CHAPTER XV

Felicia received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel--perhaps faithless. Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate. She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her morning duties were done, she went out--walked in her garden, in the woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill, radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.

Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear, shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one, yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.

Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.

She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory word or look.

"How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate's?" she asked.

Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with as quiet a candour--imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!--and have taken it for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.

He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, "No; I came down to see you. Have you time for me?--time for a walk, I mean?"

She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part of the reticence.

"Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?" he asked. "You have never showed it to me yet."

She answered, "I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods."

They entered the grave, scented silences.

Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile.

She was horribly changed, and her smile had shocked him more than her tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew itself.

The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other. In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.

Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold and azure. Felicia's long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed in her as she in her own sad consciousness.

"How ill you look," he said.

"I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been lopped off; do you remember?" She did not want to talk with any nearness of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm's length, would bring her to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.

"Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?"

"I know how kind you are," she said, feeling herself at a loss before the difference in voice and look. "So much kinder," she urged herself on to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, "than I had ever suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn't imagine when I first met you that you were very kind. But don't bother about my sadness. It's of no importance."

Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with the sense of graceless discord.

"You don't at all know why I have come to-day, do you?" he said. A tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and humanly shaken in its strength.

In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.

"You see--you see--what I have come to ask. Wait--don't answer. I don't want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed all my life. I don't mean that I care less about the things I have cared for. I care more, only differently.

"From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all this: it's like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it's like light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make life great--for you--with you. It would be a new world with you beside me. Wait, don't speak--I see that I hurt you. You don't care about me--yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me. You must always trust me."

He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held her to silence.

"Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?" he said.

"What can I say," she faltered. "You are so beautiful to me; I see it all--I believe it all. I can only hurt you."

His question flashed upon her faltering. "There is some one else?"

"I love some one else."

Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.

He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for this abrupt defeat.

"What can I say?" she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the inarticulate anguish that his must hold.

"Don't let us say anything," Geoffrey replied. "Let us walk on a little."

The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white and gold.

"One gets one's breath like this," said Geoffrey. He had not looked at her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed itself.

"Don't think me impertinent," he said; "you understand that one must grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?"

The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone. She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her despair--the seeing of it stripped to him--her self-control gave way.

She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into helpless sobs. "I am not engaged," she said.

"Ah!--then----," She heard Geoffrey's voice near her, above her, a voice whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality--soaring, noble, yet seeing from afar a triumph.

That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him. She must shoot down that soaring hope.

And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, "The some one is Maurice--we cannot marry--we love each other," the silence near her was, indeed, like a slow throbbing to death.

She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: "Last autumn when he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is hopeless. He sets me free." Her sobbing shook her again, and again the thought of what Geoffrey's suffering must be smote too unendurably upon her own wound. "Forgive me--I am selfish. But to have you ask me that--this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me. And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!"

From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again. And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after hearing--sharp on its indrawn breath--that "We love each other," not a flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice's situation--verging on the desperate as he well knew;--of Felicia; of their love for each other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster, but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea's deep moan in caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly.

Felicia wept on: "If I could only see him!--it's been so long. If I could only appeal to him!--I know--I know it's for my sake; but if only I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on without him."

Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest of her words.

A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her only splendid truth and courage.

Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch.

"That is pure fairy-tale, you know," he said. "People can't marry on only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to understand."

"We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know--it is part of my own suffering--it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and die of suffering than not have known--not have had him tell me. At least now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy."

Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all reserve; but, with his new insight, he felt in it, too, the helpless abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support.

"Sit down here," he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood. "All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it."

She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face.

He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground.

The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous, melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds. Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head.

How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her. Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers, the sad sunset, and Maurice's sad face.

The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection.

"See," she said, in a shaken but different voice, "the snowdrops; they are all out."

Geoffrey smiled. "I hadn't noticed them." He watched her as she stooped to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.

Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished in his fear and adoration. Yet his man's training availed him. He could have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.

She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held them to him. "Will you have them?"

For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.

"I shall always think of you when I see them," she said, looking away from him. "And you, when you remember to-day, don't let it be a memory only of sadness; but of my gratitude--my wondering gratitude." She paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, "I never dreamed you cared for me."

"It came slowly--the knowledge that without you the world would be empty," said Geoffrey.

"And is it empty now?"

"Oh, no," he answered, raising his eyes to her; "you are here."

Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for him--for herself--urging her, she asked, "But does loving me--knowing how deeply you have made me care for you--does that keep the pain from being too great?"

Geoffrey again had his half smile. "Ah, if I don't talk about it, you mustn't think it's not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so miserable."

"Do you mean that if I were happy--married to Maurice--you would be happier too?"

Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he was thinking.

"Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?" he asked.

"I wouldn't care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness with him would be happiness."

"You love him--you are sure--so much?"

"You know; you must see." She leaned her face into her palms, not weeping, with a weariness too deep for tears, and again her tragic sincerity made her seem far from him.

"You must have courage," said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it. "You are both young. Maurice has talent."

"Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to myself, 'He will come to-day; he must come to-day!' How I waited--how I hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don't know how I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I could wait--and could hope."

Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing.

"Ah! don't suffer so!" he pleaded.

"But I want to suffer," said Felicia. "The time will come when I won't mind. Haven't you that fear--the worst of all--that even the suffering will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember larger hopes."

"No, no," said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; "you don't really believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won't be because you've grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things. And," he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, "you have your feeling for beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see snowdrops."

Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, seemed entering a still harbour at evening.

"How you think of me. How dear you are," she said softly. She had that image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling shores, and the evening star. "You make me ashamed. I have thought only of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you--really see you--for the first time."

She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.

He rose, flushing a little. "Thanks," he said; "you won't forget me, I know."

She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go home, she, too, rose.

Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The tattered sails could sleep.

They left the woods near Felicia's garden wall.

"And now I go back to those scuffles that don't interest you," said Geoffrey.

"But they do now, because of you."

"I may come again? I shall never trouble you--you know."

"Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so utterly. You are my dear friend."

Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face. He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must be helped. And helped soon.

He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on the forehead.

Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.

Geoffrey's kiss, Maurice's desolate, farewell face, were both far away. Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled in sleep.