Paths of Judgement Part 16

"I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her."

Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his sentences. "She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has suffered. She told me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that she loved you."

Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia's faith his own faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the beating of his heart.

"She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her free. Do you love her?" Geoffrey asked.

"My G.o.d!" Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them, and burst into loud weeping.

Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his hope had clung to, that Maurice's att.i.tude would show some obvious unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that would make of Felicia's love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered.

There was simply no more hope.

Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: "I adore her; I have from the beginning. Don't you remember?" Through his grief the resentment showed itself.

"Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferent to you as I thought, our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn't have stood for a moment between my wishes and her." Before this firmness Maurice's resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs again.

"You adore her, and you give her up?" Geoffrey asked.

"What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry me?"

"Why did you ask her?"

"Don't turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don't be ungenerous. I was a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn't help myself. I hoped that something might turn up."

"Why don't you still hope?"

"I can't, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living--far more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed?

Looks terribly----?"

Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend.

"She looks terribly ill."

"And she sticks to me, the little darling!"

"She certainly stuck to you," said Geoffrey, still looking down into the fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, "You surely would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn't be here this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking."

For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey's voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, "Maurice, do you want to marry her?"

At this Maurice started to his feet. "What are you talking towards, Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell me the truth--do you hope to marry her?"

"I told you that I wouldn't have asked you to come if I'd had any hope."

"To marry her I'd sacrifice anything and everything," said Maurice, altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream.

Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no consciousness of superiority in his claim.

"To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice," he said; "I will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her happy."

Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to white. "Geoffrey," he gasped.

"_Will_ you make her happy?" asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed, as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man's responsive soul.

"Before G.o.d I will," he said.

In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the table and sat down at it again. "I can pay off your debts--I have made some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money on my property--its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife; what you have now, once it's free, will do the rest, and her father no doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me back, well and good; but don't bother over it. I shall get on well enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always lucky with my speculations; I shan't be pinched."

"Do you mean it, Geoffrey?" All that was best in Maurice rose in the solemn grat.i.tude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question.

With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the half-pa.s.sionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the difference between Angela's boudoir and a country meadow in spring.

Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music, Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliest lark and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was really best in him--his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-gla.s.s idealism.

He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to veil her.

Geoffrey had answered with an "Of course I mean it," while Maurice's mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. "But how--how can I accept all this from you, Geoffrey?" he said at last; "it is splendid of you; it's a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I accept it?"

"As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either side--for her sake."

"And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?" Maurice asked with a half-sad, half-whimsical smile.

"Perhaps a little for you. If I didn't care for you, didn't think you worth her caring for, I wouldn't do it; but that would probably be for her sake again. Candidly, I don't feel for you much just now, or think much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand that, of course, in another lover."

"But it's in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism."

"It's the best thing I can do for myself, isn't it?" said Geoffrey, with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. "I wouldn't do it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I would rather have her happy than miserable."

"But, dearest Geoffrey"--the tears again rose to Maurice's eyes as the wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy--"how can you tell that--with time--you couldn't have hoped? People do outgrow their griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing--she would have seen that I wasn't really worthy--and have recognized that you were." That it was, apart from Felicia's future att.i.tude, a fact already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of Angela--ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with Felicia--this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, breaking his voice.

Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future possibility. He answered Maurice's inner fear and his own inner regret with a brief "She might die before she outgrew it."

The fact soothed Maurice's qualms. "Dear, dear old Geoffrey," he said brokenly. "How we will both love you. It won't hurt you, I hope, to see a lot of us."

"I'm not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it's between you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a lucky speculation, a legacy--what you will. Her father will expect nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I've thought about it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in her cup." He put his hand on Maurice's shoulder as the young man stood beside him: "Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better."

CHAPTER XVII

And Angela? This was Maurice's first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and grat.i.tude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glaston's opportune entrance had saved him from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his escape--and hers. But with the day Angela's personality unpleasantly rea.s.serted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia's had been.

Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now hara.s.sed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all, how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure he would cut in Angela's eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, in kissing her, accepting her avowal.

By the time that he went to Geoffrey's he had decided in a definite recoil from the pain and humiliation--for both of them--that he simply could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must not see her face to face when she learned the fact--this despite an undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.

He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand?

The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound--so mild and unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their feet, and the a.s.surance of a very small but secure income irradiating the future. He suspected that Geoffrey's future, in consequence, had become uncertain, but under the circ.u.mstances submission only was open to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there was no danger of Geoffrey's losing office.

When Maurice was on the point of leaving--he had been slightly ill at ease during the interview, and Geoffrey's calm perhaps a little forced--the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, "I wrote to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is the copy."