Paths of Judgement Part 24

Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was a hope, clutched at, that Angela's proffered friends.h.i.+p had been sincere, a dread lest Felicia's rejection of it should call down upon her Angela's revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the circ.u.mstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon she held--and withheld--the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It was the thought of this weapon, turned against his wife's breast, and murdering there her love for him, that made him white.

"I will tell him, dear, anything you like," he said, in a voice she recognized as strange. "And she was here, you say, this afternoon?

Felicia, dearest"--he had managed now to draw through the loop of the white tie--"weren't you a trifle hard on her?--a trifle cruel, as you say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been unconsciously--through taking too much for granted. You know you misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did."

Something like terror was freezing Felicia's anger. She steadied herself with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice's point of view. "I said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me--that I am hard, cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can't think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false, and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don't know, except that she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates me."

"Dearest,"--Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief--"I know all you feel; but you do grant, don't you, that your dislike of her, instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her?

I don't think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it's caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that that's the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all, as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her utterly."

"We must, we must," said Felicia, "for her sake as well as ours, we must."

"Why, dearest?" Maurice tipped some perfume on the handkerchief.

"It can only be more pain and more bitterness for her if we don't. What can I mean to her? What can you mean to her? And I have broken with her.

Oh, Maurice, surely you see that it must be."

He turned to her now, and saw that tears were running down her cheeks.

Caution left him. "Dearest!" he exclaimed, his arms about her in a moment, "rather than hurt you I would walk over ten thousand Angelas.

Dearest, don't cry; I will do my best. I'll try and dissuade your father--an ugly task for me. Poor Angela was my friend."

"Oh, Maurice, say that I do not come between you and anything real."

Hiding her face on his shoulder, it comforted her to think herself weak, and he, with his larger, kinder comprehension, strong.

"You are the only real thing," Maurice answered. He felt that he forced her to imply herself wilful in wrongness; and his fear lest she were more right than she guessed made his triumph seem dangerous.

Felicia said that she would not come in to dinner, and Maurice walked slowly to the drawing-room, pausing for a moment over his thoughts in the little hall. Felicia's parting kiss had quieted his worst fear--the fear lest her love suspected past wrongs in him, a baseless fear he now saw, and with this steadying of the nerves he could see the other fear as baseless too. Angela would never turn despicably on him; besides, even if she did, Felicia would never believe her, her jealousy would piteously interpret her desperation. There was further relief in thinking Felicia unjust. The thing must be patched up, and Felicia brought to see that common fairness demanded a certain toleration of Angela.

Mr. Merrick was reading a paper with a pretence at absorption, and Maurice guessed that he was very angry. Neither commented on Felicia's absence, and they went in silence into the little dining-room.

"So you are going to make friends with Angela," Maurice observed lightly, when the servant had gone.

"Felicia has spoken to you, I infer," said Mr. Merrick, sipping his soup in slow and regular spoonfuls. His father-in-law's aggressively noisy manner of imbibing soup had long been a thorn in the flesh to Maurice.

It was peculiarly irritating to-night. He could but hold Mr. Merrick responsible for all the vexatious situation. Silly, gullible old fool!

He could almost have uttered the words as the sibilant mouthfuls succeeded one another. How obvious, in looking at him, that Angela could only have captured him as a tool. To think that, again cast the danger-signal on the situation, made it more than vexatious. Maurice forcibly quieted his mental comments, since to think his father-in-law a silly old fool roused again his worst suspicions of Angela.

"Naturally, she has spoken to me," he said.

"I trust that you do not share her morbid hatred."

"I don't know about a morbid hatred," Maurice answered, controlling his impatience with the more success now that the soup was done. "I see a very normal antagonism of temperament. Angela is all artificiality, and Felicia all reality; but I do think," he added, "that Felicia has the defects of her qualities. She scorns artificiality too quickly. Her scorns outshoot the mark. I don't think that poor Angela, with all her att.i.tudinising, meant any harm this afternoon. Why should she? It was, I own, rather hard on her to come to beg for forgiveness, and to have Felicia refuse to forgive her."

Mr. Merrick had not dared openly to express his angers and grievances, for then he must reveal their source, and that he felt to be inadvisable; but the latent angers only awaited their opportunity.

"Upon my word! Forgiveness for what?" he demanded.

Maurice recoiled as Angela that afternoon had recoiled. He had intended a cheery, mending talk, and he had not intended that it should lead him to this. He could not tell Mr. Merrick the cause of Angela's visit--that he had jested with her over the very article he had urged him to publish.

"I don't quite know what happened," he said, searching his mind for a safe clue. "Felicia, as you know, didn't like that article of yours; Angela spoke to her about it--it was in the summer--there was some misunderstanding; Felicia resented her sympathy."

Matters were becoming clear, luridly clear, to Mr. Merrick's mind, and Angela gained all that Felicia lost. "Indeed," he said, ominously, "she criticizes her own father and resents the frank and more intelligent criticism of a friend."

"No, no!" Maurice was feeling a rush of stupefaction. What had he done?

This was not the clue. "Felicia, as far as I understand, didn't initiate the criticism--resented Angela's."

"I see; I understand. It is the proffered friends.h.i.+p she rejects; the community, not the criticism." Mr. Merrick felt that in Angela's interpretation of the scene he held a touchstone of its real significance, invisible to Maurice. And how n.o.ble had been her further reticence. His anger rose with redoubled vigour over the slight obstacle Maurice had thrown before it. "I see it all," he repeated; "the quixotic generosity of Lady Angela's seeking for reconciliation, and Felicia's rejection of her. As I say, a morbid hatred, and that only, explains it, and it explains it all."

Maurice was silent, with a sort of despair he felt that so, in its false truth, the situation must rest.

"At all events," he said, "I don't suppose that under the circ.u.mstances you will really care to accept this invitation of Angela's."

"I have accepted it."

"Grant that it's a bit indelicate of her to steal such a march on Felicia. It looks like retaliation, you know."

Mr. Merrick flushed. "I do myself and her the honour to think that it looks like friends.h.i.+p for myself." Fresh lights were breaking on him every moment. Dewy roses in danger; perilous influences. "I do her the further honour," he went on, "to believe that Felicia's rejection of her does not alter her wish to do well by Felicia. For my part I will do my best to atone to her for the cruel affront that she has received at my daughter's hands."

Maurice, after the uncomfortable meal was over, almost feared to go to Felicia's room with his news of defeat. He feared, too, with this new weakness born of his new self-disgust, that her love already had taken on that shadow of suspicion and distrust that he dreaded. He was feeling a sort of giddiness from the hateful pettiness of complexity that enmeshed him. He even imagined he might find her crying in bed, and dinnerless, a horribly effective form of feminine pathos that he had never yet had to face in her. The sight of a tray outside her door rea.s.sured him as to the dinner, and it was with a sense of exquisite relief, a sense of dear, sane, commonplace effacing silly doubts that he found her engaged in the very feminine but very unpathetic occupation of tidying her drawers.

She sat--her lap filled with gloves, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and was folding and rearranging, apparently intent on her occupation. Her eyes, as she looked round at him, gave him once more that sense of quiet security. She had faced the situation, seen its triviality, recovered her humour and her calm. Maurice at once saw the situation as only trivial too.

"Well?" Felicia asked, laying a lawn collar in its place.

"Well, dear, I'm afraid he is unmalleable. He is going."

Felicia's face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself.

"He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?"

"Try not to mind, dear. You'll find that it will adjust itself."

Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange disintegrating longings to justify Angela by that self-distrust, to own herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her--to what bogs and quicksands?

Under the s.h.i.+fting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as she answered now.

"I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to me. I shan't oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn't come between you and me, it's really all right."

CHAPTER VIII

"Yes, it had become impossible," said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked.

"I couldn't submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction."

He smiled a little as he added, "So you see before you a ruined man. Are you pleased with me that I've embraced failure?" Lightness of voice went with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a sugar-plum to a child.