Paths of Judgement Part 15

"I shall always think of you when I see them," she said, looking away from him. "And you, when you remember to-day, don't let it be a memory only of sadness; but of my grat.i.tude--my wondering grat.i.tude." She paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, "I never dreamed you cared for me."

"It came slowly--the knowledge that without you the world would be empty," said Geoffrey.

"And is it empty now?"

"Oh, no," he answered, raising his eyes to her; "you are here."

Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for him--for herself--urging her, she asked, "But does loving me--knowing how deeply you have made me care for you--does that keep the pain from being too great?"

Geoffrey again had his half smile. "Ah, if I don't talk about it, you mustn't think it's not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so miserable."

"Do you mean that if I were happy--married to Maurice--you would be happier too?"

Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he was thinking.

"Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?" he asked.

"I wouldn't care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness with him would be happiness."

"You love him--you are sure--so much?"

"You know; you must see." She leaned her face into her palms, not weeping, with a weariness too deep for tears, and again her tragic sincerity made her seem far from him.

"You must have courage," said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it.

"You are both young. Maurice has talent."

"Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to myself, 'He will come to-day; he must come to-day!' How I waited--how I hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don't know how I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I could wait--and could hope."

Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing.

"Ah! don't suffer so!" he pleaded.

"But I want to suffer," said Felicia. "The time will come when I won't mind. Haven't you that fear--the worst of all--that even the suffering will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember larger hopes."

"No, no," said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; "you don't really believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won't be because you've grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things.

And," he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, "you have your feeling for beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see snowdrops."

Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the difference between her own pa.s.sionately rebellious grief, self-centred in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, seemed entering a still harbour at evening.

"How you think of me. How dear you are," she said softly. She had that image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling sh.o.r.es, and the evening star. "You make me ashamed. I have thought only of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you--really see you--for the first time."

She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.

He rose, flushing a little. "Thanks," he said; "you won't forget me, I know."

She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go home, she, too, rose.

Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The tattered sails could sleep.

They left the woods near Felicia's garden wall.

"And now I go back to those scuffles that don't interest you," said Geoffrey.

"But they do now, because of you."

"I may come again? I shall never trouble you--you know."

"Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so utterly. You are my dear friend."

Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face.

He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must be helped. And helped soon.

He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on the forehead.

Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.

Geoffrey's kiss, Maurice's desolate, farewell face, were both far away.

Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled in sleep.

CHAPTER XVI

Geoffrey, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Sat.u.r.day night, and Geoffrey was free.

Maurice had pa.s.sed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of vagueness, Felicia's figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by the thought of her. What cruel tricks one's brain played upon one, and how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms.

Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, that pa.s.sed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was over. He had believed that he had pa.s.sed through such an experience in his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him.

This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of necessity--in Maurice's philosophy all past fact became necessity--and not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.

There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room, with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from his boyhood's home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity and composure, Geoffrey's quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he sat at his s.p.a.cious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal, to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There lay Geoffrey's strength.

"Sit down, Maurice," said Geoffrey; "I want a talk with you." He still held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again.

He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep secrets--though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy--how he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing question; and when Geoffrey's matter was over, he might as well tell him that the culminating romance had at last been achieved.

The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he could take for granted her shrinking from the world's prying eyes; her love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each other surrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief.

Anything that took him out of himself was a relief.

"Maurice," Geoffrey said deliberately, "I went to see Felicia Merrick this morning."

Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion, and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. "I have seen her several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me."

Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief; but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia--_his_ Felicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of suspense.