Paths of Judgement Part 30

CHAPTER XII

That evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. "Will you come to me,"--the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an arrow--"and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation."

Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her mind of unwavering benevolence. "I will be with you at eleven to-morrow morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the truth as I to speak it."

She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or unsteadiness.

Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the interview next day Angela's mind, like a wreck, was tossed from shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had crawled at Maurice's feet her image of herself had been broken, unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching suppliant. What she had further done--that final, pa.s.sionate abandonment where vindictive fury, wors.h.i.+p, and desperate appeal to the very rudiments of feeling were indistinguishably mingled,--she could not look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and appalling, she could just s.n.a.t.c.h a vision of a not ign.o.ble Angela. There had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she must veil her eyes from it.

Most terrible of all was the seeing of herself slip and slide from a serene eminence down into a slimy, warring world. The betrayal of Maurice had not been in her ideal of herself; it forcibly abased her to a level of soiling realities--hatreds, jealousies, revenges. With sick revulsion she could imagine herself feebly turning--though bones were broken--feebly crawling up again from the abyss, either by some retractation, or by withholding from Felicia the ultimate humiliations she could inflict upon her. She might evade the cruellest truth; spare her the deepest wounds and so hug once more the thought of her own loyalty to the man who had struck her from him, a loyalty crowned with a halo of martyrdom.

But so to turn would be to own herself abased; to see herself in the mud; and Angela could not for long see herself in the mud.

Then, in the swing of reaction, her head reeled with the old illusion of height; she was again on her illumined pinnacle, ruthless through very pity, wounding with the sharp, necessary truth; stern to the glamour of a loyalty grown craven, saving Felicia from a falsity that must corrode her life. A pitiful, relentless angel. She saw the sword, the wings--white, strong, rustling, the splendid impa.s.sivity of her face.

Yet on the pinnacle the darting terrors of the abyss went through her.

Was not the truth what Maurice had said--what he had looked--so horribly looked--and not what he had written; that he had written to spare her; had never loved her? She turned shuddering from the thought as she had shuddered at his feet. If that indeed were truth he must convince Felicia of it. The fact of his written words was there, surely unforgiveable; the fact of Geoffrey's love was there; was not the fact of a dim, growing love for Geoffrey there too? She had said it; she believed it; and again, upon the pinnacle, the hands of miry hopes clawed at her. Hardly could Maurice forgive the betrayal. Yet--had he not once loved her? The memory, sweet and terrible of that far-away spring day--his kiss and his embrace--faltered, "yes," though it wept in saying it. Should Felicia prove to him that Angela had only spoken truth might not the showing of the letter be one day forgiven by a man scorned, abandoned? She had been forced to the showing by all their guilty incredulity, and to save Felicia from the trap laid for her, to save her from Geoffrey's scheming pa.s.sion--so could she dress her motive--had pointed out the trap, the danger. Where lay her guilt, if, after this, Felicia chose to verify all her prophecies by walking straight into the trap? It had not been to kill her love for her husband, but to warn her of Geoffrey's love that the letter was shown.

So her thoughts groped in the dubious future; and when despair flung her back again on the black present, hatred, hatred for Maurice, and the recklessness of hatred, caught her, clasped her, sustained her from falling, and hurried her on all trembling with the final thought that if hope were dead, there was nothing to lose in betrayal, nothing to gain in loyalty.

As she drove next morning to Felicia, the day's clear sunlight, the almost wintry freshness of the air, lifted her mood once more to steadiness. She beat off debasing visions, pushed away miry hands, told herself that neither hope nor hatred was with her. And she felt herself standing high in sunlight as she waited for Felicia in the little drawing-room, its windows open on the blue, the brightness. She felt herself in tune with purity and radiance. Dressed from head to foot in spotless white, the long flowing of her fur-edged cloak monastic in simplicity, the white sweep of a bird's breast about her head, she was as pitying and as picturesque as a sculptured saint looking down through centuries of woe from the lofty niche of a cathedral; and a more human but as consolatory a simile showed her as a Dorothea waiting in all her tender strength and helpfulness for a fragile, tawdry Rosamund.

But when Felicia entered, and as she turned to her from the window, a mood as high, as inflexible as her own,--higher, more inflexible, she felt, in a crash that had a crumbling quality--met her in Felicia's eyes. For a moment Angela was afraid, felt herself rocking in her niche; in the next the recollection of her truth upheld her. Truth, pity and tenderness; with these she would meet this stony, hating creature.

"You see," she said, "I have not refused to come to you."

"You had to come, after what you had said," said Felicia.

It was a preliminary only; the pause before conflict. Angela's eyes went over her. Felicia wore her customary blue serge, her lawn collar and black bow. In her place, Angela thought, she would have felt the effectiveness of an unrelieved black dress; a comment followed by a further recognition of Felicia's indifference to effectiveness that left another little trail of fear. She had slept; well, perhaps. Her eye-lids showed no languor. Her face was white, cold, composed. Hardly fragile.

Certainly not tawdry. From this re-adjustment to reality Angela glanced out at the sky. She must grasp at all her strength. She must pray for strength. With her eyes on the sky her mind sped hastily through the uplifting supplication--haunted as it sped by a thought of pursuit that gave a shadow-simile of a fleeing through caverns.

But she brought back gentle eyes to Felicia. "Mrs. Wynne, you have never understood me; never believed me; you have always misunderstood, and mistrusted me, as you do now. I have been forced to this," said Angela, keeping all her quiet while Felicia stood before her with her stony face. "I have watched you like a child wandering in the dark. I have seen you come to the brink of a pit in the darkness. I have put out my hand to save you. That is all my fault."

"By the pit, you mean, I suppose, Mr. Daunt's love for me. As my father told you, I have known, my husband has known, from before my marriage, that he loved me. You did not only warn. You lied. About my husband,"

Felicia's eyes did not change, as she said the word, looking straight at Angela. Since the night before when her father had told her vile falsehoods she had felt not one doubt of Angela's falsity. A white heat of utter scorn had never left her. She would have scorned her too much to see her had not her father's frenzied belief pushed her to this elemental conflict. She would tell Angela again and again that she was a liar.

"How you hate me," Angela now said.

"And how you hate me."

"I do not. I pity you. I want to help you."

"I will pity you if you confess that you have lied."

"If it were to help you I could almost do it--though that would indeed be to lie. I believe that truth is the only helper. Your husband was paid to marry you."

Felicia's eyes received it unflinchingly.

"It may be so. Geoffrey is generous enough; Maurice is enough his friend to accept his help. I will ask him to tell me all the truth. Your implication was that my husband married me through pity."

"You are very sure of people's love for you."

Angela saw herself lashed by the hatred of these two men, by the scorn of this woman whom they loved. Her voice shook.

"I am perfectly sure of their love."

"Yet your husband's love was not always yours."

She was horribly unmoved by half truths; this again she accepted.

"Maurice may once have cared for you. Since he has known me he has loved me. I cannot spare you when you come between me and my husband."

"Since he knew you he loved me--loved me most!" Angela could scarcely draw her breath. "He married you from pity--it is not a lie--loving me.

And I loved him--I love him now! It is the cross of my life! It crushes me!" Her breast panted with the labouring breath; she threw her cloak back from her shoulders and kept her hands at her throat, even then conscious of the gesture's dramatic beauty. "He is unworthy of it--that I know. He is incapable of the sacred pa.s.sion I feel. He loves most the one he is with, and when he was with me--before you took him from me--he loved me most--before G.o.d I believe it--and with the best love of which he is capable. I would have lifted him--inspired him--he used to say I would. He told me that he loved me and that only my wealth had kept him from me--the day that Geoffrey came with his news of you. I would have redeemed him had not you made a claim on his weakness, his pity."

"I know that you are lying," said Felicia. But as she listened, as she spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past.

"Then,"--Angela's breath failed her; she drew Maurice's letter from her breast and put it in Felicia's hand--"read that," she half whispered.

And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment's supreme vengeance. She stood watching her rival--her victim--yes, yes, those voices from the abyss were true--watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like.

But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen contemplation of Maurice's perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: "My husband's words." Then at last ident.i.ty whispered "of me."

They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly, was his love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to know--for she knew it--that he indeed loved her. An acted lie--while he could betray her to another woman--would have made him less odious to her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror.

She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and they saw more than the loss of love.

With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the pa.s.sion of her shattered pride, she hated him.

Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she could not feel that she hated her.

She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly--"This was home."

"You see--I did not lie to you," said Angela. That Felicia should show no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck, made her wonder--in another of those crumbling flashes--whether indeed her foot was upon Felicia's neck. She had struck her down, she had humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was seeing her in the mire?

She repeated: "You see I did not lie to you."

"No," said Felicia, folding her husband's letter as she spoke, "you didn't lie."

Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned out of it.

"And can you not believe _now_ that I never hated you?" said Angela.

Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. "I don't care. It makes no difference to me."

Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other's consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. "How cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only tried to help you."