Paths of Judgement Part 17

Maurice, flus.h.i.+ng deeply, read--

"MY DEAR MISS MERRICK,--

"I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you know. Everything, now, is all right.

"Yours devotedly, "G. DAUNT."

"I'll go at once," Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. "My dear old Geoff."

"You mustn't make me ridiculous by your grat.i.tude," said Geoffrey. "And, my dear Maurice, I'm not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me happy." He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look of affection that Maurice knew so well.

But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound opening again as he drove away from Geoffrey's, and on reaching his rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small, pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand--Angela's oddly large and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive att.i.tude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read, while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet--

"DEAREST, DEAREST MAURICE (can one say more than dearest?)--

"Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now how much I needed happiness.

"Your ANGELA."

Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger--for even in the extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.

He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all events he would not see her face; and--

"My dear Angela," he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic trust of her "dearest," tore the sheet across, took another and began again with--

"Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick." Maurice paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday morning--Angela's tears, the kiss, the embrace--surged over him. "I did not know this yesterday," he went on, writing rapidly. "We must forget yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She doesn't take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half serious trifling is not to her what it is to us."

Maurice's forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of Angela. She, though not a "dear, simple little girl," did not take things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But having so smoothed her way--and at Felicia's expense--stabbed Maurice with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the messenger's ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn't what he had said really truer than that? Had not Felicia's dear image grown dim? Was it not Felicia's feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia's sake?

Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found?

He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was in a sooty atmosphere one couldn't escape smudges. By degrees the deeper truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly, endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia's sake, he would be brutal enough, yes, he would--to intimate this even now.

He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. "You must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is difficult to see what one would have felt in different circ.u.mstances; I judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am necessary to her happiness--perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.

"Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I call myself

"Ever your devoted friend, "M. WYNNE.

"PS.--Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at once destroy this record of it."

Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia.

The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met.

How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!--how oddly things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near he turned from it with impatience--almost with resentment.

In Felicia's garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.

The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.

Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness of her emotion drew all expression from her face.

A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.

They were together, and for her--for him--the past was forgotten. Yet as Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for him?--for herself? The love in Maurice's eyes drew her from dreams; yet in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it breathed.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick looked about the little room with a scrutiny cautious and acute. Almost a year had pa.s.sed since Felicia's marriage, but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther sh.o.r.e it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr.

Wynne's income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the drawing-room offended her, as Felicia's garden had done. She could sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs.

Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh and spotless as a white sea-sh.e.l.l, the austere suavity of eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious consolation in the dowdiness of some of Felicia's guests; Mrs. Merrick knew that d.u.c.h.esses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called "smart." It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more gratification after deciding that it did not apply here.

Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia's tea-table, and Mrs.

Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as her furniture. Mrs. Merrick's brain had bubbled with conjecture during those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome Geoffrey Daunt's potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush.

Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft un.o.btrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend, Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her.

"Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn't it very charming, very exquisite?" said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided past him. "Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?" She detached herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk.

People were going--only a group remained about Maurice at the other end of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and Felicia's first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as she smiled and talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone, really to see and speak to him.

When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a deeper flush.

"Is this your first meeting, too?" asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey to Felicia, as she held the latter's hand. "Geoffrey has become a greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are no doubt _au courant_ of all his news?"

"Yes; he kept us posted," said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness, making no allusion to depths.

"He hasn't kept _me_ posted," said Angela, taking a chair beside Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in an att.i.tude habitual with her--an att.i.tude at once sibylline and saint-like. "I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey--only heard of you.

How are you?"

"All right. And you?"

"Wearing out my scabbard," she said with a fatigue that made no attempt at lightness. "That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to anything, isn't it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn't it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn't it? It does one good," she repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.

Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially when she took a chair and the sibylline att.i.tude. His talk with Felicia was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the boredom, at all events, showed itself in his "To be with people who aren't wearing out their scabbards."