Felicia was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she
made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about
the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience.
She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many
people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of
interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had
much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had
been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played
and sang; Felicia's place among them was an unimportant one. Miss
Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a passionate ballad, her eyes
fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions
strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss
Bulmer's shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the
enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat
down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the
undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer,
flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean over her and watch her
fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience
when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer
said, "You really do improve so much," to have some one, some one who
knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with
recognition, clapping his hands and crying, "Magnificent, simply
magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn't know
that you really were a musician--I thought you merely played the piano!"
He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went,
an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia
with a new discernment.
"But you mustn't stop," said Maurice; "she mustn't stop, must she, Mrs.
Merrick? Why didn't you prepare us for this treat? You never told us
that your niece was a genius."
Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow
satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice's. "Is
she not wonderful? We expect great things of her," she said, for Mrs.
Merrick was quick at adjustments.
Felicia's placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment.
Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer's place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that
benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her
fingering, while she played.
It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience.
Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This
view from Trensome Hall--the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees
framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like
bands of flowers--was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in
the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne's.
He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved
his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at
him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this
beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one.
"Come down," said Maurice. "How good of you to be up early. Let us have
a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time."
Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a
walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as
playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was
waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns
and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the
deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet
earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether
un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of
his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view--as far as he
could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes the
pages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully
upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought
most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that
reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a
melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take
hard.
"Do you ever have moods of despondency--despair?" he asked her, as they
went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency
were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows
were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen
far above, beyond the sparkling green.
"Moods? No; I don't think so," said Felicia; "but I am sometimes
horribly discontented--and when I am I can't imagine anything that would
content me."
"Not anything?"
"Not anything--except everything. I mean being sure that everything is
significant, worth while."
"But it is worth while as long as it lasts."
"But it doesn't last!" She smiled round at him, for she was leading the
way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet
grasses on either side. "The sense of impermanence often poisons the
worth." She added, "Do you have moods?"
"Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It's funny that I should talk to you
about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that
there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues
except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the
way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at
Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me
out, put me on my feet, and, once I'd done gasping, set me running, as
it were, got up my circulation. He didn't argue; but he wonderfully
understood, and he promptly acted."
"And do you have them, the moods, because things don't last?" Felicia
asked, looking ahead into the wood's translucent green.
"No; not so much that as that things don't come. I want so much more
than I ever get. I want to feel everything--to the uttermost. I never
get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see,
rather than loss that I dread."
They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were
meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the
stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him,
showed a gravity, a little perplexity. "You don't understand that?" he
asked, when she stepped down beside him.
"No; I dread both."
"I am awfully human," said Maurice; "and I want the whole human
gamut--but that's all I ask."
"But what is the human gamut?"
"That question from your father's daughter! Your father, I hear, is a
great positivist."
"Well, his daughter asks the question."
They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall
field flowers.
"Do you know," he asked, "how, after this, I shall always personify
faith to myself?"
"Faith?"
"Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking
among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The
key-note of your life is a question."
"Do you call the asking of a question, faith?" Felicia smiled.
"It's faith to think it worth asking."
Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it.
He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his
observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy,
yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of
almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or
displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented
unfavourably upon her companionship with Maurice. And with the intuition
came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep
him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her
among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers.
Really, Mr. Daunt's head, so high against the blue sky, with its classic
white and gold, was ridiculously handsome. She nodded a smiling _au
revoir_ to Maurice and left them.
The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the
garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped
behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret.
Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice.
"That's a very pretty girl," Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the
symptom.
Maurice's shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable
repudiation.
"Pretty! Don't be so trivial!"
"Well--what was it Angela called her yesterday?--alluring, elusive?"
"Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela's lips the terms would savour too
much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is
a wild rose open to the sky, dewy, _un peu sauvage_; anything less
alluring in Angela's sense of the word was never seen."
Geoffrey, who had heard a multitude of wild-rose raptures, received this
one with composure.
"I assure you, Geoffrey," Maurice went on, growing the more confidential
for his momentary reticence, "I assure you that if I could afford it I
would fall in love with that enchanting girl."
"And since you can't afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical.
Meanwhile, what of Angela?"
"You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag
in Angela?"
"Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you.
Don't flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela's affection too far."
Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably.
"My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn't that sort. One flirts in the
boudoir--not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to
risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela's affection."
"Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this
last year of dallying meant?"
"Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us."
"Yet you came down here----?"
"To go on dallying. I own it. But I've never yet made up my mind to find
my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven't any reason to believe
that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it
rather nicely." Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and
as though by holding the matter at arm's length he were keeping it from
the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.
The latter's composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said,
"Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don't find the
culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material
considerations as well as I do, so I'll not urge them, but add to them
the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with
Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it--and they
might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision."
"Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don't show me the nuggets under
the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction--must charm me
into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my
urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my
Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating
marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn't jar upon you as it
would upon me. When it's got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to
fall in love so completely that I shan't be able to write a sonnet about
it. Now, I've written several sonnets to Angela."
Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his
watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, "I
don't urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is,
I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don't allow an
emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You've had
quite enough of these experiments in feeling."
"Ah! but suppose--suppose," laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the
laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind
him, "suppose that this were the permanent emotion."
"In that case," Geoffrey answered, "I should be very sorry for you, and
for Angela and for the wild rose."