Mrs. Merrick's drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such
intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle
Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of _Art
Nouveau_. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs
weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an
obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of
painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed
like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick's painfully acquired taste had not
had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no
eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.
She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and
shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room,
always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever
apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs.
Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup
of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she
herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her
tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the
tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above
her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a
small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with
distorted bandy legs--a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up
to one, winking and leering with all its decorations--and drawing off
her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her
aunt's kaleidoscope.
Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her
adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before
he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a
young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not
arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm
vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and
figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian
completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His
height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes,
were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia's
quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young
man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness
found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so
magnificent.
An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr.
Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a
corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty
hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession.
The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and
Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that.
Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.
She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid
man--Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him--and in appearance she was very long
and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the
swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a
shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her;
clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that
curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward
the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale,
shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair
haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the
delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost
spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the
meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was
like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A "touched-up" spectre. Lady Angela
certainly did not please--nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than
once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela's seemed to rest
on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed
to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet
making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick
relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice
Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in
the other.
"You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my
opportunity to bring you something." His eyes smiling steadily, as if
over the new bond they had found, said to her, "You don't like your
aunt--nor do I. You are out of your _milieu_ here. Nobody here is
capable of appreciating you; but I appreciate you." The smile was so
infinitely more delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity
in her, only made her happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost
comrade.
As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt's head turned towards them,
and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as
though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received
a more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He
was displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela,
and displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so
freshly young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until
he presently got up and went across the room to Lady Angela,
interrupting her _tête-à-tête_ with such an air of evident purpose that
Mr. Jones arose and wandered away.
Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. "What have you been doing this
afternoon?" he asked.
From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his
eyes were upon them as he spoke.
"Writing to my friends," Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a
great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate
recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was
a probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her
time, after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the
same opinion.
That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her
significance was shown by his next placid question, "What about?"--quite
implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting
to him.
Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be
understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an
intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, "About
how I feel life--theirs and mine."
"You feel a good many things about it--don't you?" Geoffrey smiled,
though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and
kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, "I
believe in feeling," she returned.
"You and Maurice are alike in that."
"Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an
end; mine is a means."
"For the good of others?" Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a
perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not
imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one
thing, but to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble
Hermes is gently quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it
was one that Geoffrey often gave her. He was one of the few people, she
told herself, who almost made her angry. She flushed now, ever so
slightly, at the tone. Yet with a sweet patience that he should have
felt as the turning of the other cheek, she answered, "I own that I try
to live for others."
"And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he
is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference."
Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at
her wrist.
"You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;--wilful, isn't
it?--perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain
attitudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts
it."
"Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?" Geoffrey inquired, raising his
eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the
palm-tree. "I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for
others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so."
"I have owned to an aim--not to an attainment. Why is it that those who
do not aim cannot forgive those who do?--try always to smirch the
effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not
self-righteous, Geoffrey--I frankly recognize your intimation--why not
make it as frankly?"
Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all
abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very
lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before
him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, "I am sure
that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are
very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you
a little."
"It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you
were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is
more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is
strong, though I myself am weak."
Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to
observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it
was now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and
his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind
turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but
flattering. "Who is that girl?" he inquired.
Angela's eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that
Geoffrey's interest in her, his relative, was only because of his
interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some
years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as
the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by
Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that
Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own
hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision,
she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of
sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be
Maurice's, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice's
indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at
the girl under the palm--the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the
talk to--she said vaguely, "A niece--a cousin--I forget which Mrs.
Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the
world--the world to her. Quaint, isn't it?"
"I shouldn't like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick's," Geoffrey
observed. "An ugly woman," he went on, adding, "The niece doesn't look
provincial."
"No; oddly she doesn't; not physically; but provincial in soul I should
think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a
shallow joy in life. It hasn't suffered, isn't capable of much
suffering. She looks like a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive,
alluring."
Geoffrey passed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it
was natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was
clearly allured.
"Her dress isn't provincial either," he said; "its simplicity is
extremely sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods.
She is a young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress."
"And how to eat," mused Angela. "Dear child, it's really delightful to
see such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich."
"I beg your pardon, it is her fifth."
"You share Maurice's interest."
"Is Maurice so interested?"
"Isn't he?"
"While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a sketch
of her."
Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it
with, "Why did you come here, Geoffrey?"
"Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a
quiet place where one can rest."
"And why did Maurice come?"
Geoffrey responded promptly. "To see you--in a quiet place where he
_can_ see you."
She let the assertion pass, forestalling a possible retort with--
"And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of
Mrs. Merrick."
"Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?"
"Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or
sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is
interested in many of my objects. She is trying to grow."
"And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring
something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and thorny."
"Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She
made me feel that, and I never refuse help."
Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely
playful.
"Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship's sake," he
said, "rather than for Mrs. Merrick's." And Angela was unable to repress
an assenting though superficial lightness.