Paths of Judgement Part 35

"Ill!" she repeated. "And I am not to go to him! My husband!"

Something in her stricken face, her fixed eyes, made him yield.

"Come then, let us go together."

"No." Her thrust against him did not relax. "I must go alone; I must see him alone; I must speak to him alone."

Geoffrey clasped his arm around her. "Felicia, understand me, you shall not go alone. We are too near to be separated--in this. We must go together."

He saw that his words tore from her mind the veil that covered horror.

She submitted, grasping, yet pushing from her, the arm that held her.

"To our room--first. The light is turned in the same place--near the door."

Geoffrey flung open the door. It did not need the light to show them that the room was empty; the desolate evening sky again confronted them at the window. They drew back.

"The drawing-room--the studio--he could not easily hear in the studio."

Geoffrey knew that her hope was desperate--almost mechanical. They looked into the drawing-room; went through the dining-room to the studio. All were empty. They retraced their steps. Her hand no longer grasped and repelled his arm. She leaned upon it.

"His dressing-room--across the pa.s.sage," she half whispered.

If only, Geoffrey thought, she would faint in his arms so that he might lay her down and go alone. But her swiftness equalled his. Neither could hesitate. He threw open the door of the little dressing-room.

Darkness again. The curtain drawn before the window with its courtyard aspect. Geoffrey's hand felt for the electric b.u.t.ton, trembled before it found it. Light came like a shock in the darkness. Maurice lay at their feet.

The pistol had not fallen from his hand, though the open fingers no longer held it. He had not shot himself through the head. Thank G.o.d for that, Geoffrey found himself trivially thinking; his head was unmarred and beautiful. One hardly noticed the breast's tragic disarray.

As Felicia put away his arm and left him it was now Geoffrey who leaned, weak, nerveless against the wall.

He watched her kneel beside her husband, and, softly pushing the pistol from his hand, take the empty, open hand in hers.

With a look of tender wonder, like a mother with her sleeping child, she slightly touched his hair and brow. It was still with wonder that she looked up at Geoffrey.

"He is dead," she said in a hushed and gentle voice, as the mother says: "He is sleeping."

Geoffrey's white, silent face, the tears so strangely running down it, over his cheeks, into the corners of his lips, gave her a shudder. Her eyes turned again to the serenity, the slumbering serenity, of the dead face.

For long moments she sat still, while Geoffrey stifled his sobs.

"Is my letter there?" she said at last. He saw the open letter on the dressing table; near it was a sealed envelope.

He forced himself to cross the room to them. The dressing table was behind her; he lifted the letters above her head; the envelope was addressed to Mrs. Wynne. Hesitating, he glanced down, and saw that she had raised her head, that her eyes were on him. She put up her hand.

"Wait--not now."

"I want it now," she commanded with her emotionless gentleness.

Now--while I am still stupefied; he understood. He gave it to her and turned aside while she read, down there, at his feet, beside Maurice.

The letter was not long. He heard her hand fall softly with it. She sat, the vacant hand before her face, bowed over her husband.

Geoffrey could not speak to her and he could not leave her. He stood looking down at the dressing table--empty but for its little ivory tray, its pin-cushion. Maurice had not unpacked his dressing-case. A photograph of Felicia was stuck into the gla.s.s; not the framed one; that was packed too; he had taken it with him. This was a profile; not good; making her too sad, as Maurice had said.

He heard now that she wept.

He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his presence by his grief.

And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her face still hidden she held up the letter to him.

"I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?"

"He is ours. It is because of you--because of you that I----" She could not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He had given him back to her and her to him.

"Dearest Felicia," he read, "I was a coward. But I always loved you most--even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for me but you. And I am unworthy of you--and of my friend. All I can do for you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck's poem, darling? I do smile; not only so that you shan't cry, but for pure joy that at last I can really do something not ign.o.ble in your eyes. Darling--darling--it is only horrible because I can't see you again, and because you hate me and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don't, ah! don't hate me. Love me again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy, dearest one.--MAURICE."

A groan broke from Geoffrey's lips. Had it been any other woman at his feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from herself.

"Oh, Maurice--my Maurice, I have killed you," Felicia said. "How can I live?"

He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at Maurice.

And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compa.s.sion, she shuddered with dreadful sobs.

"He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness--so afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me--loving me--and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might always hate him. I can't live. I can't."

Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift her yet.

And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life's supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice's, he stammered, "You must, you must. For me."

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