Paths of Judgement Part 33

"Ah! Felicia," said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.

"Yes, yes," she said, "I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you reproach me than listen to myself."

"Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, too, was blindfolded," he said, looking away from her.

His voice was the voice of frozen tears.

They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a word from her would unlock flood-gates.

And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative face.

She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she knew them black and dangerous.

But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the world's wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a defiant happiness.

She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her la.s.situde was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.

Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying--

"And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want you to go back to Maurice."

His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. "Nothing is really changed," said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, hardly stooping to persuasion. "You and I are parted. He needs you as much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth--only I believe you have seen it, as I have. It's a choice between taking up your old life--and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good thing out of it--or living the new life I described to you--the life of the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece--a life of constant danger.

For you--I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself--I would die for you, as you know; but to live without you--seeing you drifting--alone--in a sadness worse than any suffering--? I know that the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my sake--for your own I'd put it, too:--Felicia--for my sake--if I asked you as I could--you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn't be the growing flower; you wouldn't be the cut flower in the vase"--his face, white in its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would strip all illusion from her; "you would be like those snowdrops that I carry here--on my heart;--on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, dead." He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw now, and as he had wished, without illusions.

"But go back to him!" she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the cup he held out to her.

"He loves you. He needs you."

"Go back from fear?--fear of you?--of myself?"

"Turn from that thought then. Don't let it be a question of you or me.

Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife."

"But after that letter!"

"Is a person's moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond?

If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in disowning her?"

"Oh--a mother!" Felicia's tears ran down.

"Remember, I wouldn't urge--I wouldn't ask you to fear me or pity him unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life.

Felicia, it's his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, that makes the barrier that holds me from you now--my memory of his face--his voice--when he said that you were his life--that he would die without you. He thanked me for his happiness--you and I had 'made him.'

He said: 'You shall never regret it--so help me, G.o.d.' Felicia, you have given him his soul. You must not rob him of it."

"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!" she said, pressing her hands against her eyes--for his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, wrenched and broken limbs--"I have given him no soul. He has found his soul through me, perhaps, but I can't rob him of it."

"You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do pity him. And you must--you must pity him--and forgive him."

"How could we go on," she whispered, "after my letter to him? after he knows?"

"He doesn't return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet.

Besides, let him know the facts--but the facts from yourself. Tell him.

Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest,"

said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet a.s.surance of safety.

"After his to her!"

"You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt.

Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you will; let him have it straight; but don't let him read it--alone. Poor old Maurice!" Geoffrey added.

The words, his comment on them, the "poor old Maurice!" that seemed a final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed suddenly before her a vision of Maurice--a piteous Maurice. The hatred of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey--so far away it seemed--saying, "Can you really bear to think of his reading that letter--alone?"

She went towards him--there was now no longer any fear in his nearness.

He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.

Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from the rapture of abandonment that had called to her--to him. What had he not conquered in himself--and her--to do this great thing for her?--to save not only her, but through her, Maurice?

But, though he had conquered, she felt broken.

"Life is so long, Geoffrey."

He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of long years where they must walk apart.

"And life--founded on pity----"

"More will come. Something like a mother's love."

She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice's terror-stricken face--reading her letter--had stabbed to more than pity.

The protecting pa.s.sion that had flung itself between him and the reading had in it a deeper quality. She could not a.n.a.lyze the fiercely defensive tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, "I won't disappoint you, Geoffrey."

He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet.

For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within her, a pa.s.sion far other than the maternal pa.s.sion that was to take her back to Maurice.

His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms.

And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in silence, they clung and kissed each other.

The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose, and moved away.

Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the mantelpiece.

"Just half-past three," said Geoffrey.

Felicia went to the window.

"The rain has stopped," she said. "We can walk to the station in less than an hour."

Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. "Don't you want something to eat? Some tea?"