gentle, she went on, "I have wished, sincerely wished, to be your
wife's friend. Even after she refused my friendship, I have wished to
guard her, at least, from malicious gossip. You know what London is. You
and I and your wife live in among people who regard old-fashioned
scruples intellectually, not morally; but your wife's position is not
great enough to allow her to be reckless. Even without such knowledge as
mine to reveal it, Geoffrey's love for her makes her conspicuous. They
are here together to-night. I saw them at a concert the other day; met
them in the Park before that. When last I went to your house I found
them together, alone, and--I understand your wife, Maurice--she would
think no harm of it--I think she had just kissed him; no harm,
Maurice,"--before his start her voice did not quicken, "she would
imagine that she kissed him as a brother. He held her hand, I think. I
felt it my duty to put petty conventions and reticences aside, and for
her sake, for your sake, Maurice, to warn her father, with all delicacy,
all caution. I believe it, with all my soul, to be a perilous intimacy.
That is my betrayal."
Maurice's brain swam with the picture she flashed upon it. Only for a
moment;--Felicia's smile went like a benison over it. Even if it were
true, he could look at the picture, after that first pause of
breathlessness, steadily. Even if it were true, he could smile back,
understanding.
"Geoffrey has all my trust," he said; "I have all Felicia's love."
"You think so," said Angela quietly. Again her eyes fell before his, but
her face remained fixed in its conviction of sincerity.
"How dare you, Angela."
Still looking down, she went on as steadily as before, her voice
anchored with its weight of woe,--how he loved Felicia!--"I dare because
I believe that she loves him most. Her love for you and your weakness is
maternal by now. I know it, I feel it; I can see it when she looks at
you and at him. She loves him as she has never loved you. And I! Oh,
Maurice--Maurice--I!" She suddenly cast her arms upon the table, her
head fell upon them; terror, regret, and passionate longing swept over
her; her voice broke and she burst into sobs. "Couldn't I have let her
go from you? Has it not been nobility in me to guard her--for you? She
has never loved you, and I--Maurice, you know, you know--how I have
loved you, how I love you! Forgive me! Have pity on me!"
Maurice, frowning darkly, sick with unwilling pity, hating to feel that
she deserved pity and that he hated her, turned his eyes away. She had
terrified him too much; had dared to lay desecrating hands on the thing
dearest to him in the world. Something, and not the least best thing in
him, froze before her cry for pity and made him incapable of
forgiveness. For once in his life he hardened into resistant strength.
His silence was more horrible to Angela than any look, any word. She
raised her head and saw his averted eyes. Only humiliation remained for
her. She rose. Her wreath of flowers, loosened, had slipped to one side,
she put up a vague hand to it, moaning "Maurice!"
Still he looked away, with odd, startled eyes that did not think of her.
The wonder of the shot that had passed through his heart was still felt
more as a surprise than as a pain.
She knew that she would always see him so--erect, beautiful, startled
from a shot. She tottered to him; she fell before him and grasped his
arms. "Oh pity me! Don't be so cruel. What wrong have I done? Despise
me--but pity me."
"I cannot," he said.
"Then kiss me--once--only once."
"I cannot," he repeated, still not looking at her.
"Have you never loved me? Never really loved me--as you love her?" she
said, shuddering and hiding her face as she crouched at his feet.
"Never!"
Swaying, trembling violently, she arose. She threw wide her arms, seized
him, and closing her eyes to his look of passionate repulsion, kissed
him on his brow, cheek, lips, before, almost striking her from him, he
broke from her, burst open the door and left her.
CHAPTER X
"Geoffrey, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?" On the steps,
after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his
hand through Geoffrey's arm. "I've had a row with my father-in-law--would
rather not see him just now." They crossed the square together. Maurice
was feeling no reaction to weakness after his strength. The scene was
like a distant memory, and that strange shot that had hurt, had pierced
him with such a pang--not of suspicion, not of foreboding, but of
wonder, deep, sad wonder.
He felt a sort of languor after pain, and, as they walked, went on
dreamily: "Such a queer evening, Geoffrey, horrible!--yet no, splendid
too. Facing things is splendid isn't it? I want to tell you something,
Geoffrey--to confess something--I want you to know. That winter--when I
thought I could not marry Felicia, I went pretty far with Angela. I
thought everything was up with me; I didn't care much where I drifted.
And I did drift. Nothing much more than there has always been, Geoffrey;
with Angela it was never a case of playing with fire, the danger was of
getting frozen into the ice. It was abominable of me--caddish;"
Maurice's dreamy voice had a dignity that seemed to hold all other
reproach than his own at arm's length, a dignity so strange and new that
Geoffrey even at the moment's great upsurging of bitterness, regret and
question could repress it as unworthy, not only of himself, but of
Maurice. "Abominable--abominable," Maurice repeated, "for I let her
think--more than ever--that I cared--something. She is odious to me,
Geoffrey. I can't be just to her."
Geoffrey said nothing, but his quiet profile made confidences as easy as
peaceful breathing; the confidences that could be told. The others--ah!
that distant wailing of regret. But in this dreamy mood even that was
very distant. "Perhaps, dear old fellow--if I'd told you--on that night,
you wouldn't have cared to help me."
Maurice stated the fact calmly, looked at it calmly. "In that case--what
would I be, Geoffrey?--if you and Felicia had not made me?"
In the still, sleeping town, chill with a coming dawn, they were as near
as spirits, walking together through old memories.
"I would have cared to help you--and her," said Geoffrey.
"Ah! well; perhaps;" Maurice sighed a little. "While I'm away, Geoffrey,
see a lot of Felicia, and, Geoffrey, see that Angela doesn't get near
her. Her silly old father dislikes you, but you won't mind that. He
suspected you of being in love with her, so I informed him that he was
right. Dear old Geoff! You will see after her?"
"I don't mind the father; I would mind making it difficult for her to
get on with him."
"Oh! you won't. He's had to accept it. I wouldn't like to go if you
weren't here to see after her. So you don't regret making me?"
"Making you and her so happy?" Geoffrey smiled, humouring his child-like
mood.
"I do make her happy? You see it. It's your reward, my dear friend.
That's what I want to say to you. I've said it often enough to myself.
You shall never regret it, so help me God."
Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice's, pressing it
firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a
peace, a thankfulness.
"You see," Maurice stammered, "I should die without her. She is life to
me, Geoffrey. You don't know what you've given me--I hardly knew. She is
life to me--that's all; and I should die without her."
The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not
real; Maurice's conscience could not call such faint confession real.
Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it
sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of
safety.
Felicia, when she heard of her father's proposed and accepted departure,
acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and when
Maurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick's resolution to
protect her, she said that she had suspected that. "I am glad you let
him know the truth, too. It's really better to let him see that he has
only discovered what no one wishes to conceal." She looked musingly up
at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her
answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted--faint and
far--across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that
blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That
turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey--the memory of it
was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the
darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel passion, that
horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it
self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the
dark?
Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought.
"I can't blame him--really--either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey
loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact
nor to recognize the calibre of such a love."
It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey's love that kept
Maurice's faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy.
Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still
was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did
not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true;
it beautified her--that kiss of reverent pity and tenderness. The toad
Angela flung became a flower on Felicia's breast; that he could smile at
such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the
sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm--colourless,
serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a
realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever
of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, "You don't mind, so
much then, his going?"
"I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be
easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he
will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits."
The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of lassitude, a
little indifferent to her father's pathos. Before this placidity his
sadness became a sudden throb of gloom.
"You do mind _my_ going?" he asked.
Felicia was sitting on the window seat and had looked down into the
street far below for his coming cab. She glanced up quickly at him as he
stood beside her, seeing the shadow in his eyes.
"Dear goose!" She drew him down on the seat, her hand in his, "Mind your
going? I hate it. But it's only for a fortnight--less, if you are lucky
with your work."
"Only a fortnight!" Maurice repeated, half playfully, but half fretfully
too. "You can say that! It's our first parting, Felicia. It seems to me
an eternity before I shall see you again."
She still looked into his eyes, seeing, under the playfulness, the
fretfulness, all that he had suffered during these last weeks of
entanglement. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she said dreamily:
"Don't go."
"Really?" Sunlight streamed through clouds, "Really you say don't go?
And my duty? my work? all the virtues you make me believe in?"
"I want to keep you near me, to comfort you for it all," Felicia said.
He understood the reference to his pain. The very sweetness nerved his
growing strength, the resolution to be worthy. With his arms around her
he whispered that he adored her and that he would go and work so well
that she should be proud of him. She listened, her eyes closed, yet,
when he had spoken, still dreamily she repeated, "Don't go."
"Are you tempting me? because if you are, if you really want me to stay,
I can't go."
She did not reply for a long time, lying quietly against his shoulder,
her hand in his. They heard the cab drive up.
"I suppose you must go," she said, "Yes, of course, you must. Only,
isn't it happy, sitting here together? You must go, though I want you to
stay, for I really am sensible; I know there is a grown-up world; but
sitting here makes it seem unreal, and I think of sweet, silly things,
like children's games on a long summer afternoon."
She straightened herself, sighing, smiling, then as she looked at him,
she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. In her eyes sudden tears
answered them.
"It's that we have been rather unhappy, isn't it, dear Maurice?"
"Never, never again," he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back
to such a distant day; "Do you remember once, long ago, when I first
knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded--it's only
loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am
growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly
dread of loss. I'll never make you unhappy any more."
"Ah! but what about me? It's I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive
me everything. You shall have no more dreads."
She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction
for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go,
smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must
nerve his growing strength.
"Never, never again," she repeated. "So go, dear, have all the virtues.
We will both work. The eternity will pass."
CHAPTER XI
Mr. Merrick, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own
expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw
little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her
friends. The days passed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every
day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his
life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded,
harassed.
Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard.
Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a
frightened silence. Mr. Merrick's foundations seemed giving way beneath
him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard
from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a
desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela's defection
was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by
accusing himself of over-imaginativeness--nerves on edge--no wonder--and
went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice's fortnight was nearly
over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had
meditated a retreat on Paris, a week there to make the descent from
London to the country less of a horrid jolt.
Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick's sharpened
suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he
hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause
of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in
her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of
prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking
shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his
virtual dismissal from his children's roof. After all, as he reflected,
it was in a sense Angela's doing. She might now at least from the
frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him
comprehension and compassion.
"To speak plainly, I've been turned out," he said, stirring the cup of
tea she had handed him.
"Turned out?" repeated Angela, with an impersonal vagueness, quite as if
it had been a stray dog of which they were speaking.
Mr. Merrick's suspicion grew past alarm to resentment, and resentment
cowered under a more sturdy manner of pathos as of one who faced fate's
unjust bolts with erect bearing and unconquerable gaze. "Our friendship,
it seems, is unforgiveable. It was a choice between it and them. I
couldn't submit to such intolerable dictation."
Angela felt as if, after a long drowning swoon under water, she were
being resuscitated to painful life by blows upon her head. She, so
blameless, having done no wrong except love with a fatal fidelity; she,
crushed, humiliated, was to feel another lash. Even her kindness to this
pompous fool was to be made a scourge for her.
Mr. Merrick saw that she grew more white as, with folded arms, she
drooped her head and looked up at him from sombre brows. "They can't
forgive you that? They hate me so much?"
"Apparently," said Mr. Merrick, his growing sense of the indignity of
his situation giving him a deeper gloom of manner. "The crisis was
brought about by my venturing to warn Maurice on the subject you have
spoken of."
"And you told him who had warned you? I see."
Mr. Merrick took hasty refuge before the cutting quality of her voice.
"He sprang at the conclusion and defied me to deny that it was you. He
was outrageous. I have had to defend you as well as myself, Lady
Angela."
"He accused me of falseness?"
"Insolently." It was well that she should know how much he had had to
champion her. "I don't care to recall the terms." But Mr. Merrick was
feeling an odd satisfaction in recalling them. His heart, before this
rebuffing friend, before her icy eyes and icy voice, was calling out for
Felicia--Felicia whom he had lost because of this,--did she not suggest
something snake-like? His wounded affection, his wounded vanity, longed
for such comfort as Felicia alone could give. It would be well could he
believe Lady Angela--if not a liar, at least a presumptuous busy-body.
His first impressions of her were flooding his mind again.
"I could not forgive the insolence," he said, "although I can conceive
it possible that you and I have been to a certain extent mistaken. Such
a mistake must naturally wound Maurice and Felicia."
Angela leaned back in her chair, her long eyes on him, and he felt, like
a palpable atmosphere, the enmity between them.
"As it happens, Maurice told me that he had always known of his friend's
love for Felicia," he pursued. "It's in no sense an ordinary case of
attraction, you see. A Dante and Beatrice affair. He has absolute trust
in his friend, Maurice has, and I, of course, have absolute trust in
Felicia. Not that I approve; I would have felt it my duty to protest in
any case."
"You think that I imputed some wrong that was not there, and that owing
to me this breach has come between you and your daughter?" said Angela.
"I hold you in no way to blame. Without a full knowledge of
facts--Maurice's knowledge the most important of them--one may naturally
draw false inferences. We were both a little hasty in judging." Mr.
Merrick essayed a generous smile.
A deep flush passed over Angela's face. For a long moment she was
silent, her eyes on him; then, in a voice harsh and monotonous she
said--
"I hardly know what facts may mean to you--or inferences. Maurice,
before he married your daughter, told me that Geoffrey had paid him to
marry her. They live upon Geoffrey's money. He has ruined his career for
your daughter's sake. These are further facts, Mr. Merrick. Have I
indeed been a little hasty in my inferences?"
Mr. Merrick, his tea-cup in his hand, his face with as yet merely a look
of wonder on it, sat dumb.
"You now see the knowledge that underlay my warnings. What Geoffrey's
motives were I cannot say; purely disinterested, perhaps; apparently
your daughter was dying for love of Maurice. Whether they have remained
so disinterested is for you to judge. But I hope you will acquit my
warnings of hastiness."
"Maurice told you?" Mr. Merrick repeated. He chiefly felt a deep,
personal humiliation.
"As he told me everything at that time."
Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table.
"The scoundrel!" he said.
"Which one do you mean?"
"The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him."
Angela's eyes glittered.
"I think it well that all the truth should be known," she said.
CHAPTER XII
That evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. "Will you
come to me,"--the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an
arrow--"and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my
father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation."
Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her
mind of unwavering benevolence. "I will be with you at eleven to-morrow
morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the
truth as I to speak it."
She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a
larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or
unsteadiness.
Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the
interview next day Angela's mind, like a wreck, was tossed from
shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had
crawled at Maurice's feet her image of herself had been broken,
unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching
suppliant. What she had further done--that final, passionate abandonment
where vindictive fury, worship, and desperate appeal to the very
rudiments of feeling were indistinguishably mingled,--she could not
look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and
appalling, she could just snatch a vision of a not ignoble Angela. There
had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she
must veil her eyes from it.
Most terrible of all was the seeing of herself slip and slide from a
serene eminence down into a slimy, warring world. The betrayal of
Maurice had not been in her ideal of herself; it forcibly abased her to
a level of soiling realities--hatreds, jealousies, revenges. With sick
revulsion she could imagine herself feebly turning--though bones were
broken--feebly crawling up again from the abyss, either by some
retractation, or by withholding from Felicia the ultimate humiliations
she could inflict upon her. She might evade the cruellest truth; spare
her the deepest wounds and so hug once more the thought of her own
loyalty to the man who had struck her from him, a loyalty crowned with a
halo of martyrdom.
But so to turn would be to own herself abased; to see herself in the
mud; and Angela could not for long see herself in the mud.
Then, in the swing of reaction, her head reeled with the old illusion of
height; she was again on her illumined pinnacle, ruthless through very
pity, wounding with the sharp, necessary truth; stern to the glamour of
a loyalty grown craven, saving Felicia from a falsity that must corrode
her life. A pitiful, relentless angel. She saw the sword, the
wings--white, strong, rustling, the splendid impassivity of her face.
Yet on the pinnacle the darting terrors of the abyss went through her.
Was not the truth what Maurice had said--what he had looked--so horribly
looked--and not what he had written; that he had written to spare her;
had never loved her? She turned shuddering from the thought as she had
shuddered at his feet. If that indeed were truth he must convince
Felicia of it. The fact of his written words was there, surely
unforgiveable; the fact of Geoffrey's love was there; was not the fact
of a dim, growing love for Geoffrey there too? She had said it; she
believed it; and again, upon the pinnacle, the hands of miry hopes
clawed at her. Hardly could Maurice forgive the betrayal. Yet--had he
not once loved her? The memory, sweet and terrible of that far-away
spring day--his kiss and his embrace--faltered, "yes," though it wept in
saying it. Should Felicia prove to him that Angela had only spoken truth
might not the showing of the letter be one day forgiven by a man
scorned, abandoned? She had been forced to the showing by all their
guilty incredulity, and to save Felicia from the trap laid for her, to
save her from Geoffrey's scheming passion--so could she dress her
motive--had pointed out the trap, the danger. Where lay her guilt, if,
after this, Felicia chose to verify all her prophecies by walking
straight into the trap? It had not been to kill her love for her
husband, but to warn her of Geoffrey's love that the letter was shown.
So her thoughts groped in the dubious future; and when despair flung her
back again on the black present, hatred, hatred for Maurice, and the
recklessness of hatred, caught her, clasped her, sustained her from
falling, and hurried her on all trembling with the final thought that if
hope were dead, there was nothing to lose in betrayal, nothing to gain
in loyalty.
As she drove next morning to Felicia, the day's clear sunlight, the
almost wintry freshness of the air, lifted her mood once more to
steadiness. She beat off debasing visions, pushed away miry hands, told
herself that neither hope nor hatred was with her. And she felt herself
standing high in sunlight as she waited for Felicia in the little
drawing-room, its windows open on the blue, the brightness. She felt
herself in tune with purity and radiance. Dressed from head to foot in
spotless white, the long flowing of her fur-edged cloak monastic in
simplicity, the white sweep of a bird's breast about her head, she was
as pitying and as picturesque as a sculptured saint looking down through
centuries of woe from the lofty niche of a cathedral; and a more human
but as consolatory a simile showed her as a Dorothea waiting in all her
tender strength and helpfulness for a fragile, tawdry Rosamund.
But when Felicia entered, and as she turned to her from the window, a
mood as high, as inflexible as her own,--higher, more inflexible, she
felt, in a crash that had a crumbling quality--met her in Felicia's
eyes. For a moment Angela was afraid, felt herself rocking in her niche;
in the next the recollection of her truth upheld her. Truth, pity and
tenderness; with these she would meet this stony, hating creature.
"You see," she said, "I have not refused to come to you."
"You had to come, after what you had said," said Felicia.
It was a preliminary only; the pause before conflict. Angela's eyes went
over her. Felicia wore her customary blue serge, her lawn collar and
black bow. In her place, Angela thought, she would have felt the
effectiveness of an unrelieved black dress; a comment followed by a
further recognition of Felicia's indifference to effectiveness that left
another little trail of fear. She had slept; well, perhaps. Her eye-lids
showed no languor. Her face was white, cold, composed. Hardly fragile.
Certainly not tawdry. From this re-adjustment to reality Angela glanced
out at the sky. She must grasp at all her strength. She must pray for
strength. With her eyes on the sky her mind sped hastily through the
uplifting supplication--haunted as it sped by a thought of pursuit that
gave a shadow-simile of a fleeing through caverns.
But she brought back gentle eyes to Felicia. "Mrs. Wynne, you have never
understood me; never believed me; you have always misunderstood, and
mistrusted me, as you do now. I have been forced to this," said Angela,
keeping all her quiet while Felicia stood before her with her stony
face. "I have watched you like a child wandering in the dark. I have
seen you come to the brink of a pit in the darkness. I have put out my
hand to save you. That is all my fault."
"By the pit, you mean, I suppose, Mr. Daunt's love for me. As my father
told you, I have known, my husband has known, from before my marriage,
that he loved me. You did not only warn. You lied. About my husband,"
Felicia's eyes did not change, as she said the word, looking straight at
Angela. Since the night before when her father had told her vile
falsehoods she had felt not one doubt of Angela's falsity. A white heat
of utter scorn had never left her. She would have scorned her too much
to see her had not her father's frenzied belief pushed her to this
elemental conflict. She would tell Angela again and again that she was a
liar.
"How you hate me," Angela now said.
"And how you hate me."
"I do not. I pity you. I want to help you."
"I will pity you if you confess that you have lied."
"If it were to help you I could almost do it--though that would indeed
be to lie. I believe that truth is the only helper. Your husband was
paid to marry you."
Felicia's eyes received it unflinchingly.
"It may be so. Geoffrey is generous enough; Maurice is enough his friend
to accept his help. I will ask him to tell me all the truth. Your
implication was that my husband married me through pity."
"You are very sure of people's love for you."
Angela saw herself lashed by the hatred of these two men, by the scorn
of this woman whom they loved. Her voice shook.
"I am perfectly sure of their love."
"Yet your husband's love was not always yours."
She was horribly unmoved by half truths; this again she accepted.
"Maurice may once have cared for you. Since he has known me he has loved
me. I cannot spare you when you come between me and my husband."
"Since he knew you he loved me--loved me most!" Angela could scarcely
draw her breath. "He married you from pity--it is not a lie--loving me.
And I loved him--I love him now! It is the cross of my life! It crushes
me!" Her breast panted with the labouring breath; she threw her cloak
back from her shoulders and kept her hands at her throat, even then
conscious of the gesture's dramatic beauty. "He is unworthy of it--that
I know. He is incapable of the sacred passion I feel. He loves most the
one he is with, and when he was with me--before you took him from me--he
loved me most--before God I believe it--and with the best love of which
he is capable. I would have lifted him--inspired him--he used to say I
would. He told me that he loved me and that only my wealth had kept him
from me--the day that Geoffrey came with his news of you. I would have
redeemed him had not you made a claim on his weakness, his pity."
"I know that you are lying," said Felicia. But as she listened, as she
spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past.
"Then,"--Angela's breath failed her; she drew Maurice's letter from her
breast and put it in Felicia's hand--"read that," she half whispered.
And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of
the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at
herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment's supreme
vengeance. She stood watching her rival--her victim--yes, yes, those
voices from the abyss were true--watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes
freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like.
But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning
to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know
that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out
of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen
contemplation of Maurice's perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at
Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey
held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien
creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the
written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: "My husband's
words." Then at last identity whispered "of me."
They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with
him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly,
was his love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his
fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to
know--for she knew it--that he indeed loved her. An acted lie--while he
could betray her to another woman--would have made him less odious to
her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror.
She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing
too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and
they saw more than the loss of love.
With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the
passion of her shattered pride, she hated him.
Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was
distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred
for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she
felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela
caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their
struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she
could not feel that she hated her.
She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that
had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and
Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly--"This was
home."
"You see--I did not lie to you," said Angela. That Felicia should show
no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck,
made her wonder--in another of those crumbling flashes--whether indeed
her foot was upon Felicia's neck. She had struck her down, she had
humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch
the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid
image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was
seeing her in the mire?
She repeated: "You see I did not lie to you."
"No," said Felicia, folding her husband's letter as she spoke, "you
didn't lie."
Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned
out of it.
"And can you not believe _now_ that I never hated you?" said Angela.
Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. "I don't care. It
makes no difference to me."
Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other's
consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. "How
cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only
tried to help you."
Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of
Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela's words.
"And then how human;--after all I am human. See how intolerable it was
to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good,
when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I
loved him." It comforted her to feel the tears running down her cheeks
and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem noble to herself in her
avowed abasement. "Perhaps I have been jealous--oh, how can I tell?
Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought
that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can't you pity me? Can't
you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?"
Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from
her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous attitude; she knew it,
although she could feel nothing.
"Yes, I am sorry for you. It has been horrible for you," she said, but
with the weariness that a soldier, lying shattered, helpless, upon a
battlefield, might show towards the tormenting clamours and lamentations
of a wounded enemy beside him. She wished to be allowed to bleed quietly
to death. These alien hands plucked at her for a help, a sympathy she
could not give. She was sorry; but when one was shattered one could only
know that one was sorry and be tired.
Angela's weeping was stilled for a moment. After all, it was not pity
that she wanted. She wanted to be lifted from the nightmare of
abasement; to feel herself looking down once more; to be the consoler,
the binder of wounds--not the suppliant; not the recipient of an
indifferent dole. She approached Felicia, putting out her hand to her.
"And you know--dear--dear--child, how I pity you. Ah, let this pity,
this mutual agony unite us, Felicia--you who have lost only an illusion,
I who have lost a reality. Can we not see each other more clearly now?
Can we not understand--and kiss each other--like sisters?"
Maeterlinckian visions--a tower, a sad blue sea, a great blue sky, white
birds, wandering, beautiful souls in pain--crossed her mind, enhancing
her consciousness of beauty. It was beautiful, what she said, and she
must look beautiful, leaning in whiteness, with her outstretched hand,
the tears of her deeper sorrow upon her face, towards this fallen
comrade. This would atone for all, be the spiritual significance of all
the tragic drama, this union of suffering sisters. She drooped softly
upon the figure in the chair, encircling it.
But with a violence that made Angela reel back, almost losing her
footing, Felicia started to her feet. Staring, white, shuddering, she
looked at the other woman.
"Don't touch me. You must not touch me.--Go away--you are horrible," she
said. "You fill me with horror." Her voice was hoarse, shaking.
Angela had retreated from her, and while they looked at each other
across the room, a strange struggle and change showed itself in her
face. Felicia's conviction entered her. She felt herself evil. She felt
herself horrible.
With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in
silence, she went from the room.
Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of
a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her.
CHAPTER XIII
Felicia stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the
rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey,
unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was
a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her
arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning
her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful
avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a
week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.
Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the
desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it
liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted
lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more
intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its
chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now
forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned
to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping
duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently,
before the blaze, she would sit and rest--and sleep; there had been no
sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a
hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets.
Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the
kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her
inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to
do now. Chintz-covers--she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed
without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just
before her father's arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well
as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was
stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.
Felicia's mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future--the
writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he
returned to-night--or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause
between a dagger's uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no
pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed,
went with a sullen quiet--much like the flames among their logs--through
the well-remembered words.
"I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has
showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did
not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You
betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in
return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now.
That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only
falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey
as he is--and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that
your honour--a strange word to write to you--is safe between our hands;
but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps
me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do
not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that
you shall ever see from me."
This letter was lying on Maurice's dressing-table waiting for him.
There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a
stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered
past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her
bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night--the cold,
calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly
in her mind. "To him? From me?" She would think it dizzily; and dread
clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that
had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was
as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.
But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window
pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would
suffer--for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had
truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer
there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for
her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in
Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once
more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of
certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.
She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and
Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a
sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into
some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A
shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.
The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone
from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees
shook in the rising gusts of wind.
There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so
many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her
wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her
contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.
As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at
the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the
road, a tall man's figure under an umbrella.
Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller
improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to
plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all
pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.
It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so
great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the
figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the
road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a
conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage
had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not
Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be
Geoffrey?
Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and
pedestalled--strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!--lifted
high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at
with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in
its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched
her.
But to see Geoffrey now--now that she was his--and knew it.--The thought
shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.
It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the
house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was
for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so
high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through
her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird's nest in a shaken
tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair
showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the
strength of her own avowal?--come to claim her?--to take her away?
She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises--what they
implied of disillusion in him--or to look at the rapture that ran a
dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be
rapture was perhaps the terror's root. She heard him in the hall ridding
himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it
disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation
lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not
nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her
strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final
question--in a gasp--as he came in.
His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one
altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a
perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of
himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the
window, looked silently at him.
"It's true, then, you have left him?"
His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in
her.
"Yes, I have left him. Who told you?"
"Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All
I could grasp was that."
He did not know then, and any revelation of what his attitude would be
when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she
was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into
the deep old chair before the fire.
"Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There
was no fly?"
"No. I didn't mind the walk." Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn
or two up and down the room.
"Your father said that you would never go back to your husband."
"I never will."
"You have ceased to love him, then?"
"Absolutely ceased."
Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could
guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the
girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be
happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and
that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, "May I ask
why?"
The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present
tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos--like the spring's--like the
day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him
everything. _Might_ he ask?
"What may you not ask?" she said. "There is nothing that I have a right
to keep from you now. This is why. Lady Angela showed me
this--yesterday." Without turning her head she held out the letter. "It
was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together--when
you told me that you loved me--when I told you that I loved him."
Geoffrey's hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed
with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand.
He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair,
he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering--would he discover it? Should
she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be
told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward--though
such a tragically belated one--had at last come to him? Even to hesitate
seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind
followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly--was it
the possible rapture that made the real dread--the rapture of seeing him
claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost lassitude she
thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt
or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between
them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question.
Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes.
Suddenly she thought sharply, "I must not tell." She wondered if it was
an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most
logical thing in life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and
character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the
bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an
unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet
the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and
breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept
her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and
she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter.
"Now you see. Now you understand all," she said.
He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had
mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of
having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to
be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it.
"Now you see. Now you understand," she repeated. "I do, Geoffrey."
She had never called him by his name before.
His eyes now rested on hers.
"Let me tell you," she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against
the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and
calm. "Let me tell you that I see you and know you--and understand.
Don't ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it
has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could
see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I
hardly feel anything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful
nobility--your love. To see it--to know it--is worth the suffering."
He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the
calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head--the
dear, proud head--to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the
conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.
"How could he. To you." It was not question or exclamation, but a deep,
sickened wonder.
"He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn--and my pain;
he didn't love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him."
She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. "You thought he
loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?"
"I?" Geoffrey's stare was almost boyish.
"I?--who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?"
it said.
"Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel--a thing to
be tossed appeasingly to a rival." Again she closed her eyes. "It makes
me dizzy sometimes."
Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her
pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed,
as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around
the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.
Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts
steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them
steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice--how near his heart he only
now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a
wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back,
lamenting--seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and
intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man,
so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other
night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous
letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that
had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in
baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet--was it essential? Still
holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice's baseness would
serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the
baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the
other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He
grasped at last his own decision.
He did not turn from the window as he said, "You must go back to him."
Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her.
She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty
eyes to him.
"I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how
incapable, now, he would be of it." She made no reply. There was no
reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth
where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a
quiver of blind presage run through it.
"He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply--more deeply than you
can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with
Angela--well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in
love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are
games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived
into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost
you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess
what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela--and sorry for her,
and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward--what of it?
You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak
as water--what of it? He adores you; I know it--and you loved him--once.
You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything--everything.
_You_ are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you."
Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with
the sense of fighting in the dark--he knew not what--but fighting some
force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in
himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.
He walked away from her up and down the room. "Only the other night--how
I understand it now--he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of
remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die
without you."
"Do you really want me to go?" Felicia asked.
Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her
hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. "I want
what is best for him, and for you. You know I'm not a sentimentalist. I
think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing
life even with a husband she thinks she can't care for, than drifting
about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into
an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she
has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic
roots--a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,--but
a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial
temperature, liable to shatterings--to witherings; not a flower well
rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it."
"Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is
poisoned? You want me to go back to him--not loving him; do you want me
to go back hating?--for I do hate him."
Geoffrey still paused.
"I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love."
That memory of the lighthouse flash could no longer guide in this
darkness where a blind and wilful giant's hand steered for a shore of
reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look
upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the
open, unknown sea.
"Do you want me to go back, loving you?" she said.
"Loving me?" Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if
from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled
round and fronted the tempestuous elements.
Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the
others. She went on: "I wrote and told him that I despised him--hated
him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you.
He will get that letter to-morrow--perhaps to-day."
Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice,
Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had
been too steady--in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic,
shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back--back, and
down--where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like
dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her.
She opened her eyes to him.
The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great
distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to
emptiness; they were near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was
like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind
of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking
deeply into each other's eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and
wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke.
"I felt it."
"You did not know it, Geoffrey."
"I touched something in the dark."
"I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to
him."
"Why not, Felicia?"
Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused.
"It seemed to make things less simple--more difficult."
"More difficult, perhaps," said Geoffrey, "but more simple, too, I
think. Have you known for long?"
"Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been
there--oh--for long, long--since the beginning perhaps. I can't tell. I
can't see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love
for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength."
Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but,
in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him.
"The threads go back and back--and they turn round one another. I can't
see them separately till now--when his is broken. You remember when you
kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then--it must have
been then--that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been
woven into my life--into my love for my husband--I don't know what was
you and what was I."
His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia
rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to
the window; turned to face him.
"Ah! Felicia," said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost
stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously
uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.
"Yes, yes," she said, "I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not
see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you
reproach me than listen to myself."
"Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I,
too, was blindfolded," he said, looking away from her.
His voice was the voice of frozen tears.
They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a
word from her would unlock flood-gates.
And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so
that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its
thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her
love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper
tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through
mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his
neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to
him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her
weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that
would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal
not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook
her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative
face.
She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave
echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she
knew them black and dangerous.
But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or
of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the
thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make
in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the
world's wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a
defiant happiness.
She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which
had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a
love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent
her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose
to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its
whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude
was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and
control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.
Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her
incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying--
"And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want
you to go back to Maurice."
His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had
struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory,
and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a
fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. "Nothing is really
changed," said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty
chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince,
hardly stooping to persuasion. "You and I are parted. He needs you as
much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on
you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time
and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth--only I
believe you have seen it, as I have. It's a choice between taking up
your old life--and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good
thing out of it--or living the new life I described to you--the life of
the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece--a life of constant danger.
For you--I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in
and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no
actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself--I
would die for you, as you know; but to live without you--seeing you
drifting--alone--in a sadness worse than any suffering--? I know that
the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my
sake--for your own I'd put it, too:--Felicia--for my sake--if I asked
you as I could--you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that
sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn't be the growing
flower; you wouldn't be the cut flower in the vase"--his face, white in
its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would
strip all illusion from her; "you would be like those snowdrops that I
carry here--on my heart;--on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled,
dead." He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw
now, and as he had wished, without illusions.
"But go back to him!" she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the
cup he held out to her.
"He loves you. He needs you."
"Go back from fear?--fear of you?--of myself?"
"Turn from that thought then. Don't let it be a question of you or me.
Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife."
"But after that letter!"
"Is a person's moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond?
If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in
disowning her?"
"Oh--a mother!" Felicia's tears ran down.
"Remember, I wouldn't urge--I wouldn't ask you to fear me or pity him
unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that
you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life.
Felicia, it's his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you,
that makes the barrier that holds me from you now--my memory of his
face--his voice--when he said that you were his life--that he would die
without you. He thanked me for his happiness--you and I had 'made him.'
He said: 'You shall never regret it--so help me, God.' Felicia, you have
given him his soul. You must not rob him of it."
"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!" she said, pressing her hands against her eyes--for
his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable
pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries,
wrenched and broken limbs--"I have given him no soul. He has found his
soul through me, perhaps, but I can't rob him of it."
"You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do
pity him. And you must--you must pity him--and forgive him."
"How could we go on," she whispered, "after my letter to him? after he
knows?"
"He doesn't return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet.
Besides, let him know the facts--but the facts from yourself. Tell him.
Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest,"
said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety.
"After his to her!"
"You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt.
Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you
will; let him have it straight; but don't let him read it--alone. Poor
old Maurice!" Geoffrey added.
The words, his comment on them, the "poor old Maurice!" that seemed a
final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed
suddenly before her a vision of Maurice--a piteous Maurice. The hatred
of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror
reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but
she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life
was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that
bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her
seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey--so far away it
seemed--saying, "Can you really bear to think of his reading that
letter--alone?"
She went towards him--there was now no longer any fear in his nearness.
He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.
Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the
truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and
she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from
the rapture of abandonment that had called to her--to him. What had he
not conquered in himself--and her--to do this great thing for her?--to
save not only her, but through her, Maurice?
But, though he had conquered, she felt broken.
"Life is so long, Geoffrey."
He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of
long years where they must walk apart.
"And life--founded on pity----"
"More will come. Something like a mother's love."
She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice's
terror-stricken face--reading her letter--had stabbed to more than pity.
The protecting passion that had flung itself between him and the reading
had in it a deeper quality. She could not analyze the fiercely defensive
tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still
around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, "I won't
disappoint you, Geoffrey."
He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet.
For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within
her, a passion far other than the maternal passion that was to take her
back to Maurice.
His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms.
And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human
emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark
of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental
things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in
silence, they clung and kissed each other.
The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment
came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering
from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the
long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose,
and moved away.
Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the
mantelpiece.
"Just half-past three," said Geoffrey.
Felicia went to the window.
"The rain has stopped," she said. "We can walk to the station in less
than an hour."
Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. "Don't you
want something to eat? Some tea?"
"No; do you?"
"No, thanks."
"I will put on my hat and coat; I will be only a moment." She went to
the door while Geoffrey said--
"We can catch the fast afternoon train. We shall be in London by six."
CHAPTER XIV
A cold, evening sky was over London as Geoffrey and Felicia drove
through wet squares and streets. Here, too, the storm had lifted, and
between its darkness and the darkness of the coming night was the still
moment of bleak and bitter twilight; strips of chill radiance behind the
tattered trees; the pallid sky shining from the puddles of the roadway.
They had hardly spoken to each other during the walk; the wait at the
desolate little station; the journey in the train. Geoffrey had merely
expressed the hope that she was not cold; she had feared that he was
hungry, had begged him to buy a sandwich. Once or twice from their
corners of the railway carriage they had gravely smiled at each other.
Now in the cab they neither spoke nor smiled.
Felicia's mood was that of the bleak, still pause between the storm and
the darkness. It had its peace, its colourless peace. She could not look
back at the storm and the coming darkness seemed impenetrable, but
already her thoughts stole towards it, seeing, as if in a dream,
Maurice, comforted; feeling his hand in hers.
She had a dreaming, a sorrowing presage that he had already returned,
already knew the truth, that she would find him waiting, hopeless, yet
waiting hopelessly for help.
From her letter he would look up at her--returned to him. And, though
the thought wept for his pain, in her weariness it had lost its fear.
There was peace in its very sadness. For then there need be no horrid
crash of revelation for her to face. In silence she would hold out her
arms to him. And "poor, poor Maurice," her heart whispered.
The river, when they reached the Embankment, had the sky's cold
stillness; a drowned face looking up at its ghost. Felicia, shivering a
little, said that it was very chilly. A stir of fear came with the
sudden hope that Maurice was not waiting for her. She would rather face
crashes than have him waiting--alone--with her letter. Hope and its fear
were like a rising of life, of eagerness in her. She leaned her head
from the window of the rattling four-wheeler to direct the cabman;
explaining: "They often take a longer way here."
"I will see you up to the door of the flat," said Geoffrey.
She nodded, then said, "But if he is there? If Maurice should come to
the door?"
"But he doesn't return till to-morrow."
"He may be there--I think he is there."
"Well--the maid would come to the door. Besides--if he did--what more
simple than to shake his hand and say good-bye to you both?"
She said quietly, "We shall not see you again--for how long?"
"Oh, it will be quite natural that I should now go under for some
years," Geoffrey answered as quietly. "Some day, when you and Maurice
feel like seeing me----"
"Yes; some day," Felicia answered, with her head again out of the
window.
His dull ache of misery had been so steady that he was surprised to find
it capable of a deeper pang. He had almost the impulse to ask her if her
quiet were wrung from such agony as his. The next moment he was hating
himself for the whimpering selfishness that could not feel gladness for
her fortitude. Yet the plaint was there, and it dimly guessed at a
woman's capacity, strange in its sanity, its acceptance of compromise,
for two lives; her absorption in response to the claim that she may
listen to. He himself had helped to lock her into that smaller room of
her heart and now she must live in it, since the high and beautiful
chambers were closed to her for ever. In the smaller room, too, was the
love cruelly wounded, wounded by her hand. Her whole nature was now an
eagerness to staunch, uplift, console.
The cab drew up before the block of flats, and while Geoffrey, saying
that he would walk back to his rooms, paid the man, Felicia went inside
and rang beside the lift for the porter. Geoffrey had joined her when
the man appeared.
Yes, he said, Mr. Wynne had come back that afternoon. No, Mr. Wynne had
not been out again, though he had sent the maid away soon after
arriving. He knew that he had not gone out for he had been sitting in
the hall all day.
There had evidently been talk, Geoffrey saw. Felicia saw nothing,
thought of nothing but Maurice's presence above; her heart seemed choked
in its beating. She made no objection to Geoffrey following her into the
lift.
They stepped out together and, before the foolishly decorative little
door that Maurice had so often jested over they paused, the porter still
lingering.
"You can go," said Geoffrey cheerfully; "I prefer walking down."
The man reluctantly descended and then Geoffrey rang.
Felicia leaned against the wall, seeing Maurice's eyes as he had said
good-bye to her, hearing his, "It seems to me an eternity before I shall
see you again." He had read her letter, alone. Remorse gave her the
sense of swooning to all about her.
With almost a start she saw that Geoffrey still rang; and now he knocked
as well.
"Maurice must be asleep," she said.
Geoffrey, his finger pressed on the electric bell, nodded.
She had answered, "The eternity will pass." It seemed an eternity. And
it had passed. Yes, here she was again, before the familiar door, and in
a moment he would see her.
"I should think that by now he would be awake. Don't you think that he
must be awake by now?" she repeated the question almost irritably as he
did not answer her; adding, "Perhaps he guesses that it is we, and will
not see us. Oh Geoffrey--Geoffrey. How could I have written such a
letter!"
"It will be all right when you see each other. You must meet his
despair, of course." Geoffrey, his shoulder turned to her, continued to
knock loudly. The draughty landing with its twilight square of window
open to a damp brick wall, was vault-like in its cold; Felicia, clasping
her arms, shivered.
Geoffrey presently said, "I shall have to break the glass and open the
door."
At this she started from her place, caught back his hand.
"No, no! He can't have waked yet. He is worn out--tired--imagine how
tired! Go on ringing. Knock again."
Her face showed a horror that did not know itself.
"I think I had better break the door," said Geoffrey, gently; putting
her back.
She dropped to helpless submission.
The glass panel crashed in under the sharp blow and putting his hand
through the aperture Geoffrey drew the bolt.
Inside was complete darkness. A touch at the electric button near the
door and the little hall, its closed doors, its chairs, table, jar of
laurel-leaves, flashed upon them.
Geoffrey still kept Felicia behind him.
"Let me go first," he said.
"You! First! No, no, I must see him first."
But firmly now he held her back.
"Felicia, you must wait here. Maurice may be ill."
She had seized his arms to push by him and they stood clutching each
other in the brilliant light.
"Ill!" she repeated. "And I am not to go to him! My husband!"
Something in her stricken face, her fixed eyes, made him yield.
"Come then, let us go together."
"No." Her thrust against him did not relax. "I must go alone; I must see
him alone; I must speak to him alone."
Geoffrey clasped his arm around her. "Felicia, understand me, you shall
not go alone. We are too near to be separated--in this. We must go
together."
He saw that his words tore from her mind the veil that covered horror.
She submitted, grasping, yet pushing from her, the arm that held her.
"To our room--first. The light is turned in the same place--near the
door."
Geoffrey flung open the door. It did not need the light to show them
that the room was empty; the desolate evening sky again confronted them
at the window. They drew back.
"The drawing-room--the studio--he could not easily hear in the studio."
Geoffrey knew that her hope was desperate--almost mechanical. They
looked into the drawing-room; went through the dining-room to the
studio. All were empty. They retraced their steps. Her hand no longer
grasped and repelled his arm. She leaned upon it.
"His dressing-room--across the passage," she half whispered.
If only, Geoffrey thought, she would faint in his arms so that he might
lay her down and go alone. But her swiftness equalled his. Neither could
hesitate. He threw open the door of the little dressing-room.
Darkness again. The curtain drawn before the window with its courtyard
aspect. Geoffrey's hand felt for the electric button, trembled before it
found it. Light came like a shock in the darkness. Maurice lay at their
feet.
The pistol had not fallen from his hand, though the open fingers no
longer held it. He had not shot himself through the head. Thank God for
that, Geoffrey found himself trivially thinking; his head was unmarred
and beautiful. One hardly noticed the breast's tragic disarray.
As Felicia put away his arm and left him it was now Geoffrey who leaned,
weak, nerveless against the wall.
He watched her kneel beside her husband, and, softly pushing the pistol
from his hand, take the empty, open hand in hers.
With a look of tender wonder, like a mother with her sleeping child, she
slightly touched his hair and brow. It was still with wonder that she
looked up at Geoffrey.
"He is dead," she said in a hushed and gentle voice, as the mother says:
"He is sleeping."
Geoffrey's white, silent face, the tears so strangely running down it,
over his cheeks, into the corners of his lips, gave her a shudder. Her
eyes turned again to the serenity, the slumbering serenity, of the dead
face.
For long moments she sat still, while Geoffrey stifled his sobs.
"Is my letter there?" she said at last. He saw the open letter on the
dressing table; near it was a sealed envelope.
He forced himself to cross the room to them. The dressing table was
behind her; he lifted the letters above her head; the envelope was
addressed to Mrs. Wynne. Hesitating, he glanced down, and saw that she
had raised her head, that her eyes were on him. She put up her hand.
"Wait--not now."
"I want it now," she commanded with her emotionless gentleness.
Now--while I am still stupefied; he understood. He gave it to her and
turned aside while she read, down there, at his feet, beside Maurice.
The letter was not long. He heard her hand fall softly with it. She sat,
the vacant hand before her face, bowed over her husband.
Geoffrey could not speak to her and he could not leave her. He stood
looking down at the dressing table--empty but for its little ivory tray,
its pin-cushion. Maurice had not unpacked his dressing-case. A
photograph of Felicia was stuck into the glass; not the framed one; that
was packed too; he had taken it with him. This was a profile; not good;
making her too sad, as Maurice had said.
He heard now that she wept.
He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his
wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the
tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his
presence by his grief.
And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her
face still hidden she held up the letter to him.
"I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?"
"He is ours. It is because of you--because of you that I----" She could
not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of
him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He
had given him back to her and her to him.
"Dearest Felicia," he read, "I was a coward. But I always loved you
most--even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for
me but you. And I am unworthy of you--and of my friend. All I can do for
you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck's poem, darling? I
do smile; not only so that you shan't cry, but for pure joy that at last
I can really do something not ignoble in your eyes. Darling--darling--it
is only horrible because I can't see you again, and because you hate me
and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don't, ah! don't hate
me. Love me again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy,
dearest one.--MAURICE."
A groan broke from Geoffrey's lips. Had it been any other woman at his
feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt,
he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was
half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love
yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from
herself.
"Oh, Maurice--my Maurice, I have killed you," Felicia said. "How can I
live?"
He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly,
patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at
Maurice.
And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she
shuddered with dreadful sobs.
"He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness--so
afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me--loving
me--and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might
always hate him. I can't live. I can't."
Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him
to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift
her yet.
And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the
succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life's
supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice's, he
stammered, "You must, you must. For me."
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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
The Confounding of Camilia=> The Confounding of Camelia {title page}
an idolent=> an indolent {pg 14}
You wont like Geoffrey=> You won't like Geoffrey {pg 35}
milien=> milieu {pg 40}
tenacious worldiness=> tenacious worldliness {pg 48}
clearer vison=> clearer vision {pg 79}
he ammended=> he amended {pg 129}
unobstrusiveness=> unobtrusiveness {pg 176}
resistlessness=> restlessness {pg 303}
dependance=> dependence {pg 305}
End of Project Gutenberg's Paths of Judgement, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick