Paths of Judgement Part 14

"How ill you look," he said.

"I have been rather f.a.gged 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 att.i.tude, "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 grat.i.tude, 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 compa.s.sion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality--soaring, n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude strangely contrasted with the shaken, pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion, 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, as ignorant as any boy of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished in his fear and adoration. Yet his man's training availed him. He could have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.

She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long gra.s.s around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held them to him. "Will you have them?"

For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.