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Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick · English · Gutenberg #42012 · 477,429 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Paths of Judgement

Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick


        
Release date: February 4, 2013 [eBook #42012]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2024

Language: English

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PATHS OF JUDGEMENT


POPULAR 6/-NOVELS

=Sir Mortimer.= By MARY JOHNSTON, Author of "Audrey," "By Order of the
Company," "The Old Dominion."

=Incomparable Bellairs.= By AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE, Authors of "The Star
Dreamer," "Young April," etc. Illustrated by FRED PEGRAM.

=Turnpike Travellers.= By ELEANOR HAYDEN, Author of "From a Thatched
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=Broke of Covenden.= By J. C. SNAITH, Author of "Mistress Dorothy Marvin,"
"Fierceheart the Soldier," etc.

=The Imperialist.= By SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN (Mrs. Everard Cotes), Author
of "Those Delightful Americans," etc.

=Dorothea: A Story of the Pure in Heart.= By MAARTEN MAARTENS, Author of
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=The Bindweed.= By NELLIE K. BLISSETT, Author of "The Concert Director,"
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=Veranilda.= By GEORGE GISSING, Author of "The Private Papers of Henry
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=Belchamber.= By HOWARD STURGIS, Author of "Tim" and "All that was
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=The Ladder of Tears.= By G. COLMORE, Author of "The Strange Story of
Hester Wynne," etc.

=Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life.= By CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM.

=The Tutor's Love Story.= By WALTER FRITH, Author of "In Search of Quiet,"
etc.

=Angelo Bastiani.= By LIONEL CUST. Illustrated by FRANK MASON.

=Magnus Sinclair.= A Border Historical Novel. By HOWARD PEASE.

A. CONSTABLE & CO. LTD. LONDON




PATHS OF JUDGEMENT

By
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(_Author of "The Rescue" "The Confounding of Camilia" etc_)

LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO Ltd
1904

BUTLER & TANNER,
THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS.
FROME, AND LONDON.




_PART I_




CHAPTER I


Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout
pony's indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road
was steep and the day hot.

Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle
valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the
dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime
and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.

Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the
wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy
of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the
hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and
trees of an orderly dulness, that didn't even make Constable effects, to
look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes
resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and
a minute's quick trot brought her to her destination.

Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond
the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the
south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant
summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the
house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with
contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the
beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon
the other to the splendid line of the horizon.

So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the
half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers
about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs.
Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house,
too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and
balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a
tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it
symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The
garden, too, irritated her and made her envious. Even at this late
summer season its beauty was abundant. Her well-trained gardener at
Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him, produced no such effects
with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was like an official report;
this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the simile; she merely
felt, as before, irritating comparisons.

Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying
into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes
were Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the
shade a soft radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of
white pansies, thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the
ground; near them nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour
against the wall.

As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden,
a girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the
house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but
loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at
once flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon
at her neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew
and dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down
her burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple
and white and flame; smiling indifferently.

Mrs. Merrick's smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative.
She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted
her. Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply
tonged fringe and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed
appendages of the sailor hat--tilted forward and fastened to her head by
a broad elastic band, a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could
but sit erect; her meagre body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was
box-like. Her figure was her chief vanity; its "neatness" her aim, and
the word with her signified a careful, unrelaxing compression.

"Gardening, Felicia?" she asked, glancing down at her niece's
earth-dogged shoes.

Felicia Merrick's father and her own husband were brothers.

"Yes; digging all morning; weeding and watering most of the afternoon."
Felicia was thinking that to-day her aunt looked more funnily than ever
like a collection of parcels strapped together for postal delivery. She
was mentally tying a stamped label to her hat; the circle of the curl
between the eyebrows was already a post-mark.

"Doesn't Thomas do the digging? It must, I know, be hard to manage with
one boy, but surely he could do the digging."

"He does, unless I want to."

"People can see you from the road--not that any one passes by here
often."

"Not often," Felicia assented.

"I want to know if you can come down to us to-morrow for a week," said
Mrs. Merrick, allowing the antagonistic moment to pass, and after a
slight hesitation Felicia answered, "Yes, thanks."

Mrs. Merrick had often suspected that Felicia's gratitude on these
occasions was not up to the mark of the opportunities they gave her, and
now, emphasizing the present opportunity, she went on, "You can't fail
to enjoy yourself. Lady Angela Bagley is with us. You have heard of her.
I met her in London this Spring; we took a great fancy to each other.
She is a wonderful woman--really wonderful. Such intellect, such soul,
such world polish, and with it such saintliness. Everybody feels that
about her; it helps one to know that there are such people in the
world," said Mrs. Merrick, sighing as she flicked the pony--"people who
have everything the world can give, and who care nothing for it."
Felicia wondered from which of her recent guests her aunt had picked up
these phrases which came oddly from her anxious materialism.

"I have often seen her picture in the ladies' papers," she replied; "it
will be nice to see her." She dimly remembered a narrow face, a mist of
hair, a long, yearning throat, and she at once decided that she would
not like Lady Angela and her soul.

"Yes, it will be nice for you. She takes an interest in everybody. Of
course your father must come, too. There are some interesting men whom
he will like meeting. Mr. Daunt, the young M.P., is a cousin of Lady
Angela--the comet of the season, my dear;--most wonderful speech in the
House--you probably heard of it; Imperialism--national prestige;--and a
friend of his, Mr. Wynne, a most captivating person. He writes essays,
he paints, he plays the violin; people are quite mad about him in
London. You mustn't fall in love with him, Felicia, for, charming as he
is, he has no money."

Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened
stone with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest.

"And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure,
will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in
books, I suppose. Is he writing?"

"Yes. He is well."

"He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr.
Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it
last night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now."

Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing.

"So," Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly--her niece had the faculty of
disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs--"So it will be
nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I
thought that he would see or hear me."

Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his
hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the
afternoon's balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his
sister-in-law, had lured him from his studies.

He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome
head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair
haloed a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely
aquiline, the lips full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing
of his own impressions; his cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous.
Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering green neck-tie, a Panama hat,
placed at the back of his head with a certain recklessness, carried out
the impression of ease and of indifference.

"Ah! Kate," he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large,
white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively
away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick
irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.

"You and Felicia are coming to me for a week," she said, again flicking
her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. "I mustn't let you get
rusty up here."

If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had
an equal faculty for "drawing" her father. His eye did not turn from the
landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, "Ah,
my dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my
good little whetstone here I don't fancy that the combined efforts of
our not highly intelligent country people could save me from it--when I
go among them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in
spite of one's resolve to keep one's steel bright. Up here we have our
own little space of dry, bracing air--we keep one another sharpened,
don't we, Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find,
when we come down from our tiny Parnassus."

Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm
around his daughter's shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness
of the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight
smile seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while
disavowing its magnificent complacency.

Mrs. Merrick's sudden flush made evident her nose's amelioration. "It is
well to have the gift of idealization, Austin--it makes life far more
comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?" The
irony of her tone was not easy.

"One moment, Kate." Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter's
shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. "Do you see that
quite delightful effect--that group of trees melting against the sky--"
It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom
Mrs. Merrick had never heard. "He could do it; it's like one of his
smiling bits." His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, "I am rather busy
just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a
rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing--German idealism; what
caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun,
the unpleasant sun;--I can't leave just now."

"But a holiday would do you good." Mrs. Merrick was forced to some
urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to
feel that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these
sourly suave contests without being made to feel that she was receiving
one. Indeed, her odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude,
his disdain, and his pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure
she could not afford to miss from her parties--parties often so
painfully scraped together--painfully commonplace when scraped. This
year her party was surprisingly significant, but even in its midst
Austin would count well as her appendage--would certainly redeem her
from her husband's heavy conformity, that simply counted for nothing. He
impressed her, and she imagined that he must impress other people.

"I have a really interesting group," she said, and she recited the list,
adding, "Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so
suggestive--" Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of
consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia.

"Jones? Ah, yes," Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity.

"A clever man, you know."

"Not bad," Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity. "That
little book of his on Comte wasn't half bad; you remember it, Felicia?"

Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added
discomfiture. "You will come, then?" She gathered up her reins.

"May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but
may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow,
and I will join you as soon as may be." His face had regained its full
serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession.

When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her
digging. Her father stood in the path watching her.

"Could one of Spenser's heroines be imagined digging?" he mused. "The
day, the flowers--you among them--bring Spenser to my mind."

"I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand
to do," said Felicia. "But I am not a Britomart type."

"And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;--an indolent, unroused
Britomart. But I don't see you in armour. Charming, that white dress
drenched with sunlight."

"And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose we
must go to her? Aren't you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her
parties?"

"My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial
isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And
then"--Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply--"it is well
that you should have these distractions."

"How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?" Felicia
remarked.

"A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may
find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate
managed to get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a
very clever fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite
extraordinary independence."

"What is he?--a Liberal?"

"Really, my dear Felicia--your ignorance of politics!" Her father
laughed, half approving the indifference to the world's loud drums such
ignorance betokened. "Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is
on the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the
Admiralty."

"Personally ambitious, do you mean?"

"When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?" Mr.
Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but
delicate hand through his hair. "Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if
need be, is no longer to be found in British public life."

Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be
addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague
attention. "He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly
success, and bound to succeed, is clever. It's a cloddish cleverness,
after all. This Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I've
read a little volume of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle,
ironic; bound by no outworn faiths and making use of none for his own
advancement; an observer merely, not a scrambler."

Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, "Scrambling must be nice, I
should think."

She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had
walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she
worked; it was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that
recognized and accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her
father made her wince when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the
world!

The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as her
thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she
had burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now,
it was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of
past energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality
of life go by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what
avail was the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for
armed faiths? She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses
strayed by. But though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart
attitude as sadly funny, her hand had not slackened--she still held her
sword. If a lion did come, so much the better for her--and for life.




CHAPTER II


Only one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that
afternoon--the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little
Gothic church--where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never went,
and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate and
derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia
saw every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely
perhaps, for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely
decorous well-being of the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her,
wings that would fly to risks, a faith that could be won only by
fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most things, she found it every
morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the symbol that rejected
her.

Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than those
of their formal intercourse. He wasn't at all a jackass, and he probably
thought her father one, and as Felicia's place was beside her father the
barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and
smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous
daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin
Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr.
Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his defiant infidelity; he would
have cheerfully waived the relationship of parson for that of mere
neighbour; and he did not ask Mr. Merrick to listen to his sermons; he
knew that they were poor; he counted for more as man than as parson; but
the personality of this recalcitrant, wandering sheep, his vanity and
patronizing superiority of manner made even a neighbourly tolerance
difficult. It was with an impersonal courtesy that he bowed to Mr.
Merrick's daughter as he rode by.

Soon after Felicia went in to give her father his tea. He was sitting in
the small room that was, at once, library and drawing-room. Above
book-filled shelves the walls were whitewashed, and against this
background tall porcelains and bronzes showed their delicate outlines,
and some fine mezzotints after Reynolds and Gainsborough their harmonies
of golden-greys and blacks. In a corner stood an ivory-coloured cast of
the Flying Victory of Samothrace, and above it the thoughtful bust of
Marcus Aurelius looked down upon its arrested swiftness, its still and
glorious strength. From open windows, where white curtains flapped
softly, one looked over the garden and pinewoods and valleys to the sky
of luminous gold.

One note, only, jarred; a charcoal drawing of a woman's head, hung
prominently. Feebly ill-drawn, its over life-size exaggerated its
absurdity; the eyes monstrously large, not well matched, all beaming
high light and sentimental eyelash; the nose and mouth showing a rigid,
a cloying sweetness. This production was the result of one of Mr.
Merrick's rare fits of active self-expression, and, excellent judge of
art though he was, he was completely blind to the grotesqueness of the
caricature of his dead wife. He had drawn it, many years ago, from life,
and claimed to see in it a subtle and exquisite likeness. Felicia
suffered, though with the silent and humorous resignation characteristic
of her, from living with it, even when a photograph of her mother,
standing near, corrected its travesty of her charming countenance.

Mr. Merrick was sitting in a deep armchair, his attitude of complete
ease harmonizing with the tranquil room, though his eyes, as he looked
up from the review he was reading, were irate. "The modern recrudescence
of mysticism is truly disheartening, Felicia," he said. "Have you read
this article?"

Felicia, on her way to the tea-table, glanced at the title he held out,
and nodded.

"How long will the human race, like an ostrich, hide its head from truth
and, in the darkness, find revelation?"

"Why shouldn't they make themselves comfortable in any way they can?"
Felicia asked, measuring her tea into the teapot.

"Comfort at the cost of truth is a despicable immorality."

"Well--what is truth? How is the poor ostrich to find it out? Besides,
papa, you are comfortable, and the truths you believe in aren't." Her
smile at him was one of the comforts Mr. Merrick most securely counted
on. Felicia, in every way, made him comfortable, even when she argued
with him, and by half-droll opposition called out his refutations.

"My dear child," he now said, "your logic is truly feminine. I have
never shirked an intellectual consequence. If, for the moment, I enjoy
certain satisfactions, I never forget that my position is that of the
condemned prisoner."

"We certainly have a nicely furnished cell."

"Your mind evades the realities of the bars," said Mr. Merrick,
selecting, after a hesitation in the choice, a cake from the plate she
handed him. "Once you have seen an ugly fact you turn your back upon
it."

"What better thing can one do with an ugly fact? What claim has truth or
logic upon anybody in a world of atoms and their concussions? The only
thing to do is to make oneself comfortable--with tea or mysticism as the
case may be."

Mr. Merrick received this flippancy with calm, convinced of an essential
chime under superficial janglings. "You are, I am glad to say, Felicia,
a woman who can think."

"We do a lot of thinking," Felicia assented. "How little else!" she
could not repress. That her thinking had been for the most part lonely
she was glad that her father never suspected, nor did he suspect a
Puck-like fun she found in turning his own theories against him. He ate
slowly now, his eyes raised in a train of thought that even his
intelligent daughter, he felt, could hardly have followed. His own
detachment from the shows of life was its theme. Suddenly, however, this
contemplation was shaken by a more intimate, more stirring realization.
"My dear Felicia," he exclaimed, glancing rapidly at the tea-table and
at the stand of eatables, "is not this the day for the frosted cake?"

"Grant forgot it, papa; you shall have it to-morrow."

"There are only the small cakes, then?"

"And bread and butter."

"It is really very careless of Grant, very careless. She should not have
forgotten," said Mr. Merrick, flushed, and as seriously aggrieved as a
child. "Pray, speak sharply to her about it. I looked forward to the
frosted cake to-day, freshly baked, warm, as I like it. It is very
annoying. You are sure that she has not made it?"

"Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it." Felicia looked at him
with a touch of placid severity. "Have another of the small ones."

"No--no, I thank you. I don't care for them." He had eaten three. The
distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful
and unexpected _hors d'oeuvre_ at dinner effaced the grievance. It was
with a species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these
cajoleries, herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he
smoked, and she read _Leopardi_ aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite
forgotten.

When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a melancholy
current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her window
looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply.
Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of
theory, how weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful
it would be--she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of
thought--to love, to be loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance,
this awakening.

Felicia's ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and
pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as
gracious and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in
beauty over the pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear,
analyzing the feminine waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that
she was really ready to fall in love with the first nice person who
presented himself for idealization. He must, of course, be possible;
idealization had been impossible with the stupid men she had met at
Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs and rabbit head. He
must be possible--he must be delightful; and would he ever come?
"Beware, Felicia," she thought. "You are young; you are lonely; you are
sentimental and idle; that's a basis for mistakes and tragedies." She
laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the
yearning, all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and
the sky, found an echo in her untried heart.




CHAPTER III


Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an
unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a
younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even
anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was
helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He
had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking
vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was
still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the
contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people's
apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick's
attitude had always been what it now was--a calm down-smiling from a
hill-top upon other people's dulness.

After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser
reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism--the one book, as
sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date--Austin married a
pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune.

Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of
a sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she
seized upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to
see life.

She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life
steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained;
she was fearless, eager, full of faith.

Austin Merrick met her at a Paris _pension_ and his essentially
irresolute soul was stirred by Miss Grey's resolute eyes, eyes large and
clear, like a boy's. He stayed on at the _pension_ and made Miss Grey's
acquaintance, an easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or
of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply
interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading _Flaubert_, with a
dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and
refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece went
sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey
described in home letters as "very cultivated and high-minded," adding
that she imagined him to belong to an "aristocratic family."

Felicia Grey's crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize;
he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute
impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent
to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world's weights
and measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but
indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant
valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be.

With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic
about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,--these
words with capital letters--that he already felt it to be the fashion to
scoff at a little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest
scorn--were burning realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in
love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had
not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was
in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely
unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly equipped with dollars he
would not so have abandoned himself. It was, indeed, a very modest
equipment, but with his own tiny allowance, that didn't do at all--he
was always in debt--would lift him above the material restrictions that
had so long irked him. His indifference might really, then, equal hers.

He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the
reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking
contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom,
and of making her own living by teaching. "It seems to me that one would
face life more directly--more truly--like that," remarked Miss Grey.

He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days
argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its
responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she
was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of
life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr.
Merrick very "cultivated and high-minded"; she equipped him further with
a "great soul," and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him,
too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness.

He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be
lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life
should be lived with him.

So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her
husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to
Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather
pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed
fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.

She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great
meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like
routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull
country-side, but her husband's character. She never doubted the great
soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted;
he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not
know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she
was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of
his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any
attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to
see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew
blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her
affection.

Her husband's idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it,
or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its
pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than
the lives of any of the neighbouring squires--if as much. What did she
and Austin _do_ in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like
question.

She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick's mind was a
lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be
surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive
criticism, he found the attitude of superiority more attainable by
opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of
scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it
in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had
gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable
to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped
at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the
ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had
not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The
largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a
lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant
optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his
own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for
him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty
ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a
looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of
a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did
not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But
with all his complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick
was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by
indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to
him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw
with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of
bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her
small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as
tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a
radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young
girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick
braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head,
looked hardly more than twenty when she died.

Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness,
with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had
never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender,
very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the
uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due
to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia
remembered the naïvely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her.
"In this life to fail is to triumph," was one, and the pathos to Felicia
was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother's
own life. She had indeed "carried her soul like a white bird," through
the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter
apprehended.

She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also
ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did
not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she
thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more
foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for
lions, and her only title to commendation in her own eyes was that she,
at all events, did not bray.




CHAPTER IV


Mrs. Merrick sent a cart for her niece's box next morning, and Felicia
set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy
in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded easily to sunshine
and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education, easily
expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for her
behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more potent
mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk, smiling,
behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia's mood was happy. She saw it
in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled woods,
in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-like
song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the
warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was
only an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the
road, she met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the
breeziness, the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming
thus upon each other, both smiling to themselves, both looking,
listening, and, as it were, expectant, it seemed only natural that
their eyes should dwell upon each other with frank interest. Their steps
slackened, a mute, pleased query passed between them, and the young man,
doffing his hat, and giving Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of
sunlit auburn hair, said, "I beg your pardon, but I am sure that you are
Miss Merrick."

"And you are Mr. Wynne," said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was not
the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as
natural as all the rest.

"I came to meet you," said Mr. Wynne. "I heard that you were arriving
this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful
garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to
meet you as near them as possible."

Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss
Merrick.

Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white
roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair--hair
the colour of sandal-wood--and her pale face. He would have climbed any
number of hills to see the face--so significant, so resolute, so
delicate.

Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her
wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her
eye-brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet
vivid tints of her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her
eyelashes slanted across them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland
water. Maurice was seeing all this, delightedly,--and that through the
child-like moulding of the cheek, the lips' sweetness, the eyes'
tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous gaiety--a dryad laughing
a little at her own new soul.

"You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me," said Felicia,
"unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to
them----"

"Perhaps you will show me both on some other day," said Maurice, "since
I haven't missed you." He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia,
also making inner comments, reflected that a person so assured of his
own graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His
looks, his words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the
bird still sang on behind them.

"It isn't in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is
unusual."

"I am sure that your garden is unusual--just as this first stage of my
journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure
in a Watteau landscape."

"If you had started a little earlier," Felicia said, smiling, "and met
me on the hill-side, I shouldn't have been so in harmony. There the
pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been
incongruous."

"Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual," he returned; "there
would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I
may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in
the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite
bewilderingly radiant and charming?"

Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say
it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once
more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed
as inevitable as the bird's song. She could hardly feel that his rights
were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he
would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So,
if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a
picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same
sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition.

He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair,
small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his
lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink
and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had
not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy,
his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response
and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of
sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He
was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to
have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale--into a
veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the
only natural thing in the world.

As they approached the lodge-gates--they had been talking without pause
of music, books, pictures, even about life--he asked her how she had
guessed that he was Maurice Wynne--"Because there is only one of
you--but there are several of _us_--Mrs. Merrick's guests, I mean."

"She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of
them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the
other."

"Poor Geoffrey!" Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, "how you have guessed
at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a
tremendous friend of mine."

"Is he? I hope you don't mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest
scrap of conjecture."

"It isn't flippancy; it's intuition. Geoffrey _is_ that, only he is
more. I don't mind a bit--I wouldn't mind flippancy, only I feel bound
to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been
since our boyhood." His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of
character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool
approval to the stately friend.

"I suppose you have heard about the others, too," Maurice went on;
"Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will
strike you. You must tell me--even if it's flippant. She is clever, too;
at all events, she is very effective."

"Do you think they are the same thing?"

"Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn't it?"

"If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect
them, I suppose."

"But if they are stupid?" smiled Maurice, "and such heaps of people are,
aren't they?"

"Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants
out of their stupidity."

"Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does," said Maurice. It was what she
had imagined of him. "And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly
thing," he added.

"Oh; I don't know." Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were
going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. "It would
depend, wouldn't it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?"

"He wants to get power."

"Well, there again, for what end?"

"Isn't power an end in itself?"

"I should think it ought to have an aim."

"Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that
sort of thing?"

"It is the part of the powerful person to say that."

Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. "You won't like Geoffrey,"
he observed. "But though he hasn't ideals I will say of him that he is
dear of the usual reproach of the politician--he claims none. Now Lady
Angela does," he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that
rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. "She lives under tremendously
high pressure, you know." They had passed down the uninteresting avenue,
its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was
reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in
what this pressure consisted.




CHAPTER V


Mrs. Merrick's drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such
intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle
Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of _Art
Nouveau_. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs
weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an
obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of
painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed
like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick's painfully acquired taste had not
had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no
eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.

She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and
shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room,
always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever
apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs.
Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup
of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she
herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her
tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the
tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above
her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a
small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with
distorted bandy legs--a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up
to one, winking and leering with all its decorations--and drawing off
her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her
aunt's kaleidoscope.

Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her
adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before
he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a
young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not
arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm
vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and
figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian
completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His
height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes,
were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia's
quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young
man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness
found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so
magnificent.

An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr.
Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a
corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty
hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession.
The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and
Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that.
Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.

She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid
man--Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him--and in appearance she was very long
and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the
swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a
shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her;
clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that
curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward
the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale,
shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair
haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the
delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost
spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the
meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was
like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A "touched-up" spectre. Lady Angela
certainly did not please--nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than
once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela's seemed to rest
on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed
to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet
making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick
relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice
Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in
the other.

"You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my
opportunity to bring you something." His eyes smiling steadily, as if
over the new bond they had found, said to her, "You don't like your
aunt--nor do I. You are out of your _milieu_ here. Nobody here is
capable of appreciating you; but I appreciate you." The smile was so
infinitely more delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity
in her, only made her happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost
comrade.

As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt's head turned towards them,
and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as
though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received
a more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He
was displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela,
and displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so
freshly young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until
he presently got up and went across the room to Lady Angela,
interrupting her _tête-à-tête_ with such an air of evident purpose that
Mr. Jones arose and wandered away.

Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. "What have you been doing this
afternoon?" he asked.

From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his
eyes were upon them as he spoke.

"Writing to my friends," Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a
great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate
recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was
a probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her
time, after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the
same opinion.

That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her
significance was shown by his next placid question, "What about?"--quite
implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting
to him.

Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be
understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an
intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, "About
how I feel life--theirs and mine."

"You feel a good many things about it--don't you?" Geoffrey smiled,
though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and
kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, "I
believe in feeling," she returned.

"You and Maurice are alike in that."

"Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an
end; mine is a means."

"For the good of others?" Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a
perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not
imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one
thing, but to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble
Hermes is gently quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it
was one that Geoffrey often gave her. He was one of the few people, she
told herself, who almost made her angry. She flushed now, ever so
slightly, at the tone. Yet with a sweet patience that he should have
felt as the turning of the other cheek, she answered, "I own that I try
to live for others."

"And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he
is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference."

Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at
her wrist.

"You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;--wilful, isn't
it?--perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain
attitudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts
it."

"Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?" Geoffrey inquired, raising his
eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the
palm-tree. "I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for
others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so."

"I have owned to an aim--not to an attainment. Why is it that those who
do not aim cannot forgive those who do?--try always to smirch the
effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not
self-righteous, Geoffrey--I frankly recognize your intimation--why not
make it as frankly?"

Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all
abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very
lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before
him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, "I am sure
that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are
very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you
a little."

"It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you
were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is
more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is
strong, though I myself am weak."

Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to
observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it
was now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and
his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind
turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but
flattering. "Who is that girl?" he inquired.

Angela's eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that
Geoffrey's interest in her, his relative, was only because of his
interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some
years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as
the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by
Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that
Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own
hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision,
she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of
sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be
Maurice's, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice's
indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at
the girl under the palm--the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the
talk to--she said vaguely, "A niece--a cousin--I forget which Mrs.
Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the
world--the world to her. Quaint, isn't it?"

"I shouldn't like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick's," Geoffrey
observed. "An ugly woman," he went on, adding, "The niece doesn't look
provincial."

"No; oddly she doesn't; not physically; but provincial in soul I should
think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a
shallow joy in life. It hasn't suffered, isn't capable of much
suffering. She looks like a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive,
alluring."

Geoffrey passed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it
was natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was
clearly allured.

"Her dress isn't provincial either," he said; "its simplicity is
extremely sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods.
She is a young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress."

"And how to eat," mused Angela. "Dear child, it's really delightful to
see such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich."

"I beg your pardon, it is her fifth."

"You share Maurice's interest."

"Is Maurice so interested?"

"Isn't he?"

"While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a sketch
of her."

Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it
with, "Why did you come here, Geoffrey?"

"Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a
quiet place where one can rest."

"And why did Maurice come?"

Geoffrey responded promptly. "To see you--in a quiet place where he
_can_ see you."

She let the assertion pass, forestalling a possible retort with--

"And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of
Mrs. Merrick."

"Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?"

"Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or
sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is
interested in many of my objects. She is trying to grow."

"And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring
something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and thorny."

"Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She
made me feel that, and I never refuse help."

Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely
playful.

"Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship's sake," he
said, "rather than for Mrs. Merrick's." And Angela was unable to repress
an assenting though superficial lightness.




CHAPTER VI


Geoffrey and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his
mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an
obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy
inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an
heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her
greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under
the wife's guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate,
a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the
Government's disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed
and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted
in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were
at all veracious.

Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in
London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters
all well-married, inherited the father's heavy determination, the
mother's nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned
the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took
their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never
distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no
further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what
they had, and held it firmly.

Angela's father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be
said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and
sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open
rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open
scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its
thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical _femme
incomprise_, and just before her death she became fervently religious.

Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible,
finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She
could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother's
character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.

Geoffrey's strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no
such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and
connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder
branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against
all manner of restrictions.

The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his
wife's tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success
from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley
blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal
forms. The strain, in passing through the two or three generations of
simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears,
had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as
proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She
lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high
places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity
for self-advancement, she transferred her passionate and patient hopes
to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never
learned, until shortly after his father's death, that his own
opportunities were won not only by his mother's battlings, but by his
father's martyrdom.

John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in
a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense,
had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian
ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he
belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his
wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little
have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of
thinking about them--they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that
one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of
life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not
prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving
the Church.

How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that.
His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities.
His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put
before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he
would find something to do.

"Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we
will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?" Mrs. Daunt's eyes flashed
fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the
University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their
child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept
on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of
ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their
conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash
only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which
alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His
influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among
them;--what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?--the
wrecking of others' faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking
ship--she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the
place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through
the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her;
yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the
flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.

Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father's death, told her son of the
spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though
very tender towards her husband's memory, in the strength that had saved
them all from his weakness.

Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. "It shouldn't
have happened had I known," he said; "I could have made my way."

"Made your way, my dear child!" cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and
yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. "Do your realize, I
wonder, what it cost us to make you?--cost me, rather, for I did it all.
Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every
stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way,
but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from
determines the height one attains."

"No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken
longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible," said
Geoffrey.

He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for
he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he
regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done
an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.

Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but
when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered
Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it
was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of
it, poisoned all her happiness.

Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more
firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she
never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all
her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was
with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the
rapacities only.

Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.

The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could
not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further
than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.

Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his
sentiments towards this significant young relative, "I don't like her.
She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn't ask her here any
more."

Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome
this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela's fortune to back him,
Geoffrey's career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive
seemed forthcoming.

She died before seeing that Angela's affections were centred on Maurice
Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing
Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey's, who
had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to
him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her
eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished
only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various
fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him
the barrier to her hopes.

At present, three years after his mother's death, Geoffrey's position in
the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of
a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite
impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was
grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his
constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let
them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them,
and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man
became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real
supremacy.

The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small
income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston,
the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to
his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his
winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his
resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he
had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed.
Ingrained in Geoffrey's nature was the sense that power was his, and
that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he
could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his
own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that
had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his
experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the
personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in
the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could
attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller
men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and
held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him--though Geoffrey did
not appeal to these dubious sanctions--that in a great man's ends the
world also found its best.

He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He
was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of
humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never
blinded by this motive's various disguises--idealistic, aesthetic, or
philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite
owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he
was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and
tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by
all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of
sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he
would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling
towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better
use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation's
interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended
that each should survive to the best of its ability.

So far only outer circumstances had opposed him--and been walked
through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor
sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares
for him.

Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their
feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the
masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of
even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal,
most exquisitely furbelowed--he granted her good taste in spiritual
trappings--he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his
friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.

Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this
affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely
out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art
was Maurice's object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of
life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether
inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the
arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the
arabesque in moments of leisure.

Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour,
who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony.
He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did
not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the
world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and
looked to see Maurice's future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a
good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall.




CHAPTER VII


Felicia was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she
made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about
the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience.

She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many
people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of
interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had
much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had
been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played
and sang; Felicia's place among them was an unimportant one. Miss
Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a passionate ballad, her eyes
fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions
strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss
Bulmer's shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the
enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat
down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the
undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer,
flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean over her and watch her
fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience
when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer
said, "You really do improve so much," to have some one, some one who
knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with
recognition, clapping his hands and crying, "Magnificent, simply
magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn't know
that you really were a musician--I thought you merely played the piano!"

He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went,
an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia
with a new discernment.

"But you mustn't stop," said Maurice; "she mustn't stop, must she, Mrs.
Merrick? Why didn't you prepare us for this treat? You never told us
that your niece was a genius."

Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow
satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice's. "Is
she not wonderful? We expect great things of her," she said, for Mrs.
Merrick was quick at adjustments.

Felicia's placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment.

Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer's place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that
benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her
fingering, while she played.

It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience.

Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This
view from Trensome Hall--the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees
framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like
bands of flowers--was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in
the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne's.

He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved
his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at
him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this
beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one.

"Come down," said Maurice. "How good of you to be up early. Let us have
a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time."

Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a
walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as
playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was
waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns
and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the
deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet
earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether
un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of
his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view--as far as he
could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes the
pages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully
upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought
most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that
reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a
melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take
hard.

"Do you ever have moods of despondency--despair?" he asked her, as they
went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency
were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows
were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen
far above, beyond the sparkling green.

"Moods? No; I don't think so," said Felicia; "but I am sometimes
horribly discontented--and when I am I can't imagine anything that would
content me."

"Not anything?"

"Not anything--except everything. I mean being sure that everything is
significant, worth while."

"But it is worth while as long as it lasts."

"But it doesn't last!" She smiled round at him, for she was leading the
way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet
grasses on either side. "The sense of impermanence often poisons the
worth." She added, "Do you have moods?"

"Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It's funny that I should talk to you
about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that
there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues
except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the
way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at
Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me
out, put me on my feet, and, once I'd done gasping, set me running, as
it were, got up my circulation. He didn't argue; but he wonderfully
understood, and he promptly acted."

"And do you have them, the moods, because things don't last?" Felicia
asked, looking ahead into the wood's translucent green.

"No; not so much that as that things don't come. I want so much more
than I ever get. I want to feel everything--to the uttermost. I never
get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see,
rather than loss that I dread."

They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were
meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the
stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him,
showed a gravity, a little perplexity. "You don't understand that?" he
asked, when she stepped down beside him.

"No; I dread both."

"I am awfully human," said Maurice; "and I want the whole human
gamut--but that's all I ask."

"But what is the human gamut?"

"That question from your father's daughter! Your father, I hear, is a
great positivist."

"Well, his daughter asks the question."

They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall
field flowers.

"Do you know," he asked, "how, after this, I shall always personify
faith to myself?"

"Faith?"

"Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking
among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The
key-note of your life is a question."

"Do you call the asking of a question, faith?" Felicia smiled.

"It's faith to think it worth asking."

Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it.
He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his
observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy,
yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of
almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or
displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented
unfavourably upon her companionship with Maurice. And with the intuition
came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep
him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her
among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers.
Really, Mr. Daunt's head, so high against the blue sky, with its classic
white and gold, was ridiculously handsome. She nodded a smiling _au
revoir_ to Maurice and left them.

The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the
garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped
behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret.
Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice.

"That's a very pretty girl," Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the
symptom.

Maurice's shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable
repudiation.

"Pretty! Don't be so trivial!"

"Well--what was it Angela called her yesterday?--alluring, elusive?"

"Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela's lips the terms would savour too
much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is
a wild rose open to the sky, dewy, _un peu sauvage_; anything less
alluring in Angela's sense of the word was never seen."

Geoffrey, who had heard a multitude of wild-rose raptures, received this
one with composure.

"I assure you, Geoffrey," Maurice went on, growing the more confidential
for his momentary reticence, "I assure you that if I could afford it I
would fall in love with that enchanting girl."

"And since you can't afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical.
Meanwhile, what of Angela?"

"You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag
in Angela?"

"Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you.
Don't flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela's affection too far."

Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably.

"My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn't that sort. One flirts in the
boudoir--not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to
risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela's affection."

"Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this
last year of dallying meant?"

"Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us."

"Yet you came down here----?"

"To go on dallying. I own it. But I've never yet made up my mind to find
my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven't any reason to believe
that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it
rather nicely." Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and
as though by holding the matter at arm's length he were keeping it from
the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.

The latter's composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said,
"Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don't find the
culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material
considerations as well as I do, so I'll not urge them, but add to them
the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with
Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it--and they
might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision."

"Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don't show me the nuggets under
the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction--must charm me
into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my
urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my
Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating
marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn't jar upon you as it
would upon me. When it's got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to
fall in love so completely that I shan't be able to write a sonnet about
it. Now, I've written several sonnets to Angela."

Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his
watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, "I
don't urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is,
I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don't allow an
emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You've had
quite enough of these experiments in feeling."

"Ah! but suppose--suppose," laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the
laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind
him, "suppose that this were the permanent emotion."

"In that case," Geoffrey answered, "I should be very sorry for you, and
for Angela and for the wild rose."




CHAPTER VIII


"You and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia," Mrs. Merrick said
to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and
magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for
a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning
desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick's mind was of the order that infers
matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision
the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano
and violin--whatever Mr. Wynne's projects, Felicia ought not to count
upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece's
worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed
her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a
good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could
treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not
quite of bread and butter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure
establishment.

These were Mrs. Merrick's thoughts while she sorted the papers and
remarked upon the rapid friendship.

"You know," she said, laying the one magazine upon the other, "that he
is very poor. I fancy he has no settled income at all."

It had come, the inevitable grunt in the midst of the pastoral. Even in
her displeasure, Felicia could feel some amusement in the sudden simile
that suggested Aunt Kate as the unobserved pig in its pig-sty among the
orchards and rose-hedges where she had been happily strolling. She could
almost see a flexible, inquiring snout pushing between the palings,
above it the scrutiny of an observant eye. The simile so softened the
displeasure that her voice had all its indolent mildness as she asked,
"What has his poverty got to do with his friendship, Aunt Kate?" After
all, it was easy to lean over the palings, and with a stick, indulgently
to scratch the creature's back.

"Ah! nothing--nothing at all, no doubt, especially since it is said that
he is all but engaged to Lady Angela. He has admired her for years."

"And what then? Are any of his friendships a menace to his engagement do
you think?"

"Of course not, Felicia. You jump at such odd conclusions. And I did not
say that he was engaged, merely that he had admired her for years. It's
improbable that Lady Angela would accept him."

"At all events, a friendship of two days' standing can hardly be
affected by anything you may or may not have heard. _You_ mustn't jump
at odd conclusions, Aunt Kate." Felicia could not repress this as she
put her book under her arm and stepped from the window on to the lawn.
In spite of the lightness of her tone, the grunt had come as an ugly
interruption in a melodious mood. To hear such things did affect the two
days' friendship, though she did not believe them. She had known him for
only two days, but the two days had been hers so exclusively that any
other "admiration" must mean very little. Not that the two days meant
much to either of them, she assured herself. They had only strolled
among rose-hedges. A pity, though, that the pig-sty had to be faced.

On the lawn coming towards her were Angela, Maurice and Geoffrey. They
personified the new life into which she seemed to have entered. To see
them together pushed her back once more into the place of spectator.
Felicia had time to recognize her own hurt and almost angry mood as she
approached them and smiled at them in passing. But Angela, with a
winning hand held out, detained her. "You are so fond of walking. Won't
you come with us? Just about the grounds?" she said. She drew Felicia's
hand within her arm. "I am not very strong, so I can't make magnificent
expeditions as you do--Maurice tells me--with him before breakfast. But
even a little walk has twice the value if it's a talking walk, don't you
think?"

"I suppose it has," said Felicia, feeling a slight confusion as she
walked between them.

"Though a silent walk, with a companion one cares for, has even more,
perhaps," Angela added. "Don't you love silence?"

"I have had so much of it," said Felicia.

"So much silence; how exquisite! Isn't that a picture, Maurice, that she
makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness,
much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me
of it." Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between
them. "Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very
little?"

"Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I
only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could
have so much silence as not to care much about it."

Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the
shrinking irritability be simply--she asked it of herself with quite a
pang of self-disgust--a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it
was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate
herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were
more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady
Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers
as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push
her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her
eye in going over her went with something of a child's large coldness.

Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A
scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms
and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with
transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitely undressed--a wan
Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia
thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic
rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock,
stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew--a
frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not
put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm.
Let the contrast be as obvious as possible--as unbecoming to herself as
possible.

"You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am
here again," Angela went on; "may I? I can't tell you how people
interest me. I have always loved to look at other people's
lives--haven't I, Maurice?" Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking;
none of her pretty appeals included him.

"To meddle as well as look, you think--don't you?" and her smile was now
half sad in its humour.

"Oh, you meddle quite nicely," Maurice said; "Let her meddle with you,
Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do
you no harm."

"Rather scant encouragement for you!" laughed Angela, looking down, for
she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; "but may I? What I really
want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been
talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to
be done; and so much apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a
struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the
grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities
are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn't think me a Don
Quixote--tilting at other people's windmills; but wherever I go I
confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there
to live for?"

"I don't help anybody," said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness,
for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady
Angela's signature; "I don't know anything about the charities here. We
never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are
quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can't be of much
use, except as warnings, I suppose."

It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after
the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they
turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still
abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them.

The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her
reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their
eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having
fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their
lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification.

But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand, was speaking. "May I
help _you_, then, to be of more use?" she said; "I know how
circumstances--material circumstances--interfere. You live so far from
the village, and your father's interests, your interests, are
intellectual, not ethical. You haven't had an opportunity for thinking
about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should
love to talk to you about it all--the giving of oneself, the life for
others, which is the only true living. You haven't seen the spiritual
and practical side of things--for practical and spiritual are one in
reality. We know, only to do."

They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between
Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at
the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though
finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with
Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these
thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown
them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself
contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard
indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind
their palings to seraphs in laces.

"I know very little," she said; "I certainly do nothing."

"Oh, come now!" Maurice broke in. "You talk to your father; you make a
beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doing
nothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved
giving in the garden to the village children--pets of yours. I have no
doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized
charities."

"Ah! you do interest yourself then!" Angela turned on her a look of
bright reproach. "How can you say you do nothing? I am so _glad_ you
have the children--so glad that you don't shut yourself away in a palace
of art; nothing is more dangerous than that."

"That's a hit at me," Maurice declared; "I inhabit the dangerous palace,
and don't intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always
sounding her trumpet at its gate."

Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, "Might not a
shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?"

The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and
against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She
would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for
approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr.
Daunt was a half-insolent coxcomb, and she did not want Maurice to
defend her motives.

Angela's eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his
light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. "My dear
Geoffrey," she said, "you say things at times that make me wonder
whether you have not very delicate perceptions as well as a ruthless
will. I don't quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to
mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is
that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the
suffering of life--so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?"

"It depends upon what's in it, my dear Angela." Geoffrey watched his
last, and very perfect ring, float softly against the blue.

"A shrine implies some sanctified presence."

"I am afraid that I haven't much faith in miraculous healings."

"In anything, Geoffrey?"

"In no words," the Olympian answered. The sun glittered upon his golden
head as he turned to smile at Angela with, Felicia felt, implacable
indifference. Their walk had brought them near the house again.

"I must go and finish my book," said Felicia; "after these shrines and
palaces I shall feel that I am creeping into a ditch when I return to
it. I hope that ditches aren't dangerous, too."

"Why do you also pretend not to be clever?" Angela asked her softly,
suddenly, smiling closely into her eyes. "What is the book?" She bent
her head to the title, looking up at once gravely. "You like him?"

"I said it was like creeping into a ditch. But there is a certain
splendour to be found even in ditches--he shows it to one, I think."

Angela put a hand on her arm; "Don't read him. A lily should not look at
ditches."

"I am going to crawl to the very end of mine--muddy ordeal though it
is," Felicia declared, trying to keep defiance from her smile, and aware
that the Olympian was looking at her and that she was flushing. Her
detached student's interest was probably branded in all their eyes with
some crude and ugly interpretation. Well, let them think what they liked
of her. She turned and went into the house. This had not been a
melodious afternoon.

"Poor child!" sighed Angela, "poor child! What a _milieu_! An infidel
papa and decadent literature."

"Well, it has raised a lily, you see," Maurice remarked.

"Has it?" said Angela. "Poor child. I long to help her."




CHAPTER IX


Angela Bagley wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that
she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it
was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her
inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and
actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature
grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality,
like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The
scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coarse desires;
she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her
sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to
her--though she did not know that they were only tools--tools in a
complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools
used always for an egotistic end.

In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her
effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened.

Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had
charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she
would be the noblest influence in his life, not knowing that to gain
that influence she would abase herself to any ignobility. Again and
again she had almost thrown herself at his head--oh! ugly
phrase!--Angela did not use it--shown him her heart, rather, though with
a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the
giving of deep friendship if other givings were ignored. Again and again
Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that
kept the clasp of friendship, a smile that salved her pride by
recognizing only friendship in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the
self-immolation of this love--for Angela was well aware of its romantic
indifference to vulgar considerations--now when she was almost sure that
she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost
sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift
and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against
Felicia.

She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell
herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his
raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now
whispered in her heart, and she armed herself.

The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was
ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And
while fully conscious of the nobility of her own attitude in its
stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was
by no means conscious that she had armed herself and that the attitude
was her weapon.

The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr.
Merrick.

Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick
might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good
looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey's calm gaze at
him, in Maurice's kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man's
genial patronage--an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement;
she saw these things in relation to Felicia's attitude towards them, her
placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any
that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him,
she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a
funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of
lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting
away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction
that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target
attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed,
came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia's
stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely
upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a
halo.

"How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick," Angela said to her hostess; "I
see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an
intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified
in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he
must jar upon you and your husband--could I fail to see it? And yet how
kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I
suppose, their only outlook on life."

Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and
where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was
now enabled to see him with Lady Angela's clearer vision. She saw
herself, too, as very kind indeed.

To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. "What a type! That's
what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His
mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of
the century!" Since coming into the country she had not been so near
Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.

"He encouraged me magnificently this morning," Maurice in his mirth
confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile,
understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping
from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was
failing her; she couldn't tell herself with truth that she was
indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt's derivative
discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new
little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging
as of appreciating him.

Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor--he
was always taking the floor--got up and strolled away, quite as if he
were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela's sad
and vacant eyes, and Maurice's deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father
was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an
unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he
became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was
the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too
stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a
child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he
strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.

Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the
garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the
sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed
them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye
that, seeing through her evasions, said, "I understand everything.
Command me, you charming friend." To keep silence towards him, to escape
for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings
was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.

It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father's arrival, while
at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her
father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.

Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his
brother's vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful
immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger,
ready to bubble up.

Maurice's eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light,
strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much
against her all the rest.

"It's an age of sham, of conformity," Mr. Austin announced. "There seem
no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since
apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is
revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old
faiths into vaporous metaphors--metaphors accepted literally by the
masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with
metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a
candlestick--the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy
water!" His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate
and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in
even more impressive tones, "Don't, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of
faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a
fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I
think, Guyau said."

He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire
was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning
still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.

"Ah well," said Mr. Cuthbert, "all that's beside the mark. One must have
custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to
pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week," he
added, looking genially around the table.

"Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting," Mr. Jones went on to
Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder
of Mr. Merrick's denunciations to roll by.

"Godersham on faith. I've no doubt of it." The thunder rolled again.
"You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As
for the country going to pieces, that's rubbish. It shrivels in its
stiff shell."

"I have the greatest regard for Godersham--the very greatest," Mr.
Cuthbert said temperately.

"I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You
don't follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that
I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile
interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives
the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal
less theism than Voltaire--let us say. I consider such a man morally
culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a
menace to the national welfare."

Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind
still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia's attention turned from
him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the
interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a
wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid
impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr.
Merrick's flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt's face that
arrested Felicia's attention.

Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked
at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm.
To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt
herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true,
true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable
conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did
not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all
against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his
tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at
all of them. "Hear! hear! papa." She flung into the emptiness a flaming
little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her.
Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face,
steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her
thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the
sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across
the table. Geoffrey's hand continued automatically to break his bread.

"Hear! hear! Miss Merrick." Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing
her eyes from Geoffrey's. "I put your glove in my helmet. But really,
you know, Mr. Merrick--" his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the
almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship--"we shall
plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about
faith."

"Metaphysics!" Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at
Felicia's banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than
his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his
shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the
task of forcing a way into his brother's comprehension--overlaid with
"crusts of custom."

"A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia," said Mrs.
Merrick.

"Miss Merrick isn't an infidel; she's only a loyalist," said Maurice.

Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented
by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued--

"Don't you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all
attacks?"

"I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps," said Angela, who
still leaned on her hand and still looked down; "but to me mere
disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more
repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of
belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose
itself, is sacred to me."

She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt;
yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the
scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.

Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and
Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the
lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.

She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently,
clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.

Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk
near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on.
Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. "You
_were_ more a loyalist than an infidel--I understood. Only your father
pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain,
pain you?"

Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over
amazement, still kept the look of steely steadiness. "I am sorry that
any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger's
opinion of him could hardly give me pain."

This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected.
She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick
intelligence, might savour of meanness--a stroke under cover of
darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest;
indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag
her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant.

"You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?" There was a real quiver in her
voice.

"Do you count me as more?" Felicia asked.

"I want to count you as a great deal more."

A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She
smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling
one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice
came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness
of attitude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with
Felicia's sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then
slipped over to Felicia's sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile,
now, on the two men.

"I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was," she said; "we all
understood, didn't we?"

Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She
broke through it, regardless of rents. "_I_ don't understand," she
declared. She rose, drawing her hand from Angela's, confronting them.
"I think trivial things had best be left alone." With this, picking up
her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a
full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how
uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when
she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice's.
Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded
him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is assured. At
once he understood and answered.

"May I come too?" he asked.

"Do. I am going for a walk."

This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of
two women over a man. Felicia's face kept its hardness as she and
Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the
fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if
she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the
lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great
deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under
this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion,
and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in
merely following her.

Maurice's tact, as delicate as a woman's, forced no sympathy upon her by
an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they
went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting
the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went
slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was
ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.

"Do you know," he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path
where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, "to-day you are not a
bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows
and eyes is all Romney--Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that
you only remind me of beautiful things?"

Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no
reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. "Now _do_ you
consider such a remark impertinent?" Maurice demanded. "You frighten me,
you know. I feel in you such a _farouche_ fastidiousness. Our idealist
in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments."

"Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be
called that," said Felicia, biting into her pear; "I suppose I hardly
know how to accept compliments gracefully--never having had any made me
before."

"It's too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you.
You know that, don't you?"

"How can I tell? I have known you just five days."

"Still--you do know me."

"Doesn't Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider
your compliments to her blaring?" Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at
him now with her dryad-like malice.

"Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all
trustworthy."

"No, no," Felicia protested.

"No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn't know me as well as you do--in spite
of your nipping reference to five days--and for the simple reason that
she doesn't know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one's outer
vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her--she is, on the
whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she
means--and that's so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you
intend to mean."

The memory of Aunt Kate's grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this
frank analysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep
was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession
from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and
desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new
order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular
garden--finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar--had made
its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its
roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely
pleasing in the delicate desecration.

This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very
intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not
altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new
thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to
hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt
delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him,
should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked.

And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than
liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed,
intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young
man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals,
whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed
all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong
and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her
on and there was no time to pause, to analyze, to weigh her heart. She
only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little
frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she
had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the
least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart
might ache at the loss of the dear companion.

Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing.




CHAPTER X


There must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted
with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might
endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn't much care what
it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden
was Maurice's philosophy.

He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the
library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was
meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the
eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long
undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped
together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father's
articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the accumulation of
material. German idealism had been abandoned. "Why attack these castles
of sand?" said Mr. Merrick.

From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down
at Maurice.

"To-day you are not to escape me," he declared. "I claim all to-day. You
will practise?"

"I will. Why do you say I escape you?" She had to smile at his
acuteness.

"Since the other day--in the garden--you have. Angela irritated you,
Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn't it a
little true?" He leaned against her steps, answering her smile.

"Perhaps a little," Felicia owned. "I felt, perhaps, rather out of it."

"So you are--out of it, with me." His words were light, too, but she
felt the underlying emphasis. "You see we feel things in the same way,
see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to
bar me away from you--even for a day or two--and two days is a
frightfully long time in a mere week." His voice lifted itself from the
almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences
looked at and effaced, he went on. "I've something here I want you to
see and feel with me." He showed her the volume he held,
Maeterlinck--delightful dreamer.

"At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that's an
unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather
than in darkness."

"This isn't nightmare, but it's not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn
perhaps--or perhaps twilight; you must say."

"I saw Mr. Daunt pass outside just then. He always spends the morning
here. Shall we read it somewhere else?"

"Ah--let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey
would take it." Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the
twilight dream might carry him too far. "You dislike him? Really?"

"Frankly, I don't like him--but I don't want to exclude him from the
reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-assured
makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him.
He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me
think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad."

"Ah!" Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. "You have seen the
best thing in Geoffrey--the single-minded directness of his quest--its
object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty."

"And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It's a touch of human
tenderness that makes him less chilling."

"Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre.
I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges
hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I
got broken."

"No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don't believe he
has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How
grey and rigid his life must be." Geoffrey walked in as she said it.

Maurice greeted his friend gaily. "Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit
of poetry. I'm going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once."
He turned his pages.

Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to
Felicia's side.

"You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?"

Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards
women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a
lollipop--and without consulting the child's preference as to size,
shape or colour.

"Sometimes," she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the
steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. "Not
too often."

"I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young
woman. Surely you can't get too much of--Browning for instance?" and
Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull's-eye was
being kindly offered.

"Easily," she retorted; "but let's hear Maeterlinck, who has been
waiting for you."

Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read--

    Et s'il revenait un jour,
    Que faut-il lui dire?
   --Dites-lui qu'on l'attendit
    Jusqu'à s'en mourir--

    Et s'il m'interroge encore
    Sans me reconnaître?
   --Parlez-lui comme une soeur,
    Il souffre peutêtre--

    Et s'il demande où vous êtes,
    Que faut-il répondre?
   --Donnez-lui mon anneau d'or
    Sans rien lui répondre.

    Et s'il veut savoir pourquoi
    La salle est déserte?
   --Montrez-lui la lampe éteinte
    Et la porte ouverte.

    Et s'il m'interroge alors
    Sur la dernière heure?
   --Dites-lui qui j'ai souri
    De peur qu'il ne pleure.

Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees,
looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her.

He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like
deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny,
autumnal trees. Felicia's manner towards Maurice during these last days
had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend's behalf. His newer
impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose
flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and
limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice's hopes. But that she smiled
upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was
sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent
mischance of the day before.

A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but
he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so,
for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardly knew that he
wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he
stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia's shoulder, vaguely listening
to pathetic words and looking at Felicia's half-averted profile. He was
conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the
soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and
touched.

Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had
come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest,
sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and
open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain
for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing
squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and
unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father
than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had
seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky,
or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He
had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the
spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the
still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have
struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But
the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.

"Isn't that the very heart of love?" Maurice asked.

She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.

"I should have wanted him to cry," she said.

"No; I think that if I loved a woman," Maurice turned the leaves of his
book, "I should want her to smile."

"I don't believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried
dreadfully."

"You don't think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?"

"I was thinking of the heart--as it is. Now, I might have said it
all--only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the
door!"

The slight tension in Maurice's voice and look yielded to her
swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.

"Base girl!" he cried, laughing.

"Base and natural. Isn't the heart of love the longing to be loved? How
could one miss such a chance--even if it meant more suffering for the
loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer."

But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, "If I were dying, and
suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of
it--rather she smiled."

"But you would rob her then of her right to suffer--of her right to love
you more." Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. "What would you wish?
Don't say that you are as inhumanly noble as Mr. Wynne."

"I don't think we can in the least tell what we would wish."

"So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne's magnanimity may both be
illusory?"

"You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather
mawkish," Geoffrey added.

Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. "Papa goes
this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared
the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don't think the poem
mawkish."

Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with reassuring composure, and
Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both
of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the
little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In
Felicia was that more vivid sense of life--of an approaching crisis; in
Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More
desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet--what was he to
do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to
nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or
picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he
could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd
to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk
against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable
cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then
he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a
distasteful one; only some inner impetus was needed to make it really
alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized
that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge
impossible--as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added
fear in the thought that a new attitude in Angela might have made the
refuge inaccessible.

Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a
flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly,
half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear;
but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?--see that it was neither
so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted,
marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see
himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that
final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort.

He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely
to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long
looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was
beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one
couldn't stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at
the end of the sunny vista was--pain; the flowers and trees that led to
it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make
serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she
flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her
colouring and manner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile
surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of
half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden
shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of
their companionship--but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real
pang. Such fancies, after letting her know--she must know--that he would
suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not
in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be
his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that
superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the
one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she--could she--love him?




CHAPTER XI


He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently
and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such
thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had
recently written--a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole
year--and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore
logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they
did, behind a golden haze. Maurice's moods easily alternated between
golden hazes and black fogs.

Geoffrey went away on that morning--that, too, was the receding of an
uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders,
like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he
didn't want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was
a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the
violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung
and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness
more blissful.

"I sometimes think," he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm
on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, "that sadness is
the most beautiful thing in life."

In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact,
as now, when she said, "To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps."

"But we shouldn't be able to see or hear it if we hadn't lived it."

"It only becomes beauty, then, when we've outlived it, not while we are
in it. People dress up their sorrows so," said Felicia, turning vaguely
the pages of the music before her; "they always remind me of the king in
the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself
sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked."

"I believe you are right," laughed Maurice, "and that it is only when we
are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness."

Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the
realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and
there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the
empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was
a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion.
But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it
life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.

"And since it's a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?" she
asked.

"Not quite yet." Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The
golden haze was about them; it shut off everything else. She must love
him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future
take care of itself? It probably would--her father could probably give
them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a
lot of articles--very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he
contemplated Felicia and hesitated.

In the midst of this hesitation--_could_ he risk a cramping
poverty?--would it be base to find out whether she loved him--to make
her love him--with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised
grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations
they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue
eyes resolved itself--as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of
the sky--into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently,
and the smile said, "I love you. You are near me. That is why I am
happy."

But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away.

"Felicia, dearest Felicia," said Maurice. He took her hand. "I do so
adore you. Tell me that you can love me?"

Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed;

"I suppose it must be that."

"You do love me?"

"I suppose I do."

"Oh!--darling!" he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she
still kept her look of almost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his
Dresden shepherdess.

It was altogether like an _Embarquement pour Cythère_, Maurice thought,
with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing
similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze--what need to ask
where bound--to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a
wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into
a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief
at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the
ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness.
Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being
loved, after that first shock of wonder--that slipping from the shore to
the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new
trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she
went to meet its meaning.

"I almost felt that you loved me--I did not really guess it--but I felt,
though it seemed so strange," she said. She drew away from him a
little--her hands folded on his breast--so that she might look at him.

"From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that
turning in the lane. You can't claim any such pedigree of feeling!" He
put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles
and the lightness of their words.

"I can see no other beginning--unless just now is one."

"You did not know--not one bit--until just now."

"Can one fall in love so suddenly?" she wondered.

"Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long."

"And you really--really knew?"

"From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here--here at
last she is. There was a bird singing near us--do you remember, darling?
The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried."

"Oh--dear Maurice, it is too beautiful," said Felicia, almost sighing.
"Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?"

She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long
room.

"Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?" she said.
"Does that make me seem of less value?"

Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. "It only makes me seem of more; it is
my _métier_, that--to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious
things. Who that has ever known you _could_ have loved you, pray? Who
could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value,
that seeing it in others."

The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above
even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with
a gravity almost sad.

"Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some
real value myself--for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable.
Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia." And as he spoke she saw
in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness.

"Something in me!" The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now,
who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to
her lips, saying, "Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come
to me to lose your fears."

It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden
appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than
the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her,
and in herself the power to answer it.

Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous
suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What
could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him.

"What indeed!" Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance
underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked--

"You never did care for Lady Angela?"

"Never--never--never!" said Maurice. In the light of his love for
Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere.
Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next
question--

"Nor she for you--not really, I hope?"

"Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers."

Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two
days--the days of the happy secret--wondered, a poignancy in the wonder,
if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition,
hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice's common-sense only
that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with
her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that
made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would
love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love.
Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out--the
emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic
standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in
Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little
girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere
conquest--to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as
it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent.
The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was
entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior
nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility
Angela could not forgive--and did not know she could not. She talked
herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed
Felicia's unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had
met. "I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does,
you know." Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and
confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after
this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question
slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.

Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful
head of a Christ that she always carried with her.

"I have lived to my highest!--oh! I have," she murmured; and at the
sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed,
came.

"This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my
soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him;
and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she
is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings--to hurt me
so."

The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did
not know that she hated Felicia.




CHAPTER XII


Maurice and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she
was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the
hill-top, in the garden he was at last to see, they were to say
good-bye--good-bye for a little while. Felicia, in her new and blissful
confidence, did not even think of asking for how long, it seemed sure to
be so short. But Maurice was already asking himself the question,
battling creeping doubts with passionate asseverations. And better than
passionate asseverations was the meeting of such doubts by holding her
more closely in the deep, lonely lane, dispelling shadows from his mind
with a kiss. To hold her, to kiss her, was to keep alight a flame of joy
within him, a flame that drooped and flickered when those sad thoughts
blew over it; and without was sadness too; the fragrance of the white
traveller's-joy in the hedges seemed a sigh; the soft evening, the pale
clouded sky, were grey-habited nuns, whispering of the crumbling of
earthly hopes.

That Felicia heard no such whispers, no such sighs, her pensive but
steadily gazing profile showed. The pensiveness was a dove brooding on a
secure peace; her eyes, gazing ahead, had the gravity of a child's
seeing happy visions. He felt a pang of envy. Or was it ignorance that
kept fear from her? Again he turned her face, white flower that it was,
to him, bending his lips to hers. Only so he found some of her peace,
her serenity.

Felicia, after the kiss, still looked at him. "I would do anything for
you--suffer anything," she said.

"I don't want you ever to suffer for me."

"I would almost rather. It would make even deeper roots."

"And if the suffering were poverty, grinding poverty?--I am very poor,
Felicia"--Maurice's voice hurried, broke a little--"I have nothing."

"I should like showing you how little I mind. We can both work. I have
always thought that I might make something by giving lessons in
music--or translating; I am a good linguist." Her realism was a new
aspect of her. Her steadiness, then, had not faced mere visions. But
such realism perplexed, almost dismayed him. A laborious union had never
entered his mind. Her words conjured up a grey picture of unrelieved
effort, a wife striving beside him in obscurity. It hurt him more for
her than for himself, though for himself it gave a tremor of shrinking.

"You work, darling! Absurd! Besides, London swarms with music-teachers,
with translators. No, no; something will turn up for me. I can put such
heaps of irons in the fire. I may suddenly become a popular
portrait-painter--charge a thousand apiece for my pictures; two or three
a year would keep us going beautifully. Or I may write a book."

"Papa and I live on as many hundreds!" Felicia ejaculated, in her smile
a touch of maternal tolerance for such improbabilities.

In his strong reaction from that grim picture she had so calmly drawn he
could laugh at the thought of the little hundreds. Yet that even those
base rungs of the ladder were not beneath his feet gave him a chill.

Among the pines, as they began to climb, the wind sighed, and the sun,
far below and far away over the grey wastes of evening, made only a
sullenly smouldering line of embers on a cloud-barred horizon. They
paused to look back at it.

"How one feels the autumn--almost like winter already," said Felicia,
leaning against him. "It is like our music of yesterday morning, isn't
it?--a sadness so beautiful to look at from our happiness."

But already Maurice's momentary energy had crumbled. The melancholy of
the wind, the sunset, seized him like a presage.

"Oh! Felicia," he exclaimed, holding her closely, "will you always love
me? You are so much stronger than I am."

"But Maurice--dear--the only strong thing in me is my love for you."

"No, no; not only that. You are not afraid so easily as I am. And this
parting--you can bear it--with such calm!"

There was almost the sob of a reproach in his voice as he leaned his
cheek to hers for comfort. The echo--as of an alien knock at the doors
of her happiness, went through the peace, the radiance within. Tears
sprang to her eyes.

"Why, Maurice!--calm! It's only that loving you--having you to love me
is so great, so wonderful, that even yet I can only feel the
thankfulness--the beauty. Don't you know that when you are gone my life
will be only a waiting?" The tremor of pain in her, her trust in him,
roused again a flare of his manliness.

"Not for long, dearest. Waiting isn't a keen enough word for what I
shall feel. Longing, longing, until I see you again."

"Oh! it will be keener than mere waiting with me, too." She felt dimly
that she must not shackle him in the fight he was going to make for her
by showing him what pain to her would be in the waiting.

They walked on. As they neared the house Felicia said, in a voice that
had regained its quiet, "We must tell papa."

Again in Maurice was that crumbling. The last embers of intoxication
seemed, as she spoke, to die, to leave him looking at ashen realities.
He would conquer poverty. Yes; but bind himself and her to face it--as
yet menacing and unconquered? That would be to wrong her more deeply
than she could understand. She must be free--free before the world; and
fidelity to him merely a matter of feeling. And, thinking of freedom,
his mind, with a pang of self-scorn, looked back for an ugly moment at
the forfeited refuge--at Angela--not yet openly forfeited.

"No, dearest," he said, flushing in the twilight and feeling that, in
spite of its loss of intoxication, his love for her had never been so
strong as in its uprising over such thoughts, "Not yet. Let it be our
secret. My affairs are in such a mess--I must not go to your father
until they are really straightened. I really ought not to have told you
until they were straight; but I could not help that. It seemed almost
weak-spirited to go without telling you, for such a grubby little
reason--a reason that can't touch us--but that must shut out others.
Don't you think so? Darling, I have not hurt you--already?"

Nothing in the bent, listening profile told him so; the fear came with a
sudden glimpse of a craven self, lest she should see it too. But the
eyes raised to his held, with a new patience, no new vision of him. Her
smile in its grave acceptance of burdens still found joy in the bearing
of burdens for their love's sake. "No; how could it hurt me? I see that
you are right. We will keep our secret to ourselves for a little while."
It was now her trust that seemed to him almost as terrible as the
dreaded lack of it had been. Cruel, he thought, that mere material
circumstance should toss one's helpless mind like a shuttlecock from one
fear to another. But--"Only a very little while," he said, nerving
himself to be what she thought him.

Felicia, pushing open the garden gate, stepped inside; the gate swung
to. She held his hand over it.

"So this is the garden. It is exquisite to leave you here among all
these flowers; to think of you loving me and waiting for me in all this
serenity." He smiled, looking quickly from her to the irises, the
pansies, the roses. But the smile faded. "Ah! but how can I wait!--how
can I bear to leave you!" His pain, his fear, surged up in the words. He
hid his face on her shoulder, longing for a strength that would banish
them; her trust in his strength hurt him too much to give it; but when
she kissed him fear was soothed. Only--how would it be when she was no
longer there to kiss him?

Her hand for a long moment had pressed his head to her breast; then she
moved from him, saying, "You will be late for your train, dear Maurice,
and I shall be late for my dinner. Papa must be waiting."

Maurice, to spend this last day with her, was to take an evening train
that would get him to London in time to catch the Scotch express. He
must go sandwiched but dinnerless. They had laughed over the sacrifice.
He had now, again, to laugh, brokenly.

"How can you think of trains?"

"I am thinking most of the train that will bring you back." Once more
her trust struck flame from him. "Ah!--soon! soon!" he said. They kissed
silently. He saw the tears in her eyes and adored her for the strength
that, for his sake, mastered pain and did not let her fear.




CHAPTER XIII


The wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in
wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything
was beautiful; all relations beautified; for the unbeautiful ones she
could feel no longer any bitterness. And into the superficial monotony
of the old life Maurice's letters came like chimes of bells breaking the
stillness. He wrote constantly, letters of a quite recovered gaiety,
giving his impressions of the people, the places he saw, showing her
life as he saw it--as she some day should see it, beside him; and
through all went the ardour of his homage, his longing.

Felicia, in answering, felt that she could with him be so entirely her
whole self that she need not show her whole self; it was easier for her
to give him her soul dressed in tender humour, beribboned with quizzical
freaks of fancy. It was his understanding of her, his consequent perfect
possession, that lifted her life into the new sense of power and
freedom, for was it not freedom and power when every faculty was
effective, bore fruit in his responsiveness?

Not till late October was the beauty of the new life touched by a breath
of doubt or sadness. A dejection, then, showed itself in Maurice's
letters, a dejection that coincided with his return to London after his
round of country visits, coincided with his taking stock, as it were,
of his situation and looking his powers and resources in the face. The
letters then became at once more passionate and more infrequent. He must
not sadden his darling, and the analysis of his glooms could only sadden
her. He was working--it gave him less time for writing--luckily for her.
In her answers Felicia's courage steadily smiled, held out an
unfaltering hand to help him over the morass of melancholy; but the
melancholy, more and more, like a fog closing round him, seemed to shut
him from her. Her apprehensions from vague became cutting. She did not
know a touch of distrust, but the separation, the sadness, hurt too
much. "Come and see me; spend a day. We can walk in the woods. It will
give you strength and me too," she wrote.

Maurice only sorrowfully answered, in a letter like the slow rolling of
big tears, that he must not; it wouldn't mean strength, it would mean
disablement. He must wait until he had more right to see her. He begged
her to love--love--love him. After the glory of golden days and
thoughts, of deep, glad breathing in a crystal air, this change was like
a labouring breath, and like the change in the year--the grey and
amethyst of late autumn. The old loneliness returned again and again,
but with a poignant stab that no former loneliness had known.
Bereavement seemed to hover near her.

Gathering late roses in the garden one day she faced, for the first
time, her own fears--saw that they were fears. She had not heard for a
week from Maurice, and his last letter had been little more than a
plaintive sigh of self-pity. For the first time Felicia was asking
herself if joy was not to be a distant, a far distant thing. She saw
more clearly the forces against him--forces that her young ardour had
barely glanced at; she did not distrust his love--that would have been
too horrible a wrenching of the new doubled life, but she distrusted his
strength before such obstacles.

The roses were fragrant, fragile, white, the outer petals streaked with
a hardy red. When she had filled her basket she went to the gate and
leaned over it, looking vaguely down the road. The thought of that
summer evening was with her, the life there had been in it--deep,
sweet life--in the pain, the trust. The facing of a long, blank
patience was almost death-like, almost like the shutting of the eyes,
a yielding of oneself to the earth, with a faith in final
resurrection--where?--when?--who knew?--for all light in a shrouded
present. Felicia shook off the simile, with a fear that Maurice's
plaintiveness was infecting her. He had more right to it--burdened
fighter. Her love a burden?--again her heart dropped. She bent her face
to the roses. Their sweetness went through her like a smile. She sighed,
her eyes closed, over the relief of her own gratitude for such smiles.
When she looked up again she saw a man's figure among the pines below.
It was only for a moment that her heart could stand still with joyous
questioning--joy so keen that it seemed to leave the heart it passed
from bleeding; for in another she saw that it was not Maurice, and
then, with a wholesome surprise, the staunching of the wound, that the
wayfarer was Geoffrey Daunt. In knee-breeches, shooting-cap and coat, he
looked a veritable Apollo straying, incongruously garbed, through a
landscape beautiful enough to match him. Felicia, finding still that
wholesome staunching in surprise, watched the nearing perfection
appreciatively for some time before definitely wondering what brought it
there. He himself, as he approached, showed no surprise. His eyes, as he
doffed his cap, met hers calmly. He had quite the air of having come to
find her and of having expected to find her leaning on the gate and
watching him.

Felicia held out her hand. "Are you with Aunt Kate? Have you been
shooting? You haven't lost your way?"

Geoffrey, while she asked these questions, held her hand over the gate
and, though as unperturbed as ever, seemed somewhat at a loss for an
answer. Dropping her hand, his eyes went from her to the house, the
garden and away to the hills.

"You are high up here," he observed. "No, I haven't lost my way. I knew
this road led past you. Yes, I am with your aunt for the week-end. I
have been shooting."

"It is rather good shooting, I believe. Uncle Cuthbert prides himself on
it, I know."

"Very good," he answered, with still his vagueness.

"Well, won't you come in and have some tea?" Felicia suggested, since
the pause that followed grew long, and it suddenly occurred to her that
however inimical she and Mr. Daunt might be there was yet a lack of even
conventional hospitality in this survey of him over a closed gate.

"Thank you," said Geoffrey, pushing open the gate and coming in, quite
as if this, also, were what he had expected. As he walked beside her up
the path he made no customary remark on the charms of house and
garden--for the garden, with its Michaelmas-daisies and roses was still
charming. His lack of aesthetic appreciation she had guessed, and in his
quiet glance now was a business-like discrimination, as though he merely
recognized a certain oddity and were classifying it. Geoffrey,
meanwhile, was not wondering that he had come, for he had definitely
intended coming, but was wondering a little what, exactly, he had
intended in coming. To see Felicia Merrick. No further object was
defined in his definite mind, where objects were clear-cut. He therefore
turned from wonder and rested upon the attainment of his object, looking
now at Felicia, observing the details of her dress--her blue serge
frock, her narrow white lawn collar, the black bow under her
chin--observing the curves of her thick hair, the freshness of her
cheek--not as an artist would have done, with a keen consciousness of
the picture they made, but with a very vivid feeling about their
significance to himself. They meant that sense of charm; and, when her
eyes were raised to his, there came that sense of sudden peace.

She paused before the door. "Would you like tea now, or shall I show you
our view? It's the proper routine--first view, then tea. There is a
wonderful view up there from the top of the hill."

"You shall show me the view another day," said Geoffrey.

There quickly darted into her mind a strange query. Had Maurice sent him
with some message? She said, summoning a smile, "Very well. And I don't
believe you care much about views, do you?"

"I don't think I do; not much."

She ushered him into the little hall. It was panelled in light wood, and
its faint woodland fragrance made him think of pagan incense in some
primitive temple. There was a leaping fire in the sitting-room, and the
white austerity trembled with rose and gold; branches of larch in tall
bronze vases glowed like a delicate mist of light. The freshness, the
fragrance, the simplicity, all spoke of Felicia. She rang for tea, and,
while she filled a bowl with her white roses, could not repress that
inner urgency.

"It is long since I saw any of you. How are Lady Angela--Mr. Wynne?"

Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical.
Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very
little of them.

Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The
excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly
stirred her indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see
her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her
as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze.

In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him
too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at
her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave
courtesy asked, "Your father is well, I hope?"

"Very well, thank you." She was still looking at him, and into both
minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and,
seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched,
to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.

For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her,
and in this little silence something else passed between them; it
refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or
compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for
his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events
enmity was over.

"About your caring for the view," she said, going to the tea-table and
busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; "it doesn't make you
happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven't at all
cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?"

Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The
shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be,
his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new
elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. "No; I
haven't had time for cultivating my senses," he said, after the evident
adjustment. "I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does
that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all
that sort of thing; I could see it."

"Indeed, I don't at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of
thing"; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence
guilty.

"Certainly there are more important things in the world," Geoffrey
answered, also with a smile. "I don't understand making
feelings--however exquisite--the object of life."

"Nor do I--I hope you see that too."

"Oh, yes; I see that." He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the
sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked--

"But what do you call the object of life?"

He was prompt, his eye echoing her amusement. "To express oneself
actively; to do something; to succeed."

"The artist may do all that."

"The artist, yes; not the appreciator--the taster of life."

"Well, as to doing something--does not that rather depend on what the
something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn't it?"

"You can't do much for other people unless you have done a great deal
for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal
meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for
others."

Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the
smile that offered a bull's-eye. He really waited to hear what she would
say.

Felicia's eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful
conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like
sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw
them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal.

"What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say
that," she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his
certainty, "You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!"

The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her,
Geoffrey remarked: "In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose;
the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know."

"Oh--I haven't called your wisdom and goodness into question."

She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice
and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He
had the sense of sunny playfulness--reminiscent of childhood, and the
big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured
balls.

"I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid," Felicia went on, "but I
have to be--to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man
before. I suppose that you are a great man--for I can't say that my
littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of
littleness, you see."

"But not satire; that's the privilege of equality or superiority; you
have a perfect right to it. It's only potentially that I can be called a
great man."

"Why, I see people reading whole columns of you--in the _Times_;--what
is greatness, pray, if that isn't?"

"You never read my speeches?"

"Never," she confessed; "besides, you have only made one or two, you
know, since I ever knew any thing about you."

"Politics don't interest you?"

"They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches
is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it."

"What _do_ you do?" he asked.

"Since I don't read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of
the dullest thing in nature--inertia. I exist--like the trees outside.
Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch
lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except
indolent vegetation." She really liked him so much that she had allowed
her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she
went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, "I am matter,
you see--and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force."

"Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?"

"But I know nothing about its direction!" Felicia protested.

And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized
that the "force" was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he
wanted to show her his direction--the battle under the flag. His whole
visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how
little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for
sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own attitude
in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly
unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She
wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at
all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable
occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted
relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He
no doubt built with other people's ideals and intended himself to
inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late,
and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in.

Felicia saw on her father's face a mingling of amazement and
gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity.

"I liked him ever so much," said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his
departure; "he is so different from what I thought."

Gratification at the testimony to his daughter's attractiveness warred
in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the
latter as he answered--

"I don't care for the type. He does well enough for you to study"; and
gratification rose again as he added: "That's the worth of our position.
We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste
the flavour of life."

"We certainly do little else!" said Felicia.

"Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is
there to do? You wouldn't have me blindfold myself and rush into the
political arena like this young _ambitieux_?--poor automaton! The fly on
the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are
flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding
of our powerlessness."

Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured
vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father,
tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, "Let us be duped by all
means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes." He
settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction.




CHAPTER XIV


While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory
season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep
his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in
harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep
enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of
determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when
in Felicia's presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these
pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only
imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man,
when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was
no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he
must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met,
when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid
bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between
actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several
very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were
at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future.
Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.

Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop
when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting,
when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a
delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found
chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring
when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He
often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but
restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very
magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be
hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all
definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the
question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew
what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very
pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had
made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by
others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy,
flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least
resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with
pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but
associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging
aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A
hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder,
for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top;
kinder? It was necessary.

A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of
the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela
came back to London in February.

Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square
house that was part of Angela's large inheritance from her mother.

Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of
his taste as in Angela's house, where nothing made bids for notice, and
where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding
harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the
house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had
sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela
sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its
subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and
Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once
more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at
the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter,
and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make
it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the
slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio
of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a
little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made
him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have
been a dream of no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream
to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish
and an ugly part--as one sometimes does in dreams.

Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when
least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim
gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be
curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was
perfect, seemed to invite encircling)--kiss her and say "Let this go
on." Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little
as he looked at the print she held up.

"Do you know," said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he
was not thinking of the print, "I have a plan, Maurice. You have never
painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my
portrait. I want you to begin at once."

"That will be delightful," said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view
the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not
exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting.

"You must come here to do it," Angela went on, patting the edges of the
prints into place and closing the portfolio. "There is an excellent
light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only
on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I
do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake,
but for yours. You know, I think the time has come for you to strike
some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a
great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,--selfish
I!--I want to link myself, you see, with greatness." She still patted
the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness.

Maurice, as was often the case, was half-charmed into taking her at her
own valuation, as all candour, all sweetness, and, guessing at the
further feelings underlying the frankness, he felt it peculiarly
generous. After all, there was something coarse and petty in caution.
She claimed nothing; why imply that she did by any reticence on his
part? How ugly such a reticence would be!

"Will you inspire the book too? It's my only chance for greatness," he
asked, smiling.

"Who knows? Perhaps I may." Her answering smile was even lighter than
his own. "But it can't be consciously. You must find; I can't give." She
got up and walked to the fire, displaying a back flowing with faultless
lines from the sloping shoulders, their fragile, exaggerated grace, to
the curve of the long, lace train. Angela was intellectually ensconced
in mountain fastnesses, where any appeal not purely spiritual was
stonily regarded, but her very beautiful body was as keenly conscious of
itself, of its every pose and movement, as that of the crudest coquette.
Angela's coquetry was not crude; it wound itself through her mental
attitude as pervasively, but as delicately, as the narrow black ribbons
curved through the laces of her dress. It now said, "Look at me; follow
me," and Maurice, after the startled moment where he surveyed that queer
little speech as to his finding and her not giving--was it a very
clever, a very courageous, a very pathetic speech?--looked at her, and
followed, joined her at the fireplace, and as her hand rested on the
mantelpiece he put his, in an impulse he was hardly conscious of,
lightly upon it.

Angela said nothing, but she lifted her appealing eyes to him.

"If I could paint you so!" said Maurice, removing his hand and wondering
at himself. He did not go further than this, but the things that she
might well have expected him to say after it made him uncomfortable.

Angela felt more than discomfort; it was a real anguish of baffled hope.
Yet she was almost sure, now, that he would go further.

And by imperceptible degrees, during the mornings that followed in the
music-room, he did.

He definitely determined nothing; the facts of life seemed to bear him
towards a definition over which his will had no control. There was the
past, the golden haze, the sweet golden haze, and sweet Felicia; but the
self that had wandered into it with her already seemed illusory. The
present self, its crushing necessities, its really tempting escape from
them, was too vivid a reality to make memory of much avail.

Felicia had charmed him more deeply than Angela could ever charm; yet,
since the self which had so truly loved her was already dim,
unseizable, Angela's half real, half artificial attraction counted for
more than the dear impossible past.

The passionate sadness of the letters he sent to Felicia was sincere,
for in writing to her he caught together all his memories, and they
pressed on his heart with a great weight of regret. He wrote of hope
deferred, of possible hopelessness, feeling courageous, and avoiding the
worst pang of all--that dread of playing an ugly part in Felicia's
eyes--that dread of her seeing cowardice instead of courage--by telling
himself that finally to renounce her would show the truest love for her.
From these crises of almost despair he drifted on to a long silence, a
kind silence surely, from which she must draw her own conclusions. She
would of course take time in doing so, give him the benefit--poor
darling!--of every doubt, and if, at the last moment, anything did turn
up he could still claim her and explain the impossibility of writing
when there was only despair to write of.

During these weeks of drifting he saw little of Geoffrey, and when they
met, Felicia was as unmentioned as though, to both, she had been the
slightest, least significant of episodes. With all his confiding
tendency, Maurice could not well confide to Geoffrey that the wild-rose
flirtation had become a serious love affair, and, in the same breath
that the long dallying with Angela was on the verge of becoming serious
too. With all his hard common sense Geoffrey might look unpleasantly
askance at this taking on of a new love before the old was off, and
until there was no chance at all of the old love being on again,
Geoffrey might as well think him still engaged in undecisive dallying.
The very fact of long intimacy, of the taking for granted of a closeness
that made questionings unnecessary, kept their minds apart.

But on a morning in early March, Maurice, while putting the finishing
touches to his portrait of Angela, was facing at once despair and an
aching freedom. The day before had unchained at his heels a pack of
howling debts; he had run before them to the only refuge; a letter,
after a month of silence, that practically set Felicia free. He had wept
in writing it, allowing the irrepressible tears to splash upon the
paper, bitterly smiling at himself for the craven little consolation he
recognized in this testimony to his grief. And, with the half appeal of
the tears for pity, was another appeal--a spontaneous clutch at the
brightness he must thrust from his life--for her love.

He would not clearly see that in so clinging he set himself--rather than
Felicia--free. Heavy gloom had settled upon him, a gloom that filled the
letter with dismal sincerity. That it had been sincere he felt to be
proved by the fact that no sense of relief had followed its despatch. He
was free, but free in a black world, and he felt, as a result, even less
drawn to Angela than usual, even more unwilling to accept the now
inevitable escape. But with the new sense of freedom was a new sense of
recklessness, the sense that he had, in some untraceable way--(for what
could he have done, disasters crowding thick upon him?) made himself
only fit for the lower thing; so that, at all events, he might as well
make the most of it.

Poor Angela! to be so accepted! The irony of it turned to pity for her
as he looked at her sitting there in her white dress, pale, and with an
air of deep weariness. She seemed to droop before him as she sat in the
keen spring light; to droop, to appeal, and yet to be very proud, ready
for resentment almost. Maurice saw all this, and his comprehension gave
a touch of real emotion to his pity and to his recklessness. Pity for
himself mingled with his pity for her. What a queer mess they were
in--poor things!--both of them. His mind, sick with self-analysis,
self-scorn and self-defence, lurched, exhausted, on to a longing for her
to comfort him, to show him, in loving him, that he was not base, only
fatally pursued by life.

When she stepped down from the stand that had been put at the end of the
room, she did not, as usual, come to his side to see the progress he had
made. She went to the window, her hands clasped behind her, a rigidity
in the lines of her slender, half-swathed arms. Maurice painted for a
moment, then looked at her, added another touch, stared at his palette,
laid it down, and joined her.

She did not turn her head to him, and suddenly he guessed that there
were tears in her eyes. His own grew wet again with that mingled pity.
Her hand fell to her side. He took it in his. Still she did not look at
him. She stood waiting, anything but proud, and yet ready in all the
humiliation of her helpless avowal, to flash suddenly into scorn and
anger. The something of splendour in this attitude gave Maurice the
final impetus. He was glad to yield at last to feeling alone, to almost
irresistible feeling. It was as though he had stood for long on the
shore waiting for the tide, and that its slow rising had culminated in
this sudden wave that just lifted him off his feet. Really she was
lovely; she was piteous; and she could console him for being forced to
take her. His arm went round her; he turned her head gently, saw the
tears, and kissed her.

"Oh, Maurice!" her lips breathed under his, "how I love you!"

"And I----" he stammered. "Angela--it has been--you understood--you are
so horribly rich, and I so horribly poor." He wanted her to console him
for the fact that had tarnished everything, and the longing was so great
that he grasped at this falsification of all his hesitation. It was
rapture to Angela. He was transfigured by the avowal; and her heart,
sick for so long with doubt, seemed to expand like a storm-beaten flower
in sunlight. She herself was transfigured; saw that the starved,
straining self she had known was a lower self, distorted, difficult to
read clearly; this happy self was real at last. His arms were around
her. She would be noble, beneficent to all the world. All who came near
her would be the happier for her happiness. How weak she really
was--who so needed love to lean on!

"I understood--I hoped it was that," she said in a trembling voice.

At a step outside they moved apart, yet not soon enough Maurice felt,
but for the significance of the situation to be very obvious to Lord
Glaston as he came briskly in.

If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter's vagary he had
long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and
tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw
Maurice a bright "Hullo!" hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was
said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. "Capital,
really capital, Wynne," he asserted. "A little too thin and woe-begone,
perhaps."

Maurice's mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought
was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would
understand that they must see one another again before admitting the
world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his
farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed.




CHAPTER XV


Felicia received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the
weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the
exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst
part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel--perhaps faithless.
Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate.
She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with
nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her
morning duties were done, she went out--walked in her garden, in the
woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the
pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill,
radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that
the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to
think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.

Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered
the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with
moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear,
shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow
limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she
could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after
that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its
bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one,
yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant
nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and
sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that
tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the
deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come
to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her
eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down
her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.

Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as
ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy
familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked
at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him
now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of
momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.

She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and
while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory
word or look.

"How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate's?" she asked.

Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched
her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with
as quiet a candour--imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!--and have taken it
for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his
reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.

He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, "No; I came down to
see you. Have you time for me?--time for a walk, I mean?"

She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all
the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too
forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look
very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part
of the reticence.

"Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?" he asked. "You have
never showed it to me yet."

She answered, "I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can
reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods."

They entered the grave, scented silences.

Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have
guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of
his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent
head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile.

She was horribly changed, and her smile had shocked him more than her
tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come
into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the
old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew
itself.

The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was
like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through
the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he
with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral
where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other.
In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.

Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale
sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the
surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes
of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and
all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the
vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here
on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold
and azure. Felicia's long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put
her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender
silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of
her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from
the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed
in her as she in her own sad consciousness.

"How ill you look," he said.

"I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been
lopped off; do you remember?" She did not want to talk with any nearness
of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm's length, would bring her
to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness
that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was
hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.

"Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?"

"I know how kind you are," she said, feeling herself at a loss before
the difference in voice and look. "So much kinder," she urged herself on
to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, "than I had ever
suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn't imagine when I first met
you that you were very kind. But don't bother about my sadness. It's of
no importance."

Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with
the sense of graceless discord.

"You don't at all know why I have come to-day, do you?" he said. A
tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of
intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear
spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he
would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and
humanly shaken in its strength.

In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her
startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.

"You see--you see--what I have come to ask. Wait--don't answer. I don't
want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed
all my life. I don't mean that I care less about the things I have cared
for. I care more, only differently.

"From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me
feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing
why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all
this: it's like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it's like
light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make
life great--for you--with you. It would be a new world with you beside
me. Wait, don't speak--I see that I hurt you. You don't care about
me--yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you
to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be
there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me.
You must always trust me."

He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the
protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause
where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held
her to silence.

"Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?" he said.

"What can I say," she faltered. "You are so beautiful to me; I see it
all--I believe it all. I can only hurt you."

His question flashed upon her faltering. "There is some one else?"

"I love some one else."

Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.

He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for
this abrupt defeat.

"What can I say?" she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering
struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the
inarticulate anguish that his must hold.

"Don't let us say anything," Geoffrey replied. "Let us walk on a
little."

The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for
further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the
respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but
down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered
among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white
and gold.

"One gets one's breath like this," said Geoffrey. He had not looked at
her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he
bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick
up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed
itself.

"Don't think me impertinent," he said; "you understand that one must
grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?"

The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone.
She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her
despair--the seeing of it stripped to him--her self-control gave way.

She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into
helpless sobs. "I am not engaged," she said.

"Ah!--then----," She heard Geoffrey's voice near her, above her, a voice
whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality--soaring, noble,
yet seeing from afar a triumph.

That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him.
She must shoot down that soaring hope.

And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, "The some one is
Maurice--we cannot marry--we love each other," the silence near her was,
indeed, like a slow throbbing to death.

She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: "Last autumn when
he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I
have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is
hopeless. He sets me free." Her sobbing shook her again, and again the
thought of what Geoffrey's suffering must be smote too unendurably upon
her own wound. "Forgive me--I am selfish. But to have you ask me
that--this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me.
And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!"

From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the
sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating
emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again.
And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after
hearing--sharp on its indrawn breath--that "We love each other," not a
flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing
passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut
away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice's situation--verging
on the desperate as he well knew;--of Felicia; of their love for each
other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster,
but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea's deep moan in
caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly.

Felicia wept on: "If I could only see him!--it's been so long. If I
could only appeal to him!--I know--I know it's for my sake; but if only
I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on
without him."

Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness
of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest
of her words.

A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey
observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as
well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in
her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something
illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was
hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a
new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in
her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her
only splendid truth and courage.

Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the
strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch.

"That is pure fairy-tale, you know," he said. "People can't marry on
only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only
that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to
understand."

"We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We
must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my
darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know--it is part of my own
suffering--it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and
die of suffering than not have known--not have had him tell me. At least
now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy."

Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all
reserve; but, with his new insight, he felt in it, too, the helpless
abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree
exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support.

"Sit down here," he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and
prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood.
"All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it."

She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face.

He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his
arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground.

The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its
little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous,
melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds.
Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head.

How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that
young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see
Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her.
Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers,
the sad sunset, and Maurice's sad face.

The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought
a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection.

"See," she said, in a shaken but different voice, "the snowdrops; they
are all out."

Geoffrey smiled. "I hadn't noticed them." He watched her as she stooped
to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.

Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden
shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear
went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem
by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what
feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his
cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with
this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy

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