Paths of Judgement Part 7

Angela put a hand on her arm; "Don't read him. A lily should not look at ditches."

"I am going to crawl to the very end of mine--muddy ordeal though it is," Felicia declared, trying to keep defiance from her smile, and aware that the Olympian was looking at her and that she was flus.h.i.+ng. Her detached student's interest was probably branded in all their eyes with some crude and ugly interpretation. Well, let them think what they liked of her. She turned and went into the house. This had not been a melodious afternoon.

"Poor child!" sighed Angela, "poor child! What a _milieu_! An infidel papa and decadent literature."

"Well, it has raised a lily, you see," Maurice remarked.

"Has it?" said Angela. "Poor child. I long to help her."

CHAPTER IX

Angela Bagley wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality, like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coa.r.s.e desires; she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to her--though she did not know that they were only tools--tools in a complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools used always for an egotistic end.

In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened.

Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she would be the n.o.blest influence in his life, not knowing that to gain that influence she would abase herself to any ign.o.bility. Again and again she had almost thrown herself at his head--oh! ugly phrase!--Angela did not use it--shown him her heart, rather, though with a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the giving of deep friends.h.i.+p if other givings were ignored. Again and again Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that kept the clasp of friends.h.i.+p, a smile that salved her pride by recognizing only friends.h.i.+p in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the self-immolation of this love--for Angela was well aware of its romantic indifference to vulgar considerations--now when she was almost sure that she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against Felicia.

She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now whispered in her heart, and she armed herself.

The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And while fully conscious of the n.o.bility of her own att.i.tude in its stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was by no means conscious that she had armed herself and that the att.i.tude was her weapon.

The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr.

Merrick.

Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey's calm gaze at him, in Maurice's kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man's genial patronage--an adaptation, Angela knew, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with amus.e.m.e.nt; she saw these things in relation to Felicia's att.i.tude towards them, her placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him, she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction that she would not a.n.a.lyze upon the possible n.o.bility of this target att.i.tude, a n.o.bility that others, too, might see. Relief, as una.n.a.lyzed, came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia's stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a halo.

"How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick," Angela said to her hostess; "I see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he must jar upon you and your husband--could I fail to see it? And yet how kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I suppose, their only outlook on life."

Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was now enabled to see him with Lady Angela's clearer vision. She saw herself, too, as very kind indeed.

To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. "What a type! That's what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned a.s.surance! His mind is a mince-meat of little sc.r.a.ps from all the lesser thinkers of the century!" Since coming into the country she had not been so near Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.

"He encouraged me magnificently this morning," Maurice in his mirth confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile, understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was failing her; she couldn't tell herself with truth that she was indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt's derivative discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging as of appreciating him.

Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor--he was always taking the floor--got up and strolled away, quite as if he were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela's sad and vacant eyes, and Maurice's deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.

Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the sense of his pursuing comrades.h.i.+p enveloped her, the anger that repulsed them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye that, seeing through her evasions, said, "I understand everything.

Command me, you charming friend." To keep silence towards him, to escape for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings was not to evade that sense of comrades.h.i.+p s.h.i.+ning in the sudden gloom.

It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father's arrival, while at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.

Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succ.u.mbed to his brother's vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, ready to bubble up.

Maurice's eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much against her all the rest.

"It's an age of sham, of conformity," Mr. Austin announced. "There seem no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old faiths into vaporous metaphors--metaphors accepted literally by the ma.s.ses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a candlestick--the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy water!" His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pus.h.i.+ng back his plate and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in even more impressive tones, "Don't, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I think, Guyau said."

He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning still lurked in his wholesomely disenc.u.mbered mind.

"Ah well," said Mr. Cuthbert, "all that's beside the mark. One must have custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to pieces. G.o.dersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week," he added, looking genially around the table.

"Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting," Mr. Jones went on to Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder of Mr. Merrick's denunciations to roll by.

"G.o.dersham on faith. I've no doubt of it." The thunder rolled again.

"You will always find material prosperity b.u.t.tressed by conformity. As for the country going to pieces, that's rubbish. It shrivels in its stiff sh.e.l.l."

"I have the greatest regard for G.o.dersham--the very greatest," Mr.

Cuthbert said temperately.

"I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You don't follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal less theism than Voltaire--let us say. I consider such a man morally culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a menace to the national welfare."

Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia's attention turned from him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr.

Merrick's flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt's face that arrested Felicia's attention.

Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm.

To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true, true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at all of them. "Hear! hear! papa." She flung into the emptiness a flaming little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her.

Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face, steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across the table. Geoffrey's hand continued automatically to break his bread.

"Hear! hear! Miss Merrick." Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing her eyes from Geoffrey's. "I put your glove in my helmet. But really, you know, Mr. Merrick--" his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the almost ardour with which it had a.s.sured her of champions.h.i.+p--"we shall plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about faith."

"Metaphysics!" Mr. Merrick e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with impatience. He had glanced at Felicia's banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than his own bomb-sh.e.l.ls, attracting the general attention. Turning his shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the task of forcing a way into his brother's comprehension--overlaid with "crusts of custom."

"A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia," said Mrs.

Merrick.

"Miss Merrick isn't an infidel; she's only a loyalist," said Maurice.

Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued--

"Don't you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all attacks?"

"I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps," said Angela, who still leaned on her hand and still looked down; "but to me mere disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-a.s.sertion, is more repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose itself, is sacred to me."

She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt; yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.

Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her grat.i.tude for this enlightenment, rose, and Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.

She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently, clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.

Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on.

Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. "You _were_ more a loyalist than an infidel--I understood. Only your father pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain, pain you?"

Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over amazement, still kept the look of steely steadiness. "I am sorry that any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger's opinion of him could hardly give me pain."