Geoffrey, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see
him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a
Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.
Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had
accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that
Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of
vagueness, Felicia's figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by
the thought of her. What cruel tricks one's brain played upon one, and
how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The
dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this
starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another
flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in
such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his
experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed
untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms.
Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing,
that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the
transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more
keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had
felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was
over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in
his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that,
for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture
that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how
far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would
probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him.
This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly
started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the
life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of
necessity--in Maurice's philosophy all past fact became necessity--and
not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.
There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room,
with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its
incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing
and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from
his boyhood's home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and
great-grandmothers.
Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity
and composure, Geoffrey's quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with
which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he sat at his
spacious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things
seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal,
to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There
lay Geoffrey's strength.
"Sit down, Maurice," said Geoffrey; "I want a talk with you." He still
held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them
into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that
he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust
themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again.
He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really
was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept
secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think
if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of
renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep
secrets--though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy--how
he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing
question; and when Geoffrey's matter was over, he might as well tell him
that the culminating romance had at last been achieved.
The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to
the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided
that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he
could take for granted her shrinking from the world's prying eyes; her
love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each other
surrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he
leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked
up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief.
Anything that took him out of himself was a relief.
"Maurice," Geoffrey said deliberately, "I went to see Felicia Merrick
this morning."
Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but
his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion,
and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. "I have seen her
several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing
her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me."
Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he
ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the
strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the
sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief;
but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he
could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia--_his_
Felicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of
suspense.
"I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her."
Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his
sentences. "She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would
not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has
suffered. She told me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that
she loved you."
Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia's faith his own
faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the
beating of his heart.
"She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her
free. Do you love her?" Geoffrey asked.
"My God!" Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly
turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them,
and burst into loud weeping.
Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed
down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his
hope had clung to, that Maurice's attitude would show some obvious
unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that
would make of Felicia's love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed
to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered.
There was simply no more hope.
Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: "I adore her; I have from the
beginning. Don't you remember?" Through his grief the resentment showed
itself.
"Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had
I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never
spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferent to you as I thought,
our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn't have stood for a
moment between my wishes and her." Before this firmness Maurice's
resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs
again.
"You adore her, and you give her up?" Geoffrey asked.
"What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse
than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry
me?"
"Why did you ask her?"
"Don't turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don't be ungenerous. I was
a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn't
help myself. I hoped that something might turn up."
"Why don't you still hope?"
"I can't, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living--far
more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to
be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed?
Looks terribly----?"
Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon
the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend.
"She looks terribly ill."
"And she sticks to me, the little darling!"
"She certainly stuck to you," said Geoffrey, still looking down into the
fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, "You surely
would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn't be here
this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking."
For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no
ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which
his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his
head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went
with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey's
voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, "Maurice, do
you want to marry her?"
At this Maurice started to his feet. "What are you talking towards,
Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell
me the truth--do you hope to marry her?"
"I told you that I wouldn't have asked you to come if I'd had any hope."
"To marry her I'd sacrifice anything and everything," said Maurice,
altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized
hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream.
Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no
consciousness of superiority in his claim.
"To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice," he said; "I
will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her
happy."
Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to
white. "Geoffrey," he gasped.
"_Will_ you make her happy?" asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon
him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed,
as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man's responsive soul.
"Before God I will," he said.
In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the
table and sat down at it again. "I can pay off your debts--I have made
some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money
on my property--its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out
of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife;
what you have now, once it's free, will do the rest, and her father no
doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me
back, well and good; but don't bother over it. I shall get on well
enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always
lucky with my speculations; I shan't be pinched."
"Do you mean it, Geoffrey?" All that was best in Maurice rose in the
solemn gratitude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question.
With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the
half-passionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling
dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the
difference between Angela's boudoir and a country meadow in spring.
Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music,
Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliest lark
and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was
really best in him--his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face
risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an
orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded
spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-glass idealism.
He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to
veil her.
Geoffrey had answered with an "Of course I mean it," while Maurice's
mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. "But how--how can I accept all
this from you, Geoffrey?" he said at last; "it is splendid of you; it's
a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I
accept it?"
"As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either
side--for her sake."
"And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?" Maurice asked with a half-sad,
half-whimsical smile.
"Perhaps a little for you. If I didn't care for you, didn't think you
worth her caring for, I wouldn't do it; but that would probably be for
her sake again. Candidly, I don't feel for you much just now, or think
much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand
that, of course, in another lover."
"But it's in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is
that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I
should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism."
"It's the best thing I can do for myself, isn't it?" said Geoffrey,
with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. "I wouldn't do
it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I
would rather have her happy than miserable."
"But, dearest Geoffrey"--the tears again rose to Maurice's eyes as the
wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy--"how can you
tell that--with time--you couldn't have hoped? People do outgrow their
griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing--she would
have seen that I wasn't really worthy--and have recognized that you
were." That it was, apart from Felicia's future attitude, a fact
already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own
words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion;
for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of
Angela--ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with
Felicia--this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that
was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat,
breaking his voice.
Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future
possibility. He answered Maurice's inner fear and his own inner regret
with a brief "She might die before she outgrew it."
The fact soothed Maurice's qualms. "Dear, dear old Geoffrey," he said
brokenly. "How we will both love you. It won't hurt you, I hope, to see
a lot of us."
"I'm not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But,
one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it's between
you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a
lucky speculation, a legacy--what you will. Her father will expect
nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I've thought about
it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in
her cup." He put his hand on Maurice's shoulder as the young man stood
beside him: "Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over
details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better."