Paths of Judgement Part 11

"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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, 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 circ.u.mstance should toss one's helpless mind like a shuttlec.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sionate and more infrequent. He must not sadden his darling, and the a.n.a.lysis 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 mora.s.s 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sifying 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?"