CHAPTER II

Felicia did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly knew.

It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion--to see that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger, surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her. She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality. Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking back on her despair when she had almost lost him, she saw the something passionate and reckless, the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful requirements of life.

The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain. It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a loneliness that now--and this was the secret of achievement--meant strength and not weakness.

In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never inspired. She had moments--and in them the loneliness was ghastly--of seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm; but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain of his adoration she would always be alone.

A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures.

"Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let's just enjoy them now--while we are young and can. You don't want me to be a County Councillor, do you? You don't want, yourself, to sit on committees and be useful--like Angela, do you? There are such quantities of useful people in the world."

Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy.

The goad was gone--the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and water.

"_I_ shall work, then," Felicia declared; "it's only fair that I should. You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must prove to you that I meant what I said--do you remember?"

Their tiny income just sufficed. "If a pinch comes I'll set to," Maurice affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn't need to be pinched; she wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and she found some translating to do. Through Maurice's numerous literary relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination with which she shut herself up every morning.

"You must wait for inspiration," she retorted; "but there is no reason why this hack-work of mine shouldn't keep off a pinch for ever."

Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.

But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice's strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice's attitude of bright acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick's dogmatic intolerance could only weary or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her father.

She went into Maurice's studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.

"Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on 'Credulity'?" she asked.

"It is _vieux jeu_, you know," Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his deep chair.

"_Do_ I know?" said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.

"It is all true enough, as far as it goes," said Maurice, hardly recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. "Sit down on the arm of the chair, dear, and don't stand so still, so stiff, so disapproving."

"All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as shallow, as trivial as possible."

She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm.

"He takes a very crude view of religion," Maurice owned. "One doesn't approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of contest has been shifted."

"Exactly. Why didn't you tell him so?"

"Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn't that have hurt you?"

"Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be foolish," said Felicia, looking over Maurice's head and feeling that vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he said: "You are displeased with me?"

Alarm was such a new note that Felicia's breast echoed it, transforming it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his.

"Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased."

"Please forgive me," said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering her smile and irradiating his face; "I thought you would like me to please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did."

"I know. I know you did it for me. But I don't like you to do anything that isn't absolutely----"

She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice supplied "True?"

"Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn't be your standard. You must have your own."

"Ah, you mustn't ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I lacked."

"But I do ask it of you," said Felicia, and, leaning against his shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little knot, she went on: "You see, in your kindness you aren't really fair to him--nor to me either! He was quite cross with me just now when I tried to dissuade him--quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it to the magazine you recommended--oh, Maurice, I _was_ displeased!"

She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated, with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, "Please forgive me. I'll never do it any more."

Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay on "Credulity" was accepted, and Mr. Merrick's assurance, which had been rather pricked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to its unstable placidity.

Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards herself.

"The old sword isn't rusty yet," said Mr. Merrick; "it can still do execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods."

Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice's new endeavour "not to do it again," that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon.

Maurice's geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an assault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio, heard in the adjacent dining-room her father's pugnacious tones: "The fellow is merely an ass; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him with his winking virgin!"

"My dear father," Maurice's voice returned, and she wondered whether her father felt to the full its cutting quality, "we are all of us asses to one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my house."

"Oh, very well; by all means," said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but hesitating to express his full resentment. "I will merely vacate your drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity." The words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper.

"I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other people's beliefs; it's not a seemly thing--a bludgeon in a drawing-room."

Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a touch of anxiety.

"Did you hear, darling?" he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were alone.

"Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit of bludgeoning--he thinks it right."

"Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged."

"Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak."

"Only I did not intend you to hear."

"Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say." She smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight discords if their own harmony were perfect.

But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child, and Felicia felt her husband's eye upon her as, in all his encounters with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she desired of him.