Paths of Judgement Part 5

Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice's. "Is she not wonderful? We expect great things of her," she said, for Mrs.

Merrick was quick at adjustments.

Felicia's placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment.

Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer's place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her fingering, while she played.

It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience.

Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This view from Trensome Hall--the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like bands of flowers--was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne's.

He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one.

"Come down," said Maurice. "How good of you to be up early. Let us have a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time."

Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view--as far as he could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes the pages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take hard.

"Do you ever have moods of despondency--despair?" he asked her, as they went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen far above, beyond the sparkling green.

"Moods? No; I don't think so," said Felicia; "but I am sometimes horribly discontented--and when I am I can't imagine anything that would content me."

"Not anything?"

"Not anything--except everything. I mean being sure that everything is significant, worth while."

"But it is worth while as long as it lasts."

"But it doesn't last!" She smiled round at him, for she was leading the way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet gra.s.ses on either side. "The sense of impermanence often poisons the worth." She added, "Do you have moods?"

"Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It's funny that I should talk to you about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the way our friends.h.i.+p began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me out, put me on my feet, and, once I'd done gasping, set me running, as it were, got up my circulation. He didn't argue; but he wonderfully understood, and he promptly acted."

"And do you have them, the moods, because things don't last?" Felicia asked, looking ahead into the wood's translucent green.

"No; not so much that as that things don't come. I want so much more than I ever get. I want to feel everything--to the uttermost. I never get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see, rather than loss that I dread."

They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were meadows of tall gra.s.ses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him, showed a gravity, a little perplexity. "You don't understand that?" he asked, when she stepped down beside him.

"No; I dread both."

"I am awfully human," said Maurice; "and I want the whole human gamut--but that's all I ask."

"But what is the human gamut?"

"That question from your father's daughter! Your father, I hear, is a great positivist."

"Well, his daughter asks the question."

They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall field flowers.

"Do you know," he asked, "how, after this, I shall always personify faith to myself?"

"Faith?"

"Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The key-note of your life is a question."

"Do you call the asking of a question, faith?" Felicia smiled.

"It's faith to think it worth asking."

Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it.

He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy, yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented unfavourably upon her companions.h.i.+p with Maurice. And with the intuition came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers.

Really, Mr. Daunt's head, so high against the blue sky, with its cla.s.sic white and gold, was ridiculously handsome. She nodded a smiling _au revoir_ to Maurice and left them.

The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret.

Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice.

"That's a very pretty girl," Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the symptom.

Maurice's shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable repudiation.

"Pretty! Don't be so trivial!"

"Well--what was it Angela called her yesterday?--alluring, elusive?"

"Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela's lips the terms would savour too much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is a wild rose open to the sky, dewy, _un peu sauvage_; anything less alluring in Angela's sense of the word was never seen."

Geoffrey, who had heard a mult.i.tude of wild-rose raptures, received this one with composure.

"I a.s.sure you, Geoffrey," Maurice went on, growing the more confidential for his momentary reticence, "I a.s.sure you that if I could afford it I would fall in love with that enchanting girl."

"And since you can't afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical.

Meanwhile, what of Angela?"

"You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag in Angela?"

"Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you.

Don't flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela's affection too far."

Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably.

"My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn't that sort. One flirts in the boudoir--not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela's affection."

"Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this last year of dallying meant?"

"Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us."

"Yet you came down here----?"

"To go on dallying. I own it. But I've never yet made up my mind to find my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven't any reason to believe that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it rather nicely." Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and as though by holding the matter at arm's length he were keeping it from the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.