Paths of Judgement Part 21

"She is--my wife."

"And therefore you love her most: for the past--loyalty to your wife must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard--hard to forgive, Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my life, the blotting out--for a time--of my heaven. And how could I forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead joy?"

"But--I told you--that I was unworthy--that I was undependable; that I couldn't depend on my own feeling----" Maurice stammered on.

"You tried to help me so," said Angela quickly, "and it was that that I could not forgive--your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there."

Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling that she must leave him or burst into sobs. "I understand," she said.

"You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won't ask further. Now I will go and talk to her." She went across the room to Geoffrey and Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.

Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was there--the truth Angela clung to as her right--that he had loved her, too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth, rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or regretted--that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.

Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, strawlike, upon the pa.s.sionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, repeating to herself, "Cheap, alluring little creature." It helped her to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia's beauty. Oh, yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won her husband's shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and pain.

"At last I can escape to you," she said. "You have been so surrounded all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, it seems, find you quite alone"--she smiled at Geoffrey--"but Geoffrey hardly counts, does he? Isn't it odd--have you noticed it--that I have hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, Geoffrey does count--a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his cynicism, and it's difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a _tete-a-tete_."

"How selfish, my dear Angela." Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. "You don't get rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you."

"Isn't that a palpable evasion?" Angela turned her smile from him; "we must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may be misinterpreted."

Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the wall's stubborn presence. "I can't urge him to miss you. If he is cynical we will simply leave him--_plante la_. He is more the schoolboy, though, than the cynic."

"You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, don't let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have you been doing all this time?"

"Simply jogging on," said Felicia, finding in Angela's application of her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey's ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.

"Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must spur him; it's fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is the racer type. But your father hasn't been jogging," Angela continued, telling herself before Felicia's not very responsive look that she must try some other interest--any allusion to Maurice would rouse the hostility of this jealous little wife. "What a gallop, indeed, his article on 'Credulity'!--Maurice and I have been talking about it."

Felicia's eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and a.s.sumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his a.s.sumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement of her father always pa.s.sed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: "Have you?"

"Yes,"--Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her--"I do understand.

Only I don't feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don't feel it either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It's a thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about."

Felicia's stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly and gently.

"As an old friend of Maurice's--as a friend of yours--you allow me to understand--and be sorry for the pain, don't you?"

Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like.

"No, I don't allow any pity that divides me from my father," she said.

"You misunderstand my husband--and the privileges of your friends.h.i.+p for him."

She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at her father, she turned and went across the room to him.

Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her fan, trembled as she said, "Mrs. Wynne has a talent for _coups de theatre_."

"And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that walls might be useful."

"You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My sympathy was real--a sympathy that any friend might have expressed--I supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her." The pathos and n.o.bility of her words seemed to Angela her own n.o.bility and pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears.

"Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you can't speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable, you'd better give up trying to speak at all."

Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he walked away.

CHAPTER IV

"WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?" Maurice asked. He and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone, for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded hansoms, and the long silence had been unbroken. Leaning back in her corner, her cloak folded tightly around her, Felicia had gazed blankly at the powdery blue of the sky, the thickly sprinkled lights beneath it, her heart a chamber of angry misery. Maurice's question, its light curiosity like the aimless fumbling of a key, suddenly unlocked and threw open the door.

"Maurice--Maurice," she said under her breath, yet it was like a cry, "why did you talk to her about papa's essay?" Maurice's curiosity, had been a little less aimless than its lightness implied, but he felt now as if she had fired a pistol at his head.

"What did she say?" he asked quickly and sharply, revealing his fear.

"She said that she was sorry for us, and understood it--that you had told her we disliked the article."

"We did--you know," said Maurice after a moment, and, as he saw the pale oval of his wife's face turn upon him: "She spoke of it; I didn't think of concealing what we felt. I can't think that she meant to be impertinent." It struck him, even now, as odd that he should be venturing an excuse for Angela at the moment that his thoughts were a.s.sailing her with a pa.s.sionate vindictiveness.

"Maurice, Maurice," Felicia repeated, in a voice empty now even of reproach. It was a deep, a weary astonishment.

"Dearest, don't misjudge me; don't make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

You know how one slips into such things." He leaned forward on the ap.r.o.n of the cab to look his insistent supplication into her eyes, but hers refused to meet them. "And she is an old--old friend, my precious Felicia; one can't mistrust one's friends. It seemed perfectly natural to talk it over."

"Oh, Maurice, how miserable you have made me!" They were in the smaller streets nearing Chelsea, and she covered her face with her hands. In an agony of remorse he put an arm around her shoulders, beginning now to see his culpability with her eyes, exaggerating it with his magnified imagination of her contempt. He--who had encouraged his father-in-law to publish the wretched thing--he to jest about it with a woman whom he fundamentally distrusted! He could find no further words. They reached the house in silence. Mr. Merrick, who had arrived just before them, was inclined to talk, but, kissing him good-night with a certain vehemence, Felicia went at once to her own room and after a few moments Maurice followed her.

She had already taken off her dress, and, in a white dressing-gown, was hastily unpinning her wreath of hair. Maurice, in the mirror, met the deep look of her eyes. His face was pallid as he stood hesitatingly near the door, not guessing that anger was already gone and that the anguish at her heart was dread of loss of love for him, dread of some insurmountable barrier--would treacherous weakness be such a barrier?--coming between them. Now she turned, and seeing him standing there, white, not daring to supplicate, she stretched out her arms to him. He sprang to her.

"Oh, Maurice, don't--don't--don't," she stammered incoherently, not clearly knowing what she wished him not to do. She dropped her face upon his shoulder. "Don't let me ever--not love you. Hold me always."

"Felicia, you almost kill me."

His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need, such love, and her?

"My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do understand. With her one can't be straight. She led, you followed; how could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!"

She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her, leaning like a little child his head upon her breast.

"It is one of my horrors," he said. "For a moment I saw myself as you might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you."

"Darling Maurice--never, never. I hated her so--that blinded me. I hate so to think that she was ever near you--has any claim. Perhaps it is almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it."

In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing, rose--rose and shook him. "Tell her now, tell her all." Terror quenched longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed her, his eyes still closed, saying, "Don't take your arms away until the horror is quite pa.s.sed."