CHAPTER XI

He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had recently written--a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole year--and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they did, behind a golden haze. Maurice's moods easily alternated between golden hazes and black fogs.

Geoffrey went away on that morning--that, too, was the receding of an uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he didn't want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness more blissful.

"I sometimes think," he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, "that sadness is the most beautiful thing in life."

In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, as now, when she said, "To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps."

"But we shouldn't be able to see or hear it if we hadn't lived it."

"It only becomes beauty, then, when we've outlived it, not while we are in it. People dress up their sorrows so," said Felicia, turning vaguely the pages of the music before her; "they always remind me of the king in the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked."

"I believe you are right," laughed Maurice, "and that it is only when we are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness."

Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion. But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.

"And since it's a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?" she asked.

"Not quite yet." Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The golden haze was about them; it shut off everything else. She must love him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future take care of itself? It probably would--her father could probably give them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a lot of articles--very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he contemplated Felicia and hesitated.

In the midst of this hesitation--_could_ he risk a cramping poverty?--would it be base to find out whether she loved him--to make her love him--with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue eyes resolved itself--as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of the sky--into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently, and the smile said, "I love you. You are near me. That is why I am happy."

But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away.

"Felicia, dearest Felicia," said Maurice. He took her hand. "I do so adore you. Tell me that you can love me?"

Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed;

"I suppose it must be that."

"You do love me?"

"I suppose I do."

"Oh!--darling!" he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she still kept her look of almost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his Dresden shepherdess.

It was altogether like an _Embarquement pour Cythère_, Maurice thought, with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze--what need to ask where bound--to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness. Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being loved, after that first shock of wonder--that slipping from the shore to the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she went to meet its meaning.

"I almost felt that you loved me--I did not really guess it--but I felt, though it seemed so strange," she said. She drew away from him a little--her hands folded on his breast--so that she might look at him.

"From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that turning in the lane. You can't claim any such pedigree of feeling!" He put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles and the lightness of their words.

"I can see no other beginning--unless just now is one."

"You did not know--not one bit--until just now."

"Can one fall in love so suddenly?" she wondered.

"Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long."

"And you really--really knew?"

"From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here--here at last she is. There was a bird singing near us--do you remember, darling? The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried."

"Oh--dear Maurice, it is too beautiful," said Felicia, almost sighing. "Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?"

She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long room.

"Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?" she said. "Does that make me seem of less value?"

Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. "It only makes me seem of more; it is my _métier_, that--to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious things. Who that has ever known you _could_ have loved you, pray? Who could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value, that seeing it in others."

The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with a gravity almost sad.

"Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some real value myself--for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable. Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia." And as he spoke she saw in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness.

"Something in me!" The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now, who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to her lips, saying, "Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come to me to lose your fears."

It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her, and in herself the power to answer it.

Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him.

"What indeed!" Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked--

"You never did care for Lady Angela?"

"Never--never--never!" said Maurice. In the light of his love for Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere. Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next question--

"Nor she for you--not really, I hope?"

"Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers."

Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two days--the days of the happy secret--wondered, a poignancy in the wonder, if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition, hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice's common-sense only that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love. Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out--the emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere conquest--to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent. The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility Angela could not forgive--and did not know she could not. She talked herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed Felicia's unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had met. "I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does, you know." Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.

Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful head of a Christ that she always carried with her.

"I have lived to my highest!--oh! I have," she murmured; and at the sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed, came.

"This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him; and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings--to hurt me so."

The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did not know that she hated Felicia.