CHAPTER I

Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick looked about the little room with a scrutiny cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia's marriage, but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther shore it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr. Wynne's income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the drawing-room offended her, as Felicia's garden had done. She could sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs. Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh and spotless as a white sea-shell, the austere suavity of eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious consolation in the dowdiness of some of Felicia's guests; Mrs. Merrick knew that duchesses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called "smart." It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more gratification after deciding that it did not apply here.

Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia's tea-table, and Mrs. Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as her furniture. Mrs. Merrick's brain had bubbled with conjecture during those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome Geoffrey Daunt's potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush.

Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft unobtrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend, Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her.

"Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn't it very charming, very exquisite?" said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided past him. "Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?" She detached herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk.

People were going--only a group remained about Maurice at the other end of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and Felicia's first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as she smiled and talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone, really to see and speak to him.

When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a deeper flush.

"Is this your first meeting, too?" asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey to Felicia, as she held the latter's hand. "Geoffrey has become a greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are no doubt _au courant_ of all his news?"

"Yes; he kept us posted," said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness, making no allusion to depths.

"He hasn't kept _me_ posted," said Angela, taking a chair beside Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in an attitude habitual with her--an attitude at once sibylline and saint-like. "I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey--only heard of you. How are you?"

"All right. And you?"

"Wearing out my scabbard," she said with a fatigue that made no attempt at lightness. "That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to anything, isn't it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn't it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn't it? It does one good," she repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.

Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the boredom, at all events, showed itself in his "To be with people who aren't wearing out their scabbards."

"Yes,"--Angela did not look up from her tea-cup--"people who have in their lives what one longs to put into everybody's life."

"You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?" Felicia smiled, a little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey's manner of mild ridicule.

"No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and Maurice's be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not? just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a London season enjoyable."

Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she arranged her tea-cups, "What quest do you mean?"

"Why, the quest of youth and happiness--success in life. It is a pity that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies."

Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey's cup and helping herself to a slice of bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not let it pass. "What do you mean by life?" he asked.

Angela still seemed to muse. "Oh, in this instance, I don't mean life in its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the bread-and-butter sense, in fact," she added, raising her eyes to Felicia and smiling.

"Why not _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches?" asked Felicia; "they are even happier. Do have one."

"Yes, the _pâté de foie gras_ sense, too. My first impression of you was that--None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. Wynne eating sandwiches?--five, I think you made the number--and isn't it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want her to let me give her all I may."

Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on Angela a look both firm and gay. "Why do you think such things of me?" she asked.

"Things?--what things?" Angela's smile was neither firm nor gay. She felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered Felicia's crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most intended avoiding them. Geoffrey's cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice's wife. Yes, she was again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice's letter had spoken the truth--if Felicia's love and Geoffrey's charity had forced him into marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self enabled her to hide.

"What things?" she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before something blinding.

"Horrid things!" Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered.

"My dear child!" Angela breathed with a long sigh. "What have you been thinking of _me_? What do _you_ mean?"

"I haven't set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don't ask for either. You don't really know me at all, so please don't talk about me as if you did."

Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed Angela's discomfiture. Unless she showed her hate, what should she say? Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go, murmuring, as she took Felicia's hand: "I am sorry--sorry. You have not understood."

"It seemed to me that you did not."

Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight arrested, Angela rejoined: "I am afraid that you hardly want me to understand." Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered from rejoinder by his eagerness.

"You are not going, my dear Angela?" He took her hand, speaking very quickly. "I haven't seen you. Do stay." Meeting his eyes where a shallow sincerity seemed to glitter over depths he could not show, Angela recovered herself and could again take up a weapon.

"I am afraid that I am not really wanted, my dear Maurice," she said, standing between husband and wife, still holding Felicia's hand as he held hers, smiling from one to the other, a brave, kind smile. "I am afraid that I am a quite unnecessary fourth here. Our old trio has another head. I had hoped that I might, as a friendly hangeron, not be in the way; but I am. I feel that I am."

"Trio? Oh, you mean Geoffrey?" Maurice was perplexed, yet spoke with a gallant lightness--the concealing glitter emphasized, while Geoffrey, all placidity, queried--

"Was I ever one of a trio? That's news to me."

Angela turned her head to glance at him.

"So you will forsake me--even in the past? Well, I abdicate all claims."

"But we don't--we don't, my dear Angela! We don't abdicate our claims to you. It's not a trio," said Maurice, "it's a circle--isn't it, Felicia? Let us all join hands. Come in, Geoffrey."

"No, no," Angela softly echoed his laugh. "I will come again--and look at you all. But indeed I abdicate all my tiny claims. Remember me, my dear Mrs. Wynne, if I can ever be of any use." She pressed Felicia's hand and turned away. Maurice went with her into the hall. Her wrap lay there and he held it for her.

"You may trust me, Maurice, for ever," she whispered, as she slid into it. She did not meet his glance of helpless confusion; but she knew that all glitter had left him.

Driving away in her carriage, she leaned her head back in the corner, where she shrank and burst into tears.

In the drawing-room the last people were going, Mrs. Cuthbert among them. "I hear your father is coming to live with you, Felicia," she said.

"Yes. It is too lonely for him now."

"He won't be able to let the house, I fear."

"For the present the house is to be shut up, and we may go down to it for week-ends."

"It is always a rather dangerous experiment, you know, Felicia, a third person between a young couple."

"We must risk it," Felicia laughed.

When, after this final grunt, her aunt had gone, she and Geoffrey were alone.

He was standing at the window, and she joined him there and looked out at the silver river with a slow russet sail upon it. The sense of peace and confidence, felt on the day of their last meeting, was with her; but it was more easy to speak with perfect openness since she need not speak of themselves.

She repressed the impulsive "How she dislikes me!" that might seem to claim his sympathy for her painful part in the recent little drama; she need never claim his sympathy; and a curious sense of loyalty to Angela made her substitute, "How I dislike her. You must know it, so I may as well say it."

"That explains her unpleasantness, you think?" Geoffrey's voice was as detached and impartial as if he were questioning the validity of a dubious clause in a dubious bill.

"Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps she didn't mean to be unpleasant."

"Perhaps she didn't know that she meant it."

"But it's pitiful--if she thinks she has lost friends."

"Pretty brazen of Angela--that assumption."

"But aren't you rather cruel?" She tried to smile, but a glance at her face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was. Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he recognized a complacent vindictiveness--"She is furiously jealous of you." Accepting her reproach he merely said, "Angela makes me cruel. I enjoy showing her her own real meaning."

"That is indeed cruel--to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I'm more sorry than I can say for it all--for her being in my life in any way. Yet she is in it. She is the centre of Maurice's old life. Most of his friends are hers, and she was his nearest friend--next to you. She blights everything." Her voice had a tremor.

"That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn't have suspected you of such weakness. She doesn't really make you sad?"

"She does, rather."

"Only on her own account then--not on your own."

Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela's deepest pathos. "Oh, on my own, too," she said. "I am quite weak enough for that." She added: "You always make me show my weakness. I seem to find strength in showing it to you--your strength, I suppose."

"Do you? Thanks." Geoffrey looked at her. "You do remember, then, that I'm always there?"

"Always." She looked back at him.

Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange moment, he had kissed her good-bye.

The little silence that followed her "always," was unbroken when Maurice entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking down.

Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the words she had said to him at the door--words how well left unspoken! Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear and self-reproach.

For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no longer the hunted, unstable--yes, the base man who had written that letter. He was Felicia's husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.

When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise. He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela's consciousness if not in his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more equanimity. After all, Angela's very coming proved how such fruitless episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen tears in her eyes and kissed her--it had not been then, with her at all events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her--for Angela's sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of something indefinable and dangerous.

He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year's sunshine almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him take a long breath.

"How good this is!" he said.

They both smiled at him.

Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; gratitude was for Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize like Maurice's felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend's tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret, for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river.