Angela Bagley wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that
she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it
was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her
inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and
actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature
grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality,
like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The
scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coarse desires;
she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her
sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to
her--though she did not know that they were only tools--tools in a
complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools
used always for an egotistic end.
In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her
effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened.
Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had
charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she
would be the noblest influence in his life, not knowing that to gain
that influence she would abase herself to any ignobility. Again and
again she had almost thrown herself at his head--oh! ugly
phrase!--Angela did not use it--shown him her heart, rather, though with
a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the
giving of deep friendship if other givings were ignored. Again and again
Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that
kept the clasp of friendship, a smile that salved her pride by
recognizing only friendship in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the
self-immolation of this love--for Angela was well aware of its romantic
indifference to vulgar considerations--now when she was almost sure that
she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost
sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift
and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against
Felicia.
She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell
herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his
raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now
whispered in her heart, and she armed herself.
The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was
ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And
while fully conscious of the nobility of her own attitude in its
stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was
by no means conscious that she had armed herself and that the attitude
was her weapon.
The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr.
Merrick.
Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick
might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good
looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey's calm gaze at
him, in Maurice's kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man's
genial patronage--an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement;
she saw these things in relation to Felicia's attitude towards them, her
placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any
that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him,
she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a
funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of
lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting
away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction
that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target
attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed,
came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia's
stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely
upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a
halo.
"How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick," Angela said to her hostess; "I
see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an
intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified
in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he
must jar upon you and your husband--could I fail to see it? And yet how
kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I
suppose, their only outlook on life."
Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and
where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was
now enabled to see him with Lady Angela's clearer vision. She saw
herself, too, as very kind indeed.
To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. "What a type! That's
what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His
mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of
the century!" Since coming into the country she had not been so near
Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.
"He encouraged me magnificently this morning," Maurice in his mirth
confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile,
understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping
from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was
failing her; she couldn't tell herself with truth that she was
indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt's derivative
discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new
little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging
as of appreciating him.
Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor--he
was always taking the floor--got up and strolled away, quite as if he
were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela's sad
and vacant eyes, and Maurice's deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father
was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an
unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he
became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was
the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too
stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a
child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he
strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.
Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the
garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the
sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed
them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye
that, seeing through her evasions, said, "I understand everything.
Command me, you charming friend." To keep silence towards him, to escape
for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings
was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.
It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father's arrival, while
at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her
father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.
Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his
brother's vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful
immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger,
ready to bubble up.
Maurice's eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light,
strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much
against her all the rest.
"It's an age of sham, of conformity," Mr. Austin announced. "There seem
no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since
apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is
revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old
faiths into vaporous metaphors--metaphors accepted literally by the
masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with
metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a
candlestick--the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy
water!" His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate
and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in
even more impressive tones, "Don't, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of
faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a
fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I
think, Guyau said."
He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire
was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning
still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.
"Ah well," said Mr. Cuthbert, "all that's beside the mark. One must have
custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to
pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week," he
added, looking genially around the table.
"Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting," Mr. Jones went on to
Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder
of Mr. Merrick's denunciations to roll by.
"Godersham on faith. I've no doubt of it." The thunder rolled again.
"You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As
for the country going to pieces, that's rubbish. It shrivels in its
stiff shell."
"I have the greatest regard for Godersham--the very greatest," Mr.
Cuthbert said temperately.
"I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You
don't follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that
I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile
interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives
the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal
less theism than Voltaire--let us say. I consider such a man morally
culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a
menace to the national welfare."
Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind
still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia's attention turned from
him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the
interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a
wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid
impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr.
Merrick's flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt's face that
arrested Felicia's attention.
Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked
at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm.
To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt
herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true,
true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable
conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did
not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all
against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his
tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at
all of them. "Hear! hear! papa." She flung into the emptiness a flaming
little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her.
Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face,
steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her
thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the
sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across
the table. Geoffrey's hand continued automatically to break his bread.
"Hear! hear! Miss Merrick." Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing
her eyes from Geoffrey's. "I put your glove in my helmet. But really,
you know, Mr. Merrick--" his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the
almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship--"we shall
plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about
faith."
"Metaphysics!" Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at
Felicia's banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than
his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his
shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the
task of forcing a way into his brother's comprehension--overlaid with
"crusts of custom."
"A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia," said Mrs.
Merrick.
"Miss Merrick isn't an infidel; she's only a loyalist," said Maurice.
Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented
by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued--
"Don't you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all
attacks?"
"I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps," said Angela, who
still leaned on her hand and still looked down; "but to me mere
disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more
repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of
belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose
itself, is sacred to me."
She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt;
yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the
scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.
Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and
Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the
lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.
She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently,
clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.
Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk
near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on.
Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. "You
_were_ more a loyalist than an infidel--I understood. Only your father
pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain,
pain you?"
Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over
amazement, still kept the look of steely steadiness. "I am sorry that
any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger's
opinion of him could hardly give me pain."
This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected.
She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick
intelligence, might savour of meanness--a stroke under cover of
darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest;
indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag
her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant.
"You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?" There was a real quiver in her
voice.
"Do you count me as more?" Felicia asked.
"I want to count you as a great deal more."
A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She
smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling
one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice
came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness
of attitude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with
Felicia's sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then
slipped over to Felicia's sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile,
now, on the two men.
"I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was," she said; "we all
understood, didn't we?"
Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She
broke through it, regardless of rents. "_I_ don't understand," she
declared. She rose, drawing her hand from Angela's, confronting them.
"I think trivial things had best be left alone." With this, picking up
her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a
full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how
uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when
she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice's.
Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded
him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is assured. At
once he understood and answered.
"May I come too?" he asked.
"Do. I am going for a walk."
This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of
two women over a man. Felicia's face kept its hardness as she and
Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the
fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if
she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the
lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great
deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under
this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion,
and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in
merely following her.
Maurice's tact, as delicate as a woman's, forced no sympathy upon her by
an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they
went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting
the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went
slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was
ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.
"Do you know," he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path
where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, "to-day you are not a
bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows
and eyes is all Romney--Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that
you only remind me of beautiful things?"
Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no
reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. "Now _do_ you
consider such a remark impertinent?" Maurice demanded. "You frighten me,
you know. I feel in you such a _farouche_ fastidiousness. Our idealist
in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments."
"Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be
called that," said Felicia, biting into her pear; "I suppose I hardly
know how to accept compliments gracefully--never having had any made me
before."
"It's too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you.
You know that, don't you?"
"How can I tell? I have known you just five days."
"Still--you do know me."
"Doesn't Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider
your compliments to her blaring?" Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at
him now with her dryad-like malice.
"Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all
trustworthy."
"No, no," Felicia protested.
"No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn't know me as well as you do--in spite
of your nipping reference to five days--and for the simple reason that
she doesn't know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one's outer
vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her--she is, on the
whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she
means--and that's so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you
intend to mean."
The memory of Aunt Kate's grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this
frank analysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep
was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession
from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and
desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new
order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular
garden--finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar--had made
its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its
roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely
pleasing in the delicate desecration.
This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very
intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not
altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new
thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to
hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt
delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him,
should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked.
And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than
liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed,
intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young
man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals,
whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed
all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong
and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her
on and there was no time to pause, to analyze, to weigh her heart. She
only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little
frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she
had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the
least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart
might ache at the loss of the dear companion.
Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing.