Paths of Judgement Part 31

Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela's words.

"And then how human;--after all I am human. See how intolerable it was to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good, when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I loved him." It comforted her to feel the tears running down her cheeks and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem n.o.ble to herself in her avowed abas.e.m.e.nt. "Perhaps I have been jealous--oh, how can I tell?

Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can't you pity me? Can't you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?"

Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous att.i.tude; she knew it, although she could feel nothing.

"Yes, I am sorry for you. It has been horrible for you," she said, but with the weariness that a soldier, lying shattered, helpless, upon a battlefield, might show towards the tormenting clamours and lamentations of a wounded enemy beside him. She wished to be allowed to bleed quietly to death. These alien hands plucked at her for a help, a sympathy she could not give. She was sorry; but when one was shattered one could only know that one was sorry and be tired.

Angela's weeping was stilled for a moment. After all, it was not pity that she wanted. She wanted to be lifted from the nightmare of abas.e.m.e.nt; to feel herself looking down once more; to be the consoler, the binder of wounds--not the suppliant; not the recipient of an indifferent dole. She approached Felicia, putting out her hand to her.

"And you know--dear--dear--child, how I pity you. Ah, let this pity, this mutual agony unite us, Felicia--you who have lost only an illusion, I who have lost a reality. Can we not see each other more clearly now?

Can we not understand--and kiss each other--like sisters?"

Maeterlinckian visions--a tower, a sad blue sea, a great blue sky, white birds, wandering, beautiful souls in pain--crossed her mind, enhancing her consciousness of beauty. It was beautiful, what she said, and she must look beautiful, leaning in whiteness, with her outstretched hand, the tears of her deeper sorrow upon her face, towards this fallen comrade. This would atone for all, be the spiritual significance of all the tragic drama, this union of suffering sisters. She drooped softly upon the figure in the chair, encircling it.

But with a violence that made Angela reel back, almost losing her footing, Felicia started to her feet. Staring, white, shuddering, she looked at the other woman.

"Don't touch me. You must not touch me.--Go away--you are horrible," she said. "You fill me with horror." Her voice was hoa.r.s.e, shaking.

Angela had retreated from her, and while they looked at each other across the room, a strange struggle and change showed itself in her face. Felicia's conviction entered her. She felt herself evil. She felt herself horrible.

With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in silence, she went from the room.

Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her.

CHAPTER XIII

Felicia stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.

Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-b.u.t.ter, was cheerless, for the more intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, before the blaze, she would sit and rest--and sleep; there had been no sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets.

Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her inwardly for the dumb discretion of her cla.s.s. There was nothing more to do now. Chintz-covers--she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just before her father's arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.

Felicia's mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future--the writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he returned to-night--or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause between a dagger's uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, went with a sullen quiet--much like the flames among their logs--through the well-remembered words.

"I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now.

That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey as he is--and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that your honour--a strange word to write to you--is safe between our hands; but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his n.o.bility. Do not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that you shall ever see from me."

This letter was lying on Maurice's dressing-table waiting for him.

There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night--the cold, calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly in her mind. "To him? From me?" She would think it dizzily; and dread clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.

But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would suffer--for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.

She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her pa.s.sion had a sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.

The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees shook in the rising gusts of wind.

There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself enn.o.bled by her contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.

As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the road, a tall man's figure under an umbrella.

Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.

It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made ident.i.ty a conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be Geoffrey?

Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and pedestalled--strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!--lifted high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched her.

But to see Geoffrey now--now that she was his--and knew it.--The thought shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.

It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird's nest in a shaken tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the strength of her own avowal?--come to claim her?--to take her away?

She had no time to a.n.a.lyze the terror of such surmises--what they implied of disillusion in him--or to look at the rapture that ran a dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be rapture was perhaps the terror's root. She heard him in the hall ridding himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation lay in a solemn claiming. His n.o.bility had chained them. Might not n.o.bility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final question--in a gasp--as he came in.

His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the window, looked silently at him.

"It's true, then, you have left him?"

His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in her.

"Yes, I have left him. Who told you?"

"Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All I could grasp was that."

He did not know then, and any revelation of what his att.i.tude would be when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into the deep old chair before the fire.

"Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There was no fly?"

"No. I didn't mind the walk." Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn or two up and down the room.

"Your father said that you would never go back to your husband."

"I never will."

"You have ceased to love him, then?"

"Absolutely ceased."

Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, "May I ask why?"

The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos--like the spring's--like the day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him everything. _Might_ he ask?

"What may you not ask?" she said. "There is nothing that I have a right to keep from you now. This is why. Lady Angela showed me this--yesterday." Without turning her head she held out the letter. "It was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together--when you told me that you loved me--when I told you that I loved him."

Geoffrey's hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand.