Paths of Judgement Part 29

"Dear goose!" She drew him down on the seat, her hand in his, "Mind your going? I hate it. But it's only for a fortnight--less, if you are lucky with your work."

"Only a fortnight!" Maurice repeated, half playfully, but half fretfully too. "You can say that! It's our first parting, Felicia. It seems to me an eternity before I shall see you again."

She still looked into his eyes, seeing, under the playfulness, the fretfulness, all that he had suffered during these last weeks of entanglement. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she said dreamily: "Don't go."

"Really?" Sunlight streamed through clouds, "Really you say don't go?

And my duty? my work? all the virtues you make me believe in?"

"I want to keep you near me, to comfort you for it all," Felicia said.

He understood the reference to his pain. The very sweetness nerved his growing strength, the resolution to be worthy. With his arms around her he whispered that he adored her and that he would go and work so well that she should be proud of him. She listened, her eyes closed, yet, when he had spoken, still dreamily she repeated, "Don't go."

"Are you tempting me? because if you are, if you really want me to stay, I can't go."

She did not reply for a long time, lying quietly against his shoulder, her hand in his. They heard the cab drive up.

"I suppose you must go," she said, "Yes, of course, you must. Only, isn't it happy, sitting here together? You must go, though I want you to stay, for I really am sensible; I know there is a grown-up world; but sitting here makes it seem unreal, and I think of sweet, silly things, like children's games on a long summer afternoon."

She straightened herself, sighing, smiling, then as she looked at him, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. In her eyes sudden tears answered them.

"It's that we have been rather unhappy, isn't it, dear Maurice?"

"Never, never again," he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back to such a distant day; "Do you remember once, long ago, when I first knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded--it's only loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly dread of loss. I'll never make you unhappy any more."

"Ah! but what about me? It's I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive me everything. You shall have no more dreads."

She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go, smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must nerve his growing strength.

"Never, never again," she repeated. "So go, dear, have all the virtues.

We will both work. The eternity will pa.s.s."

CHAPTER XI

Mr. Merrick, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her friends. The days pa.s.sed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded, hara.s.sed.

Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard.

Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a frightened silence. Mr. Merrick's foundations seemed giving way beneath him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela's defection was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by accusing himself of over-imaginativeness--nerves on edge--no wonder--and went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice's fortnight was nearly over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had meditated a retreat on Paris, a week there to make the descent from London to the country less of a horrid jolt.

Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick's sharpened suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his virtual dismissal from his children's roof. After all, as he reflected, it was in a sense Angela's doing. She might now at least from the frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him comprehension and compa.s.sion.

"To speak plainly, I've been turned out," he said, stirring the cup of tea she had handed him.

"Turned out?" repeated Angela, with an impersonal vagueness, quite as if it had been a stray dog of which they were speaking.

Mr. Merrick's suspicion grew past alarm to resentment, and resentment cowered under a more st.u.r.dy manner of pathos as of one who faced fate's unjust bolts with erect bearing and unconquerable gaze. "Our friendship, it seems, is unforgiveable. It was a choice between it and them. I couldn't submit to such intolerable dictation."

Angela felt as if, after a long drowning swoon under water, she were being resuscitated to painful life by blows upon her head. She, so blameless, having done no wrong except love with a fatal fidelity; she, crushed, humiliated, was to feel another lash. Even her kindness to this pompous fool was to be made a scourge for her.

Mr. Merrick saw that she grew more white as, with folded arms, she drooped her head and looked up at him from sombre brows. "They can't forgive you that? They hate me so much?"

"Apparently," said Mr. Merrick, his growing sense of the indignity of his situation giving him a deeper gloom of manner. "The crisis was brought about by my venturing to warn Maurice on the subject you have spoken of."

"And you told him who had warned you? I see."

Mr. Merrick took hasty refuge before the cutting quality of her voice.

"He sprang at the conclusion and defied me to deny that it was you. He was outrageous. I have had to defend you as well as myself, Lady Angela."

"He accused me of falseness?"

"Insolently." It was well that she should know how much he had had to champion her. "I don't care to recall the terms." But Mr. Merrick was feeling an odd satisfaction in recalling them. His heart, before this rebuffing friend, before her icy eyes and icy voice, was calling out for Felicia--Felicia whom he had lost because of this,--did she not suggest something snake-like? His wounded affection, his wounded vanity, longed for such comfort as Felicia alone could give. It would be well could he believe Lady Angela--if not a liar, at least a presumptuous busy-body.

His first impressions of her were flooding his mind again.

"I could not forgive the insolence," he said, "although I can conceive it possible that you and I have been to a certain extent mistaken. Such a mistake must naturally wound Maurice and Felicia."

Angela leaned back in her chair, her long eyes on him, and he felt, like a palpable atmosphere, the enmity between them.

"As it happens, Maurice told me that he had always known of his friend's love for Felicia," he pursued. "It's in no sense an ordinary case of attraction, you see. A Dante and Beatrice affair. He has absolute trust in his friend, Maurice has, and I, of course, have absolute trust in Felicia. Not that I approve; I would have felt it my duty to protest in any case."

"You think that I imputed some wrong that was not there, and that owing to me this breach has come between you and your daughter?" said Angela.

"I hold you in no way to blame. Without a full knowledge of facts--Maurice's knowledge the most important of them--one may naturally draw false inferences. We were both a little hasty in judging." Mr.

Merrick essayed a generous smile.

A deep flush pa.s.sed over Angela's face. For a long moment she was silent, her eyes on him; then, in a voice harsh and monotonous she said--

"I hardly know what facts may mean to you--or inferences. Maurice, before he married your daughter, told me that Geoffrey had paid him to marry her. They live upon Geoffrey's money. He has ruined his career for your daughter's sake. These are further facts, Mr. Merrick. Have I indeed been a little hasty in my inferences?"

Mr. Merrick, his tea-cup in his hand, his face with as yet merely a look of wonder on it, sat dumb.

"You now see the knowledge that underlay my warnings. What Geoffrey's motives were I cannot say; purely disinterested, perhaps; apparently your daughter was dying for love of Maurice. Whether they have remained so disinterested is for you to judge. But I hope you will acquit my warnings of hastiness."

"Maurice told you?" Mr. Merrick repeated. He chiefly felt a deep, personal humiliation.

"As he told me everything at that time."

Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table.

"The scoundrel!" he said.

"Which one do you mean?"

"The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him."

Angela's eyes glittered.

"I think it well that all the truth should be known," she said.