While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory
season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep
his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in
harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep
enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of
determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when
in Felicia's presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these
pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only
imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man,
when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was
no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he
must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met,
when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid
bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between
actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several
very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were
at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future.
Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.
Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop
when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting,
when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a
delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found
chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring
when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He
often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but
restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very
magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be
hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all
definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the
question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew
what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very
pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had
made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by
others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy,
flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least
resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with
pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but
associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging
aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A
hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder,
for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top;
kinder? It was necessary.
A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of
the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela
came back to London in February.
Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square
house that was part of Angela's large inheritance from her mother.
Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of
his taste as in Angela's house, where nothing made bids for notice, and
where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding
harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the
house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had
sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela
sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its
subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and
Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once
more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at
the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter,
and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make
it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the
slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio
of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a
little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made
him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have
been a dream of no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream
to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish
and an ugly part--as one sometimes does in dreams.
Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when
least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim
gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be
curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was
perfect, seemed to invite encircling)--kiss her and say "Let this go
on." Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little
as he looked at the print she held up.
"Do you know," said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he
was not thinking of the print, "I have a plan, Maurice. You have never
painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my
portrait. I want you to begin at once."
"That will be delightful," said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view
the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not
exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting.
"You must come here to do it," Angela went on, patting the edges of the
prints into place and closing the portfolio. "There is an excellent
light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only
on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I
do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake,
but for yours. You know, I think the time has come for you to strike
some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a
great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,--selfish
I!--I want to link myself, you see, with greatness." She still patted
the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness.
Maurice, as was often the case, was half-charmed into taking her at her
own valuation, as all candour, all sweetness, and, guessing at the
further feelings underlying the frankness, he felt it peculiarly
generous. After all, there was something coarse and petty in caution.
She claimed nothing; why imply that she did by any reticence on his
part? How ugly such a reticence would be!
"Will you inspire the book too? It's my only chance for greatness," he
asked, smiling.
"Who knows? Perhaps I may." Her answering smile was even lighter than
his own. "But it can't be consciously. You must find; I can't give." She
got up and walked to the fire, displaying a back flowing with faultless
lines from the sloping shoulders, their fragile, exaggerated grace, to
the curve of the long, lace train. Angela was intellectually ensconced
in mountain fastnesses, where any appeal not purely spiritual was
stonily regarded, but her very beautiful body was as keenly conscious of
itself, of its every pose and movement, as that of the crudest coquette.
Angela's coquetry was not crude; it wound itself through her mental
attitude as pervasively, but as delicately, as the narrow black ribbons
curved through the laces of her dress. It now said, "Look at me; follow
me," and Maurice, after the startled moment where he surveyed that queer
little speech as to his finding and her not giving--was it a very
clever, a very courageous, a very pathetic speech?--looked at her, and
followed, joined her at the fireplace, and as her hand rested on the
mantelpiece he put his, in an impulse he was hardly conscious of,
lightly upon it.
Angela said nothing, but she lifted her appealing eyes to him.
"If I could paint you so!" said Maurice, removing his hand and wondering
at himself. He did not go further than this, but the things that she
might well have expected him to say after it made him uncomfortable.
Angela felt more than discomfort; it was a real anguish of baffled hope.
Yet she was almost sure, now, that he would go further.
And by imperceptible degrees, during the mornings that followed in the
music-room, he did.
He definitely determined nothing; the facts of life seemed to bear him
towards a definition over which his will had no control. There was the
past, the golden haze, the sweet golden haze, and sweet Felicia; but the
self that had wandered into it with her already seemed illusory. The
present self, its crushing necessities, its really tempting escape from
them, was too vivid a reality to make memory of much avail.
Felicia had charmed him more deeply than Angela could ever charm; yet,
since the self which had so truly loved her was already dim,
unseizable, Angela's half real, half artificial attraction counted for
more than the dear impossible past.
The passionate sadness of the letters he sent to Felicia was sincere,
for in writing to her he caught together all his memories, and they
pressed on his heart with a great weight of regret. He wrote of hope
deferred, of possible hopelessness, feeling courageous, and avoiding the
worst pang of all--that dread of playing an ugly part in Felicia's
eyes--that dread of her seeing cowardice instead of courage--by telling
himself that finally to renounce her would show the truest love for her.
From these crises of almost despair he drifted on to a long silence, a
kind silence surely, from which she must draw her own conclusions. She
would of course take time in doing so, give him the benefit--poor
darling!--of every doubt, and if, at the last moment, anything did turn
up he could still claim her and explain the impossibility of writing
when there was only despair to write of.
During these weeks of drifting he saw little of Geoffrey, and when they
met, Felicia was as unmentioned as though, to both, she had been the
slightest, least significant of episodes. With all his confiding
tendency, Maurice could not well confide to Geoffrey that the wild-rose
flirtation had become a serious love affair, and, in the same breath
that the long dallying with Angela was on the verge of becoming serious
too. With all his hard common sense Geoffrey might look unpleasantly
askance at this taking on of a new love before the old was off, and
until there was no chance at all of the old love being on again,
Geoffrey might as well think him still engaged in undecisive dallying.
The very fact of long intimacy, of the taking for granted of a closeness
that made questionings unnecessary, kept their minds apart.
But on a morning in early March, Maurice, while putting the finishing
touches to his portrait of Angela, was facing at once despair and an
aching freedom. The day before had unchained at his heels a pack of
howling debts; he had run before them to the only refuge; a letter,
after a month of silence, that practically set Felicia free. He had wept
in writing it, allowing the irrepressible tears to splash upon the
paper, bitterly smiling at himself for the craven little consolation he
recognized in this testimony to his grief. And, with the half appeal of
the tears for pity, was another appeal--a spontaneous clutch at the
brightness he must thrust from his life--for her love.
He would not clearly see that in so clinging he set himself--rather than
Felicia--free. Heavy gloom had settled upon him, a gloom that filled the
letter with dismal sincerity. That it had been sincere he felt to be
proved by the fact that no sense of relief had followed its despatch. He
was free, but free in a black world, and he felt, as a result, even less
drawn to Angela than usual, even more unwilling to accept the now
inevitable escape. But with the new sense of freedom was a new sense of
recklessness, the sense that he had, in some untraceable way--(for what
could he have done, disasters crowding thick upon him?) made himself
only fit for the lower thing; so that, at all events, he might as well
make the most of it.
Poor Angela! to be so accepted! The irony of it turned to pity for her
as he looked at her sitting there in her white dress, pale, and with an
air of deep weariness. She seemed to droop before him as she sat in the
keen spring light; to droop, to appeal, and yet to be very proud, ready
for resentment almost. Maurice saw all this, and his comprehension gave
a touch of real emotion to his pity and to his recklessness. Pity for
himself mingled with his pity for her. What a queer mess they were
in--poor things!--both of them. His mind, sick with self-analysis,
self-scorn and self-defence, lurched, exhausted, on to a longing for her
to comfort him, to show him, in loving him, that he was not base, only
fatally pursued by life.
When she stepped down from the stand that had been put at the end of the
room, she did not, as usual, come to his side to see the progress he had
made. She went to the window, her hands clasped behind her, a rigidity
in the lines of her slender, half-swathed arms. Maurice painted for a
moment, then looked at her, added another touch, stared at his palette,
laid it down, and joined her.
She did not turn her head to him, and suddenly he guessed that there
were tears in her eyes. His own grew wet again with that mingled pity.
Her hand fell to her side. He took it in his. Still she did not look at
him. She stood waiting, anything but proud, and yet ready in all the
humiliation of her helpless avowal, to flash suddenly into scorn and
anger. The something of splendour in this attitude gave Maurice the
final impetus. He was glad to yield at last to feeling alone, to almost
irresistible feeling. It was as though he had stood for long on the
shore waiting for the tide, and that its slow rising had culminated in
this sudden wave that just lifted him off his feet. Really she was
lovely; she was piteous; and she could console him for being forced to
take her. His arm went round her; he turned her head gently, saw the
tears, and kissed her.
"Oh, Maurice!" her lips breathed under his, "how I love you!"
"And I----" he stammered. "Angela--it has been--you understood--you are
so horribly rich, and I so horribly poor." He wanted her to console him
for the fact that had tarnished everything, and the longing was so great
that he grasped at this falsification of all his hesitation. It was
rapture to Angela. He was transfigured by the avowal; and her heart,
sick for so long with doubt, seemed to expand like a storm-beaten flower
in sunlight. She herself was transfigured; saw that the starved,
straining self she had known was a lower self, distorted, difficult to
read clearly; this happy self was real at last. His arms were around
her. She would be noble, beneficent to all the world. All who came near
her would be the happier for her happiness. How weak she really
was--who so needed love to lean on!
"I understood--I hoped it was that," she said in a trembling voice.
At a step outside they moved apart, yet not soon enough Maurice felt,
but for the significance of the situation to be very obvious to Lord
Glaston as he came briskly in.
If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter's vagary he had
long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and
tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw
Maurice a bright "Hullo!" hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was
said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. "Capital,
really capital, Wynne," he asserted. "A little too thin and woe-begone,
perhaps."
Maurice's mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought
was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would
understand that they must see one another again before admitting the
world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his
farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed.