There must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted
with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might
endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn't much care what
it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden
was Maurice's philosophy.
He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the
library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was
meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the
eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long
undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped
together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father's
articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the accumulation of
material. German idealism had been abandoned. "Why attack these castles
of sand?" said Mr. Merrick.
From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down
at Maurice.
"To-day you are not to escape me," he declared. "I claim all to-day. You
will practise?"
"I will. Why do you say I escape you?" She had to smile at his
acuteness.
"Since the other day--in the garden--you have. Angela irritated you,
Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn't it a
little true?" He leaned against her steps, answering her smile.
"Perhaps a little," Felicia owned. "I felt, perhaps, rather out of it."
"So you are--out of it, with me." His words were light, too, but she
felt the underlying emphasis. "You see we feel things in the same way,
see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to
bar me away from you--even for a day or two--and two days is a
frightfully long time in a mere week." His voice lifted itself from the
almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences
looked at and effaced, he went on. "I've something here I want you to
see and feel with me." He showed her the volume he held,
Maeterlinck--delightful dreamer.
"At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that's an
unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather
than in darkness."
"This isn't nightmare, but it's not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn
perhaps--or perhaps twilight; you must say."
"I saw Mr. Daunt pass outside just then. He always spends the morning
here. Shall we read it somewhere else?"
"Ah--let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey
would take it." Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the
twilight dream might carry him too far. "You dislike him? Really?"
"Frankly, I don't like him--but I don't want to exclude him from the
reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-assured
makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him.
He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me
think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad."
"Ah!" Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. "You have seen the
best thing in Geoffrey--the single-minded directness of his quest--its
object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty."
"And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It's a touch of human
tenderness that makes him less chilling."
"Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre.
I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges
hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I
got broken."
"No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don't believe he
has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How
grey and rigid his life must be." Geoffrey walked in as she said it.
Maurice greeted his friend gaily. "Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit
of poetry. I'm going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once."
He turned his pages.
Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to
Felicia's side.
"You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?"
Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards
women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a
lollipop--and without consulting the child's preference as to size,
shape or colour.
"Sometimes," she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the
steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. "Not
too often."
"I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young
woman. Surely you can't get too much of--Browning for instance?" and
Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull's-eye was
being kindly offered.
"Easily," she retorted; "but let's hear Maeterlinck, who has been
waiting for you."
Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read--
Et s'il revenait un jour,
Que faut-il lui dire?
--Dites-lui qu'on l'attendit
Jusqu'à s'en mourir--
Et s'il m'interroge encore
Sans me reconnaître?
--Parlez-lui comme une soeur,
Il souffre peutêtre--
Et s'il demande où vous êtes,
Que faut-il répondre?
--Donnez-lui mon anneau d'or
Sans rien lui répondre.
Et s'il veut savoir pourquoi
La salle est déserte?
--Montrez-lui la lampe éteinte
Et la porte ouverte.
Et s'il m'interroge alors
Sur la dernière heure?
--Dites-lui qui j'ai souri
De peur qu'il ne pleure.
Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees,
looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her.
He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like
deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny,
autumnal trees. Felicia's manner towards Maurice during these last days
had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend's behalf. His newer
impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose
flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and
limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice's hopes. But that she smiled
upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was
sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent
mischance of the day before.
A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but
he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so,
for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardly knew that he
wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he
stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia's shoulder, vaguely listening
to pathetic words and looking at Felicia's half-averted profile. He was
conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the
soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and
touched.
Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had
come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest,
sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and
open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain
for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing
squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and
unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father
than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had
seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky,
or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He
had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the
spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the
still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have
struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But
the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.
"Isn't that the very heart of love?" Maurice asked.
She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.
"I should have wanted him to cry," she said.
"No; I think that if I loved a woman," Maurice turned the leaves of his
book, "I should want her to smile."
"I don't believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried
dreadfully."
"You don't think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?"
"I was thinking of the heart--as it is. Now, I might have said it
all--only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the
door!"
The slight tension in Maurice's voice and look yielded to her
swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.
"Base girl!" he cried, laughing.
"Base and natural. Isn't the heart of love the longing to be loved? How
could one miss such a chance--even if it meant more suffering for the
loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer."
But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, "If I were dying, and
suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of
it--rather she smiled."
"But you would rob her then of her right to suffer--of her right to love
you more." Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. "What would you wish?
Don't say that you are as inhumanly noble as Mr. Wynne."
"I don't think we can in the least tell what we would wish."
"So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne's magnanimity may both be
illusory?"
"You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather
mawkish," Geoffrey added.
Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. "Papa goes
this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared
the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don't think the poem
mawkish."
Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with reassuring composure, and
Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both
of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the
little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In
Felicia was that more vivid sense of life--of an approaching crisis; in
Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More
desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet--what was he to
do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to
nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or
picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he
could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd
to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk
against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable
cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then
he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a
distasteful one; only some inner impetus was needed to make it really
alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized
that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge
impossible--as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added
fear in the thought that a new attitude in Angela might have made the
refuge inaccessible.
Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a
flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly,
half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear;
but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?--see that it was neither
so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted,
marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see
himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that
final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort.
He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely
to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long
looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was
beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one
couldn't stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at
the end of the sunny vista was--pain; the flowers and trees that led to
it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make
serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she
flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her
colouring and manner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile
surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of
half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden
shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of
their companionship--but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real
pang. Such fancies, after letting her know--she must know--that he would
suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not
in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be
his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that
superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the
one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she--could she--love him?