Paths of Judgement Part 28

"Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison in our lives."

She was struggling with the moment's dreadful bitterness. Over the bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a retort: "I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice.

You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me."

"Great heavens!" Maurice dropped his forehead on clenched hands, "it was to spare you!"

"I guessed it," said Angela, while her hand still pa.s.sed lightly over the azaleas.

They were silent for a moment, and presently in a voice, steady, even gentle, she went on, "I have wished, sincerely wished, to be your wife's friend. Even after she refused my friendship, I have wished to guard her, at least, from malicious gossip. You know what London is. You and I and your wife live in among people who regard old-fashioned scruples intellectually, not morally; but your wife's position is not great enough to allow her to be reckless. Even without such knowledge as mine to reveal it, Geoffrey's love for her makes her conspicuous. They are here together to-night. I saw them at a concert the other day; met them in the Park before that. When last I went to your house I found them together, alone, and--I understand your wife, Maurice--she would think no harm of it--I think she had just kissed him; no harm, Maurice,"--before his start her voice did not quicken, "she would imagine that she kissed him as a brother. He held her hand, I think. I felt it my duty to put petty conventions and reticences aside, and for her sake, for your sake, Maurice, to warn her father, with all delicacy, all caution. I believe it, with all my soul, to be a perilous intimacy.

That is my betrayal."

Maurice's brain swam with the picture she flashed upon it. Only for a moment;--Felicia's smile went like a benison over it. Even if it were true, he could look at the picture, after that first pause of breathlessness, steadily. Even if it were true, he could smile back, understanding.

"Geoffrey has all my trust," he said; "I have all Felicia's love."

"You think so," said Angela quietly. Again her eyes fell before his, but her face remained fixed in its conviction of sincerity.

"How dare you, Angela."

Still looking down, she went on as steadily as before, her voice anch.o.r.ed with its weight of woe,--how he loved Felicia!--"I dare because I believe that she loves him most. Her love for you and your weakness is maternal by now. I know it, I feel it; I can see it when she looks at you and at him. She loves him as she has never loved you. And I! Oh, Maurice--Maurice--I!" She suddenly cast her arms upon the table, her head fell upon them; terror, regret, and pa.s.sionate longing swept over her; her voice broke and she burst into sobs. "Couldn't I have let her go from you? Has it not been n.o.bility in me to guard her--for you? She has never loved you, and I--Maurice, you know, you know--how I have loved you, how I love you! Forgive me! Have pity on me!"

Maurice, frowning darkly, sick with unwilling pity, hating to feel that she deserved pity and that he hated her, turned his eyes away. She had terrified him too much; had dared to lay desecrating hands on the thing dearest to him in the world. Something, and not the least best thing in him, froze before her cry for pity and made him incapable of forgiveness. For once in his life he hardened into resistant strength.

His silence was more horrible to Angela than any look, any word. She raised her head and saw his averted eyes. Only humiliation remained for her. She rose. Her wreath of flowers, loosened, had slipped to one side, she put up a vague hand to it, moaning "Maurice!"

Still he looked away, with odd, startled eyes that did not think of her.

The wonder of the shot that had pa.s.sed through his heart was still felt more as a surprise than as a pain.

She knew that she would always see him so--erect, beautiful, startled from a shot. She tottered to him; she fell before him and grasped his arms. "Oh pity me! Don't be so cruel. What wrong have I done? Despise me--but pity me."

"I cannot," he said.

"Then kiss me--once--only once."

"I cannot," he repeated, still not looking at her.

"Have you never loved me? Never really loved me--as you love her?" she said, shuddering and hiding her face as she crouched at his feet.

"Never!"

Swaying, trembling violently, she arose. She threw wide her arms, seized him, and closing her eyes to his look of pa.s.sionate repulsion, kissed him on his brow, cheek, lips, before, almost striking her from him, he broke from her, burst open the door and left her.

CHAPTER X

"Geoffrey, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?" On the steps, after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his hand through Geoffrey's arm. "I've had a row with my father-in-law--would rather not see him just now." They crossed the square together. Maurice was feeling no reaction to weakness after his strength. The scene was like a distant memory, and that strange shot that had hurt, had pierced him with such a pang--not of suspicion, not of foreboding, but of wonder, deep, sad wonder.

He felt a sort of languor after pain, and, as they walked, went on dreamily: "Such a queer evening, Geoffrey, horrible!--yet no, splendid too. Facing things is splendid isn't it? I want to tell you something, Geoffrey--to confess something--I want you to know. That winter--when I thought I could not marry Felicia, I went pretty far with Angela. I thought everything was up with me; I didn't care much where I drifted.

And I did drift. Nothing much more than there has always been, Geoffrey; with Angela it was never a case of playing with fire, the danger was of getting frozen into the ice. It was abominable of me--caddish;"

Maurice's dreamy voice had a dignity that seemed to hold all other reproach than his own at arm's length, a dignity so strange and new that Geoffrey even at the moment's great upsurging of bitterness, regret and question could repress it as unworthy, not only of himself, but of Maurice. "Abominable--abominable," Maurice repeated, "for I let her think--more than ever--that I cared--something. She is odious to me, Geoffrey. I can't be just to her."

Geoffrey said nothing, but his quiet profile made confidences as easy as peaceful breathing; the confidences that could be told. The others--ah!

that distant wailing of regret. But in this dreamy mood even that was very distant. "Perhaps, dear old fellow--if I'd told you--on that night, you wouldn't have cared to help me."

Maurice stated the fact calmly, looked at it calmly. "In that case--what would I be, Geoffrey?--if you and Felicia had not made me?"

In the still, sleeping town, chill with a coming dawn, they were as near as spirits, walking together through old memories.

"I would have cared to help you--and her," said Geoffrey.

"Ah! well; perhaps;" Maurice sighed a little. "While I'm away, Geoffrey, see a lot of Felicia, and, Geoffrey, see that Angela doesn't get near her. Her silly old father dislikes you, but you won't mind that. He suspected you of being in love with her, so I informed him that he was right. Dear old Geoff! You will see after her?"

"I don't mind the father; I would mind making it difficult for her to get on with him."

"Oh! you won't. He's had to accept it. I wouldn't like to go if you weren't here to see after her. So you don't regret making me?"

"Making you and her so happy?" Geoffrey smiled, humouring his child-like mood.

"I do make her happy? You see it. It's your reward, my dear friend.

That's what I want to say to you. I've said it often enough to myself.

You shall never regret it, so help me G.o.d."

Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice's, pressing it firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a peace, a thankfulness.

"You see," Maurice stammered, "I should die without her. She is life to me, Geoffrey. You don't know what you've given me--I hardly knew. She is life to me--that's all; and I should die without her."

The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not real; Maurice's conscience could not call such faint confession real.

Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of safety.

Felicia, when she heard of her father's proposed and accepted departure, acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and when Maurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick's resolution to protect her, she said that she had suspected that. "I am glad you let him know the truth, too. It's really better to let him see that he has only discovered what no one wishes to conceal." She looked musingly up at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted--faint and far--across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey--the memory of it was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel pa.s.sion, that horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the dark?

Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought.

"I can't blame him--really--either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact nor to recognize the calibre of such a love."

It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey's love that kept Maurice's faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy.

Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true; it beautified her--that kiss of reverent pity and tenderness. The toad Angela flung became a flower on Felicia's breast; that he could smile at such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm--colourless, serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, "You don't mind, so much then, his going?"

"I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits."

The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of la.s.situde, a little indifferent to her father's pathos. Before this placidity his sadness became a sudden throb of gloom.

"You do mind _my_ going?" he asked.

Felicia was sitting on the window seat and had looked down into the street far below for his coming cab. She glanced up quickly at him as he stood beside her, seeing the shadow in his eyes.