CHAPTER III

"What ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!" said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia's unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela's world, and in the consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.

But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its first thin veil of ice.

For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, he felt himself growing hot.

"No," he said, beginning to eat his soup, "we have both been busy, haven't we?"

"Have you, Maurice?" Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised spoon--eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. "I haven't seen the great picture or the great book yet."

Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of burning cheeks. "Not as I should have been," he confessed. His confusion was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played with her fork, "Do you mind this--so much? Don't on my account. I am completely seared, Maurice."

And as he could find no answer: "We must meet, you know. Can't you pretend calm, as I do?"

She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding between them.

"You make me feel like a felon," Maurice murmured.

"It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that," Angela returned quietly; "the retaliating attitude is not mine, Maurice." Then, as the talk about them cloaked them less, "What have you and Mrs. Wynne been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of her--so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever"--Angela leaned forward to look down the table--"and so Geoffrey evidently finds her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?"

Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of treacherous little hints and warnings. "Not much," he answered; "he drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know," Maurice added, "so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either."

"Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than for power," said Angela, "and not only as a means to power but as an end in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn't it, if the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar."

She spoke with a musing vagueness. Maurice was not looking at her, and her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the cruel, vague words.

"Dear Maurice!" she murmured, "I didn't mean that! Indeed, I forgot for a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain in it for you--beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what you let me know;--I can't get over that habit of frankness with you. But Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career."

"He knows," Maurice stammered, "that if he were to feel a shackle I would abandon----."

"Ah, but would you?" said Angela as he paused. "Though that is why, for your sake, more than his--I know your sensitiveness--that is why, dear friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is--I want to see you free. I wish--I wish," she smiled with quite her old sweet lightness now, "you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no longer?"

But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find no words.

"Dear Maurice, how you distrust me," she murmured, "how you forget that such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn't hurt you if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read to-day his article on 'Credulity.'"

In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.

"Isn't it appalling!" he laughed--he would have laughed at anything said in that normal voice--"it's unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield." Angela also laughed. "My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There's a pathos in it, so far as you and she are concerned."

"Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the eighties," Maurice said. "I am afraid Felicia and I find the grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;" and with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.

She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so staunch, so living, so moving onward.

They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to glance down these innocent vistas in each other's lives. Felicia told of the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve herself to death, in passionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had remained there through a night of lonely horror.

Geoffrey's reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never been very passionate or resentful. "I was a conceited little beggar and always kept cool." At a very early age, after a whipping from his mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, "Do you want to go on?" "I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an exceedingly disagreeable child."

Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in the dinner-table talk, were conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred upon.

After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know Geoffrey's secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her, and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought sudden, sincere words to his lips. "Angela, you have really forgiven me, haven't you?" he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe, Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they were quiet and she said: "I have forgiven you--if what you said was true."

"True? How could it not be?" Maurice stammered, conscious at once that his impulse had been unwise.

"It could not be if you loved her most." He was silent, struggling with his thoughts.

"You love her most--now," Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of questioning.

"She is--my wife."

"And therefore you love her most: for the past--loyalty to your wife must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard--hard to forgive, Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my life, the blotting out--for a time--of my heaven. And how could I forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead joy?"

"But--I told you--that I was unworthy--that I was undependable; that I couldn't depend on my own feeling----" Maurice stammered on.

"You tried to help me so," said Angela quickly, "and it was that that I could not forgive--your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there."

Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling that she must leave him or burst into sobs. "I understand," she said. "You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won't ask further. Now I will go and talk to her." She went across the room to Geoffrey and Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.

Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was there--the truth Angela clung to as her right--that he had loved her, too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth, rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or regretted--that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.

Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, repeating to herself, "Cheap, alluring little creature." It helped her to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia's beauty. Oh, yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won her husband's shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and pain.

"At last I can escape to you," she said. "You have been so surrounded all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, it seems, find you quite alone"--she smiled at Geoffrey--"but Geoffrey hardly counts, does he? Isn't it odd--have you noticed it--that I have hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, Geoffrey does count--a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his cynicism, and it's difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a _tête-à-tête_."

"How selfish, my dear Angela." Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. "You don't get rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you."

"Isn't that a palpable evasion?" Angela turned her smile from him; "we must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may be misinterpreted."

Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the wall's stubborn presence. "I can't urge him to miss you. If he is cynical we will simply leave him--_planté là_. He is more the schoolboy, though, than the cynic."

"You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, don't let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have you been doing all this time?"

"Simply jogging on," said Felicia, finding in Angela's application of her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey's ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.

"Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must spur him; it's fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is the racer type. But your father hasn't been jogging," Angela continued, telling herself before Felicia's not very responsive look that she must try some other interest--any allusion to Maurice would rouse the hostility of this jealous little wife. "What a gallop, indeed, his article on 'Credulity'!--Maurice and I have been talking about it."

Felicia's eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: "Have you?"

"Yes,"--Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her--"I do understand. Only I don't feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don't feel it either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It's a thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about."

Felicia's stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly and gently.

"As an old friend of Maurice's--as a friend of yours--you allow me to understand--and be sorry for the pain, don't you?"

Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like.

"No, I don't allow any pity that divides me from my father," she said. "You misunderstand my husband--and the privileges of your friendship for him."

She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at her father, she turned and went across the room to him.

Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her fan, trembled as she said, "Mrs. Wynne has a talent for _coups de théâtre_."

"And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that walls might be useful."

"You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My sympathy was real--a sympathy that any friend might have expressed--I supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her." The pathos and nobility of her words seemed to Angela her own nobility and pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears.

"Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you can't speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable, you'd better give up trying to speak at all."

Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he walked away.