CHAPTER XIII

The wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything was beautiful; all relations beautified; for the unbeautiful ones she could feel no longer any bitterness. And into the superficial monotony of the old life Maurice's letters came like chimes of bells breaking the stillness. He wrote constantly, letters of a quite recovered gaiety, giving his impressions of the people, the places he saw, showing her life as he saw it--as she some day should see it, beside him; and through all went the ardour of his homage, his longing.

Felicia, in answering, felt that she could with him be so entirely her whole self that she need not show her whole self; it was easier for her to give him her soul dressed in tender humour, beribboned with quizzical freaks of fancy. It was his understanding of her, his consequent perfect possession, that lifted her life into the new sense of power and freedom, for was it not freedom and power when every faculty was effective, bore fruit in his responsiveness?

Not till late October was the beauty of the new life touched by a breath of doubt or sadness. A dejection, then, showed itself in Maurice's letters, a dejection that coincided with his return to London after his round of country visits, coincided with his taking stock, as it were, of his situation and looking his powers and resources in the face. The letters then became at once more passionate and more infrequent. He must not sadden his darling, and the analysis of his glooms could only sadden her. He was working--it gave him less time for writing--luckily for her. In her answers Felicia's courage steadily smiled, held out an unfaltering hand to help him over the morass of melancholy; but the melancholy, more and more, like a fog closing round him, seemed to shut him from her. Her apprehensions from vague became cutting. She did not know a touch of distrust, but the separation, the sadness, hurt too much. "Come and see me; spend a day. We can walk in the woods. It will give you strength and me too," she wrote.

Maurice only sorrowfully answered, in a letter like the slow rolling of big tears, that he must not; it wouldn't mean strength, it would mean disablement. He must wait until he had more right to see her. He begged her to love--love--love him. After the glory of golden days and thoughts, of deep, glad breathing in a crystal air, this change was like a labouring breath, and like the change in the year--the grey and amethyst of late autumn. The old loneliness returned again and again, but with a poignant stab that no former loneliness had known. Bereavement seemed to hover near her.

Gathering late roses in the garden one day she faced, for the first time, her own fears--saw that they were fears. She had not heard for a week from Maurice, and his last letter had been little more than a plaintive sigh of self-pity. For the first time Felicia was asking herself if joy was not to be a distant, a far distant thing. She saw more clearly the forces against him--forces that her young ardour had barely glanced at; she did not distrust his love--that would have been too horrible a wrenching of the new doubled life, but she distrusted his strength before such obstacles.

The roses were fragrant, fragile, white, the outer petals streaked with a hardy red. When she had filled her basket she went to the gate and leaned over it, looking vaguely down the road. The thought of that summer evening was with her, the life there had been in it--deep, sweet life--in the pain, the trust. The facing of a long, blank patience was almost death-like, almost like the shutting of the eyes, a yielding of oneself to the earth, with a faith in final resurrection--where?--when?--who knew?--for all light in a shrouded present. Felicia shook off the simile, with a fear that Maurice's plaintiveness was infecting her. He had more right to it--burdened fighter. Her love a burden?--again her heart dropped. She bent her face to the roses. Their sweetness went through her like a smile. She sighed, her eyes closed, over the relief of her own gratitude for such smiles. When she looked up again she saw a man's figure among the pines below. It was only for a moment that her heart could stand still with joyous questioning--joy so keen that it seemed to leave the heart it passed from bleeding; for in another she saw that it was not Maurice, and then, with a wholesome surprise, the staunching of the wound, that the wayfarer was Geoffrey Daunt. In knee-breeches, shooting-cap and coat, he looked a veritable Apollo straying, incongruously garbed, through a landscape beautiful enough to match him. Felicia, finding still that wholesome staunching in surprise, watched the nearing perfection appreciatively for some time before definitely wondering what brought it there. He himself, as he approached, showed no surprise. His eyes, as he doffed his cap, met hers calmly. He had quite the air of having come to find her and of having expected to find her leaning on the gate and watching him.

Felicia held out her hand. "Are you with Aunt Kate? Have you been shooting? You haven't lost your way?"

Geoffrey, while she asked these questions, held her hand over the gate and, though as unperturbed as ever, seemed somewhat at a loss for an answer. Dropping her hand, his eyes went from her to the house, the garden and away to the hills.

"You are high up here," he observed. "No, I haven't lost my way. I knew this road led past you. Yes, I am with your aunt for the week-end. I have been shooting."

"It is rather good shooting, I believe. Uncle Cuthbert prides himself on it, I know."

"Very good," he answered, with still his vagueness.

"Well, won't you come in and have some tea?" Felicia suggested, since the pause that followed grew long, and it suddenly occurred to her that however inimical she and Mr. Daunt might be there was yet a lack of even conventional hospitality in this survey of him over a closed gate.

"Thank you," said Geoffrey, pushing open the gate and coming in, quite as if this, also, were what he had expected. As he walked beside her up the path he made no customary remark on the charms of house and garden--for the garden, with its Michaelmas-daisies and roses was still charming. His lack of aesthetic appreciation she had guessed, and in his quiet glance now was a business-like discrimination, as though he merely recognized a certain oddity and were classifying it. Geoffrey, meanwhile, was not wondering that he had come, for he had definitely intended coming, but was wondering a little what, exactly, he had intended in coming. To see Felicia Merrick. No further object was defined in his definite mind, where objects were clear-cut. He therefore turned from wonder and rested upon the attainment of his object, looking now at Felicia, observing the details of her dress--her blue serge frock, her narrow white lawn collar, the black bow under her chin--observing the curves of her thick hair, the freshness of her cheek--not as an artist would have done, with a keen consciousness of the picture they made, but with a very vivid feeling about their significance to himself. They meant that sense of charm; and, when her eyes were raised to his, there came that sense of sudden peace.

She paused before the door. "Would you like tea now, or shall I show you our view? It's the proper routine--first view, then tea. There is a wonderful view up there from the top of the hill."

"You shall show me the view another day," said Geoffrey.

There quickly darted into her mind a strange query. Had Maurice sent him with some message? She said, summoning a smile, "Very well. And I don't believe you care much about views, do you?"

"I don't think I do; not much."

She ushered him into the little hall. It was panelled in light wood, and its faint woodland fragrance made him think of pagan incense in some primitive temple. There was a leaping fire in the sitting-room, and the white austerity trembled with rose and gold; branches of larch in tall bronze vases glowed like a delicate mist of light. The freshness, the fragrance, the simplicity, all spoke of Felicia. She rang for tea, and, while she filled a bowl with her white roses, could not repress that inner urgency.

"It is long since I saw any of you. How are Lady Angela--Mr. Wynne?"

Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical. Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very little of them.

Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly stirred her indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze.

In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave courtesy asked, "Your father is well, I hope?"

"Very well, thank you." She was still looking at him, and into both minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.

For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, and in this little silence something else passed between them; it refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events enmity was over.

"About your caring for the view," she said, going to the tea-table and busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; "it doesn't make you happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven't at all cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?"

Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. "No; I haven't had time for cultivating my senses," he said, after the evident adjustment. "I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all that sort of thing; I could see it."

"Indeed, I don't at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of thing"; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence guilty.

"Certainly there are more important things in the world," Geoffrey answered, also with a smile. "I don't understand making feelings--however exquisite--the object of life."

"Nor do I--I hope you see that too."

"Oh, yes; I see that." He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked--

"But what do you call the object of life?"

He was prompt, his eye echoing her amusement. "To express oneself actively; to do something; to succeed."

"The artist may do all that."

"The artist, yes; not the appreciator--the taster of life."

"Well, as to doing something--does not that rather depend on what the something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn't it?"

"You can't do much for other people unless you have done a great deal for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for others."

Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the smile that offered a bull's-eye. He really waited to hear what she would say.

Felicia's eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal.

"What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say that," she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his certainty, "You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!"

The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her, Geoffrey remarked: "In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose; the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know."

"Oh--I haven't called your wisdom and goodness into question."

She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He had the sense of sunny playfulness--reminiscent of childhood, and the big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured balls.

"I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid," Felicia went on, "but I have to be--to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man before. I suppose that you are a great man--for I can't say that my littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of littleness, you see."

"But not satire; that's the privilege of equality or superiority; you have a perfect right to it. It's only potentially that I can be called a great man."

"Why, I see people reading whole columns of you--in the _Times_;--what is greatness, pray, if that isn't?"

"You never read my speeches?"

"Never," she confessed; "besides, you have only made one or two, you know, since I ever knew any thing about you."

"Politics don't interest you?"

"They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it."

"What _do_ you do?" he asked.

"Since I don't read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of the dullest thing in nature--inertia. I exist--like the trees outside. Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except indolent vegetation." She really liked him so much that she had allowed her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, "I am matter, you see--and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force."

"Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?"

"But I know nothing about its direction!" Felicia protested.

And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized that the "force" was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he wanted to show her his direction--the battle under the flag. His whole visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own attitude in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He no doubt built with other people's ideals and intended himself to inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late, and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in.

Felicia saw on her father's face a mingling of amazement and gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity.

"I liked him ever so much," said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his departure; "he is so different from what I thought."

Gratification at the testimony to his daughter's attractiveness warred in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the latter as he answered--

"I don't care for the type. He does well enough for you to study"; and gratification rose again as he added: "That's the worth of our position. We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste the flavour of life."

"We certainly do little else!" said Felicia.

"Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is there to do? You wouldn't have me blindfold myself and rush into the political arena like this young _ambitieux_?--poor automaton! The fly on the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding of our powerlessness."

Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father, tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, "Let us be duped by all means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes." He settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction.