He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently
and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such
thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had
recently written--a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole
year--and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore
logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they
did, behind a golden haze. Maurice's moods easily alternated between
golden hazes and black fogs.
Geoffrey went away on that morning--that, too, was the receding of an
uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders,
like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he
didn't want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was
a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the
violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung
and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness
more blissful.
"I sometimes think," he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm
on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, "that sadness is
the most beautiful thing in life."
In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact,
as now, when she said, "To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps."
"But we shouldn't be able to see or hear it if we hadn't lived it."
"It only becomes beauty, then, when we've outlived it, not while we are
in it. People dress up their sorrows so," said Felicia, turning vaguely
the pages of the music before her; "they always remind me of the king in
the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself
sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked."
"I believe you are right," laughed Maurice, "and that it is only when we
are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness."
Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the
realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and
there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the
empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was
a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion.
But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it
life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.
"And since it's a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?" she
asked.
"Not quite yet." Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The
golden haze was about them; it shut off everything else. She must love
him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future
take care of itself? It probably would--her father could probably give
them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a
lot of articles--very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he
contemplated Felicia and hesitated.
In the midst of this hesitation--_could_ he risk a cramping
poverty?--would it be base to find out whether she loved him--to make
her love him--with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised
grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations
they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue
eyes resolved itself--as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of
the sky--into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently,
and the smile said, "I love you. You are near me. That is why I am
happy."
But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away.
"Felicia, dearest Felicia," said Maurice. He took her hand. "I do so
adore you. Tell me that you can love me?"
Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed;
"I suppose it must be that."
"You do love me?"
"I suppose I do."
"Oh!--darling!" he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she
still kept her look of almost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his
Dresden shepherdess.
It was altogether like an _Embarquement pour Cythère_, Maurice thought,
with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing
similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze--what need to ask
where bound--to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a
wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into
a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief
at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the
ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness.
Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being
loved, after that first shock of wonder--that slipping from the shore to
the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new
trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she
went to meet its meaning.
"I almost felt that you loved me--I did not really guess it--but I felt,
though it seemed so strange," she said. She drew away from him a
little--her hands folded on his breast--so that she might look at him.
"From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that
turning in the lane. You can't claim any such pedigree of feeling!" He
put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles
and the lightness of their words.
"I can see no other beginning--unless just now is one."
"You did not know--not one bit--until just now."
"Can one fall in love so suddenly?" she wondered.
"Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long."
"And you really--really knew?"
"From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here--here at
last she is. There was a bird singing near us--do you remember, darling?
The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried."
"Oh--dear Maurice, it is too beautiful," said Felicia, almost sighing.
"Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?"
She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long
room.
"Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?" she said.
"Does that make me seem of less value?"
Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. "It only makes me seem of more; it is
my _métier_, that--to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious
things. Who that has ever known you _could_ have loved you, pray? Who
could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value,
that seeing it in others."
The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above
even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with
a gravity almost sad.
"Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some
real value myself--for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable.
Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia." And as he spoke she saw
in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness.
"Something in me!" The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now,
who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to
her lips, saying, "Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come
to me to lose your fears."
It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden
appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than
the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her,
and in herself the power to answer it.
Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous
suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What
could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him.
"What indeed!" Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance
underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked--
"You never did care for Lady Angela?"
"Never--never--never!" said Maurice. In the light of his love for
Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere.
Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next
question--
"Nor she for you--not really, I hope?"
"Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers."
Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two
days--the days of the happy secret--wondered, a poignancy in the wonder,
if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition,
hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice's common-sense only
that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with
her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that
made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would
love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love.
Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out--the
emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic
standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in
Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little
girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere
conquest--to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as
it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent.
The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was
entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior
nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility
Angela could not forgive--and did not know she could not. She talked
herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed
Felicia's unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had
met. "I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does,
you know." Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and
confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after
this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question
slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.
Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful
head of a Christ that she always carried with her.
"I have lived to my highest!--oh! I have," she murmured; and at the
sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed,
came.
"This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my
soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him;
and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she
is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings--to hurt me
so."
The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did
not know that she hated Felicia.