nodded.
"How long will the human race, like an ostrich, hide its head from truth
and, in the darkness, find revelation?"
"Why shouldn't they make themselves comfortable in any way they can?"
Felicia asked, measuring her tea into the teapot.
"Comfort at the cost of truth is a despicable immorality."
"Well--what is truth? How is the poor ostrich to find it out? Besides,
papa, you are comfortable, and the truths you believe in aren't." Her
smile at him was one of the comforts Mr. Merrick most securely counted
on. Felicia, in every way, made him comfortable, even when she argued
with him, and by half-droll opposition called out his refutations.
"My dear child," he now said, "your logic is truly feminine. I have
never shirked an intellectual consequence. If, for the moment, I enjoy
certain satisfactions, I never forget that my position is that of the
condemned prisoner."
"We certainly have a nicely furnished cell."
"Your mind evades the realities of the bars," said Mr. Merrick,
selecting, after a hesitation in the choice, a cake from the plate she
handed him. "Once you have seen an ugly fact you turn your back upon
it."
"What better thing can one do with an ugly fact? What claim has truth or
logic upon anybody in a world of atoms and their concussions? The only
thing to do is to make oneself comfortable--with tea or mysticism as the
case may be."
Mr. Merrick received this flippancy with calm, convinced of an essential
chime under superficial janglings. "You are, I am glad to say, Felicia,
a woman who can think."
"We do a lot of thinking," Felicia assented. "How little else!" she
could not repress. That her thinking had been for the most part lonely
she was glad that her father never suspected, nor did he suspect a
Puck-like fun she found in turning his own theories against him. He ate
slowly now, his eyes raised in a train of thought that even his
intelligent daughter, he felt, could hardly have followed. His own
detachment from the shows of life was its theme. Suddenly, however, this
contemplation was shaken by a more intimate, more stirring realization.
"My dear Felicia," he exclaimed, glancing rapidly at the tea-table and
at the stand of eatables, "is not this the day for the frosted cake?"
"Grant forgot it, papa; you shall have it to-morrow."
"There are only the small cakes, then?"
"And bread and butter."
"It is really very careless of Grant, very careless. She should not have
forgotten," said Mr. Merrick, flushed, and as seriously aggrieved as a
child. "Pray, speak sharply to her about it. I looked forward to the
frosted cake to-day, freshly baked, warm, as I like it. It is very
annoying. You are sure that she has not made it?"
"Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it." Felicia looked at him
with a touch of placid severity. "Have another of the small ones."
"No--no, I thank you. I don't care for them." He had eaten three. The
distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful
and unexpected _hors d'oeuvre_ at dinner effaced the grievance. It was
with a species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these
cajoleries, herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he
smoked, and she read _Leopardi_ aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite
forgotten.
When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a melancholy
current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her window
looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply.
Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of
theory, how weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful
it would be--she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of
thought--to love, to be loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance,
this awakening.
Felicia's ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and
pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as
gracious and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in
beauty over the pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear,
analyzing the feminine waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that
she was really ready to fall in love with the first nice person who
presented himself for idealization. He must, of course, be possible;
idealization had been impossible with the stupid men she had met at
Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs and rabbit head. He
must be possible--he must be delightful; and would he ever come?
"Beware, Felicia," she thought. "You are young; you are lonely; you are
sentimental and idle; that's a basis for mistakes and tragedies." She
laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the
yearning, all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and
the sky, found an echo in her untried heart.