Felicia received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the
weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the
exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst
part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel--perhaps faithless.
Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate.
She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with
nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her
morning duties were done, she went out--walked in her garden, in the
woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the
pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill,
radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that
the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to
think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.
Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered
the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with
moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear,
shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow
limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she
could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after
that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its
bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one,
yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant
nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and
sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that
tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the
deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come
to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her
eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down
her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.
Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as
ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy
familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked
at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him
now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of
momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.
She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and
while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory
word or look.
"How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate's?" she asked.
Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched
her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with
as quiet a candour--imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!--and have taken it
for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his
reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.
He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, "No; I came down to
see you. Have you time for me?--time for a walk, I mean?"
She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all
the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too
forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look
very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part
of the reticence.
"Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?" he asked. "You have
never showed it to me yet."
She answered, "I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can
reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods."
They entered the grave, scented silences.
Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have
guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of
his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent
head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile.
She was horribly changed, and her smile had shocked him more than her
tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come
into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the
old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew
itself.
The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was
like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through
the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he
with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral
where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other.
In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.
Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale
sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the
surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes
of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and
all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the
vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here
on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold
and azure. Felicia's long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put
her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender
silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of
her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from
the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed
in her as she in her own sad consciousness.
"How ill you look," he said.
"I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been
lopped off; do you remember?" She did not want to talk with any nearness
of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm's length, would bring her
to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness
that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was
hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.
"Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?"
"I know how kind you are," she said, feeling herself at a loss before
the difference in voice and look. "So much kinder," she urged herself on
to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, "than I had ever
suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn't imagine when I first met
you that you were very kind. But don't bother about my sadness. It's of
no importance."
Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with
the sense of graceless discord.
"You don't at all know why I have come to-day, do you?" he said. A
tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of
intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear
spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he
would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and
humanly shaken in its strength.
In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her
startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.
"You see--you see--what I have come to ask. Wait--don't answer. I don't
want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed
all my life. I don't mean that I care less about the things I have cared
for. I care more, only differently.
"From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me
feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing
why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all
this: it's like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it's like
light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make
life great--for you--with you. It would be a new world with you beside
me. Wait, don't speak--I see that I hurt you. You don't care about
me--yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you
to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be
there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me.
You must always trust me."
He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the
protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause
where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held
her to silence.
"Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?" he said.
"What can I say," she faltered. "You are so beautiful to me; I see it
all--I believe it all. I can only hurt you."
His question flashed upon her faltering. "There is some one else?"
"I love some one else."
Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.
He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for
this abrupt defeat.
"What can I say?" she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering
struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the
inarticulate anguish that his must hold.
"Don't let us say anything," Geoffrey replied. "Let us walk on a
little."
The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for
further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the
respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but
down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered
among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white
and gold.
"One gets one's breath like this," said Geoffrey. He had not looked at
her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he
bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick
up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed
itself.
"Don't think me impertinent," he said; "you understand that one must
grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?"
The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone.
She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her
despair--the seeing of it stripped to him--her self-control gave way.
She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into
helpless sobs. "I am not engaged," she said.
"Ah!--then----," She heard Geoffrey's voice near her, above her, a voice
whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality--soaring, noble,
yet seeing from afar a triumph.
That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him.
She must shoot down that soaring hope.
And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, "The some one is
Maurice--we cannot marry--we love each other," the silence near her was,
indeed, like a slow throbbing to death.
She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: "Last autumn when
he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I
have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is
hopeless. He sets me free." Her sobbing shook her again, and again the
thought of what Geoffrey's suffering must be smote too unendurably upon
her own wound. "Forgive me--I am selfish. But to have you ask me
that--this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me.
And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!"
From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the
sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating
emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again.
And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after
hearing--sharp on its indrawn breath--that "We love each other," not a
flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing
passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut
away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice's situation--verging
on the desperate as he well knew;--of Felicia; of their love for each
other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster,
but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea's deep moan in
caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly.
Felicia wept on: "If I could only see him!--it's been so long. If I
could only appeal to him!--I know--I know it's for my sake; but if only
I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on
without him."
Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness
of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest
of her words.
A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey
observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as
well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in
her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something
illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was
hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a
new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in
her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her
only splendid truth and courage.
Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the
strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch.
"That is pure fairy-tale, you know," he said. "People can't marry on
only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only
that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to
understand."
"We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We
must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my
darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know--it is part of my own
suffering--it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and
die of suffering than not have known--not have had him tell me. At least
now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy."
Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all
reserve; but, with his new insight, he felt in it, too, the helpless
abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree
exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support.
"Sit down here," he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and
prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood.
"All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it."
She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face.
He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his
arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground.
The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its
little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous,
melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds.
Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head.
How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that
young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see
Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her.
Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers,
the sad sunset, and Maurice's sad face.
The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought
a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection.
"See," she said, in a shaken but different voice, "the snowdrops; they
are all out."
Geoffrey smiled. "I hadn't noticed them." He watched her as she stooped
to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.
Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden
shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear
went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem
by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what
feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his
cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with
this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy
of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished
in his fear and adoration. Yet his man's training availed him. He could
have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at
all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature
aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.
She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass
around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held
them to him. "Will you have them?"
For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the
snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.
"I shall always think of you when I see them," she said, looking away
from him. "And you, when you remember to-day, don't let it be a memory
only of sadness; but of my gratitude--my wondering gratitude." She
paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, "I never dreamed you
cared for me."
"It came slowly--the knowledge that without you the world would be
empty," said Geoffrey.
"And is it empty now?"
"Oh, no," he answered, raising his eyes to her; "you are here."
Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for
him--for herself--urging her, she asked, "But does loving me--knowing
how deeply you have made me care for you--does that keep the pain from
being too great?"
Geoffrey again had his half smile. "Ah, if I don't talk about it, you
mustn't think it's not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so
miserable."
"Do you mean that if I were happy--married to Maurice--you would be
happier too?"
Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her
question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he
was thinking.
"Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?" he asked.
"I wouldn't care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness
with him would be happiness."
"You love him--you are sure--so much?"
"You know; you must see." She leaned her face into her palms, not
weeping, with a weariness too deep for tears, and again her tragic
sincerity made her seem far from him.
"You must have courage," said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had
taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it.
"You are both young. Maurice has talent."
"Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it
all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me
free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had
courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to
myself, 'He will come to-day; he must come to-day!' How I waited--how I
hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don't know how
I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I
could wait--and could hope."
Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing.
"Ah! don't suffer so!" he pleaded.
"But I want to suffer," said Felicia. "The time will come when I won't
mind. Haven't you that fear--the worst of all--that even the suffering
will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there
is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember
larger hopes."
"No, no," said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; "you don't really
believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won't be because
you've grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things.
And," he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad,
infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, "you have your feeling for
beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see
snowdrops."
Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a
sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation
of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the
difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred
in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain
hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim
recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship,
seemed entering a still harbour at evening.
"How you think of me. How dear you are," she said softly. She had that
image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling
shores, and the evening star. "You make me ashamed. I have thought only
of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you--really see you--for the
first time."
She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of
her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a
kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to
let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.
He rose, flushing a little. "Thanks," he said; "you won't forget me, I
know."
She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater
pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go
home, she, too, rose.
Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like
an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The
tattered sails could sleep.
They left the woods near Felicia's garden wall.
"And now I go back to those scuffles that don't interest you," said
Geoffrey.
"But they do now, because of you."
"I may come again? I shall never trouble you--you know."
"Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so
utterly. You are my dear friend."
Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face.
He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a
world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart
was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must
be helped. And helped soon.
He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve,
taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on
the forehead.
Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When
the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the
garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in
moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in
parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a
dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of
anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.
Geoffrey's kiss, Maurice's desolate, farewell face, were both far away.
Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future,
stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled
in sleep.