CHAPTER XVI

Geoffrey, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.

Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of vagueness, Felicia's figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by the thought of her. What cruel tricks one's brain played upon one, and how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms. Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him. This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of necessity--in Maurice's philosophy all past fact became necessity--and not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.

There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room, with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from his boyhood's home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity and composure, Geoffrey's quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he sat at his spacious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal, to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There lay Geoffrey's strength.

"Sit down, Maurice," said Geoffrey; "I want a talk with you." He still held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again.

He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep secrets--though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy--how he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing question; and when Geoffrey's matter was over, he might as well tell him that the culminating romance had at last been achieved.

The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he could take for granted her shrinking from the world's prying eyes; her love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each other surrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief. Anything that took him out of himself was a relief.

"Maurice," Geoffrey said deliberately, "I went to see Felicia Merrick this morning."

Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion, and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. "I have seen her several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me."

Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief; but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia--_his_ Felicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of suspense.

"I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her." Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his sentences. "She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has suffered. She told me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that she loved you."

Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia's faith his own faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the beating of his heart.

"She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her free. Do you love her?" Geoffrey asked.

"My God!" Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them, and burst into loud weeping.

Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his hope had clung to, that Maurice's attitude would show some obvious unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that would make of Felicia's love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered. There was simply no more hope.

Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: "I adore her; I have from the beginning. Don't you remember?" Through his grief the resentment showed itself.

"Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferent to you as I thought, our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn't have stood for a moment between my wishes and her." Before this firmness Maurice's resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs again.

"You adore her, and you give her up?" Geoffrey asked.

"What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry me?"

"Why did you ask her?"

"Don't turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don't be ungenerous. I was a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn't help myself. I hoped that something might turn up."

"Why don't you still hope?"

"I can't, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living--far more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed? Looks terribly----?"

Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend.

"She looks terribly ill."

"And she sticks to me, the little darling!"

"She certainly stuck to you," said Geoffrey, still looking down into the fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, "You surely would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn't be here this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking."

For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey's voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, "Maurice, do you want to marry her?"

At this Maurice started to his feet. "What are you talking towards, Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell me the truth--do you hope to marry her?"

"I told you that I wouldn't have asked you to come if I'd had any hope."

"To marry her I'd sacrifice anything and everything," said Maurice, altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream.

Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no consciousness of superiority in his claim.

"To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice," he said; "I will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her happy."

Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to white. "Geoffrey," he gasped.

"_Will_ you make her happy?" asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed, as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man's responsive soul.

"Before God I will," he said.

In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the table and sat down at it again. "I can pay off your debts--I have made some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money on my property--its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife; what you have now, once it's free, will do the rest, and her father no doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me back, well and good; but don't bother over it. I shall get on well enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always lucky with my speculations; I shan't be pinched."

"Do you mean it, Geoffrey?" All that was best in Maurice rose in the solemn gratitude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question.

With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the half-passionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the difference between Angela's boudoir and a country meadow in spring. Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music, Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliest lark and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was really best in him--his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-glass idealism. He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to veil her.

Geoffrey had answered with an "Of course I mean it," while Maurice's mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. "But how--how can I accept all this from you, Geoffrey?" he said at last; "it is splendid of you; it's a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I accept it?"

"As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either side--for her sake."

"And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?" Maurice asked with a half-sad, half-whimsical smile.

"Perhaps a little for you. If I didn't care for you, didn't think you worth her caring for, I wouldn't do it; but that would probably be for her sake again. Candidly, I don't feel for you much just now, or think much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand that, of course, in another lover."

"But it's in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism."

"It's the best thing I can do for myself, isn't it?" said Geoffrey, with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. "I wouldn't do it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I would rather have her happy than miserable."

"But, dearest Geoffrey"--the tears again rose to Maurice's eyes as the wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy--"how can you tell that--with time--you couldn't have hoped? People do outgrow their griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing--she would have seen that I wasn't really worthy--and have recognized that you were." That it was, apart from Felicia's future attitude, a fact already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of Angela--ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with Felicia--this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, breaking his voice.

Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future possibility. He answered Maurice's inner fear and his own inner regret with a brief "She might die before she outgrew it."

The fact soothed Maurice's qualms. "Dear, dear old Geoffrey," he said brokenly. "How we will both love you. It won't hurt you, I hope, to see a lot of us."

"I'm not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it's between you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a lucky speculation, a legacy--what you will. Her father will expect nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I've thought about it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in her cup." He put his hand on Maurice's shoulder as the young man stood beside him: "Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better."