Paths of Judgement Part 9

"You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?"

Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a lollipop--and without consulting the child's preference as to size, shape or colour.

"Sometimes," she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. "Not too often."

"I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young woman. Surely you can't get too much of--Browning for instance?" and Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull's-eye was being kindly offered.

"Easily," she retorted; "but let's hear Maeterlinck, who has been waiting for you."

Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read--

Et s'il revenait un jour, Que faut-il lui dire?

--Dites-lui qu'on l'attendit Jusqu'a s'en mourir--

Et s'il m'interroge encore Sans me reconnaitre?

--Parlez-lui comme une soeur, Il souffre peutetre--

Et s'il demande ou vous etes, Que faut-il repondre?

--Donnez-lui mon anneau d'or Sans rien lui repondre.

Et s'il veut savoir pourquoi La salle est deserte?

--Montrez-lui la lampe eteinte Et la porte ouverte.

Et s'il m'interroge alors Sur la derniere heure?

--Dites-lui qui j'ai souri De peur qu'il ne pleure.

Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees, looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her.

He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny, autumnal trees. Felicia's manner towards Maurice during these last days had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend's behalf. His newer impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice's hopes. But that she smiled upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent mischance of the day before.

A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so, for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardly knew that he wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia's shoulder, vaguely listening to pathetic words and looking at Felicia's half-averted profile. He was conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and touched.

Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest, sunny s.p.a.ce, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep gra.s.s and open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm gra.s.s and lain for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky, or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet gra.s.s and the still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.

"Isn't that the very heart of love?" Maurice asked.

She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.

"I should have wanted him to cry," she said.

"No; I think that if I loved a woman," Maurice turned the leaves of his book, "I should want her to smile."

"I don't believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried dreadfully."

"You don't think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?"

"I was thinking of the heart--as it is. Now, I might have said it all--only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the door!"

The slight tension in Maurice's voice and look yielded to her swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.

"Base girl!" he cried, laughing.

"Base and natural. Isn't the heart of love the longing to be loved? How could one miss such a chance--even if it meant more suffering for the loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer."

But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, "If I were dying, and suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of it--rather she smiled."

"But you would rob her then of her right to suffer--of her right to love you more." Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. "What would you wish?

Don't say that you are as inhumanly n.o.ble as Mr. Wynne."

"I don't think we can in the least tell what we would wish."

"So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne's magnanimity may both be illusory?"

"You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather mawkish," Geoffrey added.

Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. "Papa goes this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don't think the poem mawkish."

Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with rea.s.suring composure, and Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In Felicia was that more vivid sense of life--of an approaching crisis; in Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet--what was he to do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a distasteful one; only some inner impetus was needed to make it really alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge impossible--as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added fear in the thought that a new att.i.tude in Angela might have made the refuge inaccessible.

Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly, half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear; but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?--see that it was neither so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted, marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort.

He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one couldn't stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at the end of the sunny vista was--pain; the flowers and trees that led to it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her colouring and manner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of their companionship--but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real pang. Such fancies, after letting her know--she must know--that he would suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she--could she--love him?

CHAPTER XI

He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had recently written--a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole year--and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they did, behind a golden haze. Maurice's moods easily alternated between golden hazes and black fogs.

Geoffrey went away on that morning--that, too, was the receding of an uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he didn't want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness more blissful.

"I sometimes think," he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, "that sadness is the most beautiful thing in life."

In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, as now, when she said, "To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps."

"But we shouldn't be able to see or hear it if we hadn't lived it."

"It only becomes beauty, then, when we've outlived it, not while we are in it. People dress up their sorrows so," said Felicia, turning vaguely the pages of the music before her; "they always remind me of the king in the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked."

"I believe you are right," laughed Maurice, "and that it is only when we are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness."

Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion.

But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.

"And since it's a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?" she asked.