Paths of Judgement Part 19

Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been so blind to. Yet even to him she must pa.s.s in silence over Angela's deepest pathos. "Oh, on my own, too," she said. "I am quite weak enough for that." She added: "You always make me show my weakness. I seem to find strength in showing it to you--your strength, I suppose."

"Do you? Thanks." Geoffrey looked at her. "You do remember, then, that I'm always there?"

"Always." She looked back at him.

Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange moment, he had kissed her good-bye.

The little silence that followed her "always," was unbroken when Maurice entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking down.

Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the words she had said to him at the door--words how well left unspoken!

Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ign.o.ble; he felt it, and the recognition of ign.o.bility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear and self-reproach.

For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no longer the hunted, unstable--yes, the base man who had written that letter. He was Felicia's husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.

When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise.

He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela's consciousness if not in his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more equanimity. After all, Angela's very coming proved how such fruitless episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen tears in her eyes and kissed her--it had not been then, with her at all events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her--for Angela's sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal barrier between him and Angela. And now her rea.s.suring words fastened his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of something indefinable and dangerous.

He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year's sunshine almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, returning peace, a sense of protection and happy cert.i.tude, made him take a long breath.

"How good this is!" he said.

They both smiled at him.

Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; grat.i.tude was for Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize like Maurice's felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend's tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret, for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river.

CHAPTER II

Felicia did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly knew.

It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion--to see that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger, surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her.

She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality.

Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking back on her despair when she had almost lost him, she saw the something pa.s.sionate and reckless, the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful requirements of life.

The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain.

It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a loneliness that now--and this was the secret of achievement--meant strength and not weakness.

In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never inspired. She had moments--and in them the loneliness was ghastly--of seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm; but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain of his adoration she would always be alone.

A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures.

"Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let's just enjoy them now--while we are young and can. You don't want me to be a County Councillor, do you? You don't want, yourself, to sit on committees and be useful--like Angela, do you? There are such quant.i.ties of useful people in the world."

Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy.

The goad was gone--the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and water.

"_I_ shall work, then," Felicia declared; "it's only fair that I should.

You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must prove to you that I meant what I said--do you remember?"

Their tiny income just sufficed. "If a pinch comes I'll set to," Maurice affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn't need to be pinched; she wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and she found some translating to do. Through Maurice's numerous literary relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination with which she shut herself up every morning.

"You must wait for inspiration," she retorted; "but there is no reason why this hack-work of mine shouldn't keep off a pinch for ever."

Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.

But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice's strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice's att.i.tude of bright acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick's dogmatic intolerance could only weary or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in consequence, inc.u.mbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her father.

She went into Maurice's studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.

"Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on 'Credulity'?" she asked.

"It is _vieux jeu_, you know," Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his deep chair.

"_Do_ I know?" said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.

"It is all true enough, as far as it goes," said Maurice, hardly recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. "Sit down on the arm of the chair, dear, and don't stand so still, so stiff, so disapproving."

"All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as shallow, as trivial as possible."

She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm.

"He takes a very crude view of religion," Maurice owned. "One doesn't approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of contest has been shifted."

"Exactly. Why didn't you tell him so?"

"Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn't that have hurt you?"

"Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be foolish," said Felicia, looking over Maurice's head and feeling that vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he said: "You are displeased with me?"

Alarm was such a new note that Felicia's breast echoed it, transforming it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his.

"Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased."

"Please forgive me," said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering her smile and irradiating his face; "I thought you would like me to please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did."

"I know. I know you did it for me. But I don't like you to do anything that isn't absolutely----"

She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice supplied "True?"

"Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn't be your standard. You must have your own."

"Ah, you mustn't ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I lacked."

"But I do ask it of you," said Felicia, and, leaning against his shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little knot, she went on: "You see, in your kindness you aren't really fair to him--nor to me either! He was quite cross with me just now when I tried to dissuade him--quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it to the magazine you recommended--oh, Maurice, I _was_ displeased!"