CHAPTER XVII

And Angela? This was Maurice's first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glaston's opportune entrance had saved him from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his escape--and hers. But with the day Angela's personality unpleasantly reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia's had been. Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all, how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure he would cut in Angela's eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, in kissing her, accepting her avowal.

By the time that he went to Geoffrey's he had decided in a definite recoil from the pain and humiliation--for both of them--that he simply could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must not see her face to face when she learned the fact--this despite an undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.

He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand?

The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound--so mild and unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their feet, and the assurance of a very small but secure income irradiating the future. He suspected that Geoffrey's future, in consequence, had become uncertain, but under the circumstances submission only was open to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there was no danger of Geoffrey's losing office.

When Maurice was on the point of leaving--he had been slightly ill at ease during the interview, and Geoffrey's calm perhaps a little forced--the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, "I wrote to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is the copy."

Maurice, flushing deeply, read--

"MY DEAR MISS MERRICK,--

"I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you know. Everything, now, is all right.

"Yours devotedly, "G. DAUNT."

"I'll go at once," Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. "My dear old Geoff."

"You mustn't make me ridiculous by your gratitude," said Geoffrey. "And, my dear Maurice, I'm not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me happy." He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look of affection that Maurice knew so well.

But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound opening again as he drove away from Geoffrey's, and on reaching his rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small, pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand--Angela's oddly large and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive attitude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read, while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet--

"DEAREST, DEAREST MAURICE (can one say more than dearest?)--

"Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now how much I needed happiness.

"Your ANGELA."

Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger--for even in the extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.

He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all events he would not see her face; and--

"My dear Angela," he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic trust of her "dearest," tore the sheet across, took another and began again with--

"Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick." Maurice paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday morning--Angela's tears, the kiss, the embrace--surged over him. "I did not know this yesterday," he went on, writing rapidly. "We must forget yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She doesn't take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half serious trifling is not to her what it is to us."

Maurice's forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of Angela. She, though not a "dear, simple little girl," did not take things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But having so smoothed her way--and at Felicia's expense--stabbed Maurice with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the messenger's ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn't what he had said really truer than that? Had not Felicia's dear image grown dim? Was it not Felicia's feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia's sake? Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found? He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was in a sooty atmosphere one couldn't escape smudges. By degrees the deeper truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly, endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia's sake, he would be brutal enough, yes, he would--to intimate this even now.

He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. "You must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am necessary to her happiness--perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.

"Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I call myself

"Ever your devoted friend, "M. WYNNE.

"PS.--Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at once destroy this record of it."

Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia. The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met. How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!--how oddly things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near he turned from it with impatience--almost with resentment.

In Felicia's garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.

The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.

Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness of her emotion drew all expression from her face.

A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.

They were together, and for her--for him--the past was forgotten. Yet as Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for him?--for herself? The love in Maurice's eyes drew her from dreams; yet in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it breathed.