Paths of Judgement Part 20

She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated, with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, "Please forgive me. I'll never do it any more."

Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay on "Credulity" was accepted, and Mr. Merrick's a.s.surance, which had been rather p.r.i.c.ked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to its unstable placidity.

Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards herself.

"The old sword isn't rusty yet," said Mr. Merrick; "it can still do execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods."

Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice's new endeavour "not to do it again," that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon.

Maurice's geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an a.s.sault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio, heard in the adjacent dining-room her father's pugnacious tones: "The fellow is merely an a.s.s; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him with his winking virgin!"

"My dear father," Maurice's voice returned, and she wondered whether her father felt to the full its cutting quality, "we are all of us a.s.ses to one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my house."

"Oh, very well; by all means," said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but hesitating to express his full resentment. "I will merely vacate your drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity." The words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper.

"I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other people's beliefs; it's not a seemly thing--a bludgeon in a drawing-room."

Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a touch of anxiety.

"Did you hear, darling?" he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were alone.

"Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit of bludgeoning--he thinks it right."

"Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged."

"Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak."

"Only I did not intend you to hear."

"Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say." She smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight discords if their own harmony were perfect.

But in consequence Mr. Merrick a.s.sumed his manner of the sulky child, and Felicia felt her husband's eye upon her as, in all his encounters with his father-in-law, he adjusted his att.i.tude to what he imagined she desired of him.

CHAPTER III

"What ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!" said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia's unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela's world, and in the consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.

But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its first thin veil of ice.

For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, he felt himself growing hot.

"No," he said, beginning to eat his soup, "we have both been busy, haven't we?"

"Have you, Maurice?" Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised spoon--eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. "I haven't seen the great picture or the great book yet."

Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of burning cheeks. "Not as I should have been," he confessed. His confusion was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played with her fork, "Do you mind this--so much? Don't on my account. I am completely seared, Maurice."

And as he could find no answer: "We must meet, you know. Can't you pretend calm, as I do?"

She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding between them.

"You make me feel like a felon," Maurice murmured.

"It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that," Angela returned quietly; "the retaliating att.i.tude is not mine, Maurice." Then, as the talk about them cloaked them less, "What have you and Mrs. Wynne been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of her--so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever"--Angela leaned forward to look down the table--"and so Geoffrey evidently finds her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?"

Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of treacherous little hints and warnings. "Not much," he answered; "he drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know," Maurice added, "so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either."

"Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than for power," said Angela, "and not only as a means to power but as an end in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn't it, if the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar."

She spoke with a musing vagueness. Maurice was not looking at her, and her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the cruel, vague words.

"Dear Maurice!" she murmured, "I didn't mean that! Indeed, I forgot for a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain in it for you--beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what you let me know;--I can't get over that habit of frankness with you. But Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career."

"He knows," Maurice stammered, "that if he were to feel a shackle I would abandon----."

"Ah, but would you?" said Angela as he paused. "Though that is why, for your sake, more than his--I know your sensitiveness--that is why, dear friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is--I want to see you free. I wish--I wish," she smiled with quite her old sweet lightness now, "you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no longer?"

But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find no words.

"Dear Maurice, how you distrust me," she murmured, "how you forget that such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn't hurt you if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read to-day his article on 'Credulity.'"

In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.

"Isn't it appalling!" he laughed--he would have laughed at anything said in that normal voice--"it's unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield." Angela also laughed.

"My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There's a pathos in it, so far as you and she are concerned."

"Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the eighties," Maurice said. "I am afraid Felicia and I find the grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;" and with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.

She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so staunch, so living, so moving onward.

They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to glance down these innocent vistas in each other's lives. Felicia told of the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve herself to death, in pa.s.sionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had remained there through a night of lonely horror.

Geoffrey's reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never been very pa.s.sionate or resentful. "I was a conceited little beggar and always kept cool." At a very early age, after a whipping from his mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, "Do you want to go on?" "I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an exceedingly disagreeable child."

Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in the dinner-table talk, were conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred upon.

After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know Geoffrey's secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her, and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought sudden, sincere words to his lips. "Angela, you have really forgiven me, haven't you?" he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe, Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they were quiet and she said: "I have forgiven you--if what you said was true."

"True? How could it not be?" Maurice stammered, conscious at once that his impulse had been unwise.

"It could not be if you loved her most." He was silent, struggling with his thoughts.

"You love her most--now," Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of questioning.