Paths of Judgement Part 8

This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected.

She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick intelligence, might savour of meanness--a stroke under cover of darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest; indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant.

"You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?" There was a real quiver in her voice.

"Do you count me as more?" Felicia asked.

"I want to count you as a great deal more."

A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness of att.i.tude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with Felicia's sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then slipped over to Felicia's sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile, now, on the two men.

"I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was," she said; "we all understood, didn't we?"

Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She broke through it, regardless of rents. "_I_ don't understand," she declared. She rose, drawing her hand from Angela's, confronting them.

"I think trivial things had best be left alone." With this, picking up her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice's.

Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is a.s.sured. At once he understood and answered.

"May I come too?" he asked.

"Do. I am going for a walk."

This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of two women over a man. Felicia's face kept its hardness as she and Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion, and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in merely following her.

Maurice's tact, as delicate as a woman's, forced no sympathy upon her by an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.

"Do you know," he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, "to-day you are not a bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows and eyes is all Romney--Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that you only remind me of beautiful things?"

Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. "Now _do_ you consider such a remark impertinent?" Maurice demanded. "You frighten me, you know. I feel in you such a _farouche_ fastidiousness. Our idealist in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments."

"Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be called that," said Felicia, biting into her pear; "I suppose I hardly know how to accept compliments gracefully--never having had any made me before."

"It's too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you.

You know that, don't you?"

"How can I tell? I have known you just five days."

"Still--you do know me."

"Doesn't Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider your compliments to her blaring?" Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at him now with her dryad-like malice.

"Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all trustworthy."

"No, no," Felicia protested.

"No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn't know me as well as you do--in spite of your nipping reference to five days--and for the simple reason that she doesn't know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one's outer vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her--she is, on the whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she means--and that's so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you intend to mean."

The memory of Aunt Kate's grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this frank a.n.a.lysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular garden--finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar--had made its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely pleasing in the delicate desecration.

This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him, should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked.

And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed, intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals, whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her on and there was no time to pause, to a.n.a.lyze, to weigh her heart. She only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart might ache at the loss of the dear companion.

Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing.

CHAPTER X

There must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted with him, must recognize him as her champion, though champions.h.i.+p might endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn't much care what it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden was Maurice's philosophy.

He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father's articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the acc.u.mulation of material. German idealism had been abandoned. "Why attack these castles of sand?" said Mr. Merrick.

From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down at Maurice.

"To-day you are not to escape me," he declared. "I claim all to-day. You will practise?"

"I will. Why do you say I escape you?" She had to smile at his acuteness.

"Since the other day--in the garden--you have. Angela irritated you, Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn't it a little true?" He leaned against her steps, answering her smile.

"Perhaps a little," Felicia owned. "I felt, perhaps, rather out of it."

"So you are--out of it, with me." His words were light, too, but she felt the underlying emphasis. "You see we feel things in the same way, see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to bar me away from you--even for a day or two--and two days is a frightfully long time in a mere week." His voice lifted itself from the almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences looked at and effaced, he went on. "I've something here I want you to see and feel with me." He showed her the volume he held, Maeterlinck--delightful dreamer.

"At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that's an unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather than in darkness."

"This isn't nightmare, but it's not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn perhaps--or perhaps twilight; you must say."

"I saw Mr. Daunt pa.s.s outside just then. He always spends the morning here. Shall we read it somewhere else?"

"Ah--let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey would take it." Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the twilight dream might carry him too far. "You dislike him? Really?"

"Frankly, I don't like him--but I don't want to exclude him from the reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-a.s.sured makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him.

He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad."

"Ah!" Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. "You have seen the best thing in Geoffrey--the single-minded directness of his quest--its object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty."

"And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It's a touch of human tenderness that makes him less chilling."

"Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre.

I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I got broken."

"No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don't believe he has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How grey and rigid his life must be." Geoffrey walked in as she said it.

Maurice greeted his friend gaily. "Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit of poetry. I'm going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once."

He turned his pages.

Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to Felicia's side.