CHAPTER VIII

"Yes, it had become impossible," said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. "I couldn't submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction." He smiled a little as he added, "So you see before you a ruined man. Are you pleased with me that I've embraced failure?" Lightness of voice went with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a sugar-plum to a child.

Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the playful key.

"You are not a ruined man," she said; "I'm not pleased that you should call yourself that. You really can't afford to re-enter the House as an independent member?"

"No," said Geoffrey, shortly; "I can afford nothing but drudgery."

"Drudging with you will only be a stepping-stone back to power."

He was studying her as he stood before her, seeing suddenly after his momentary self-absorption, her pallor and thinness. She almost reminded him of the ghostly Felicia, the Felicia of tears and helpless grief; the Felicia of that distant day among the birch-woods. This Felicia was not helpless, not weeping, not quite so wan, but her looks made an ominous echo. He took a seat beside her. "Your father still goes constantly to Angela?" he asked.

Felicia nodded gravely, yet without plaintiveness. Geoffrey made no comment on the affirmation. In silence for some moments, he told himself that this daily growing alienation accounted for the air of pain and tension.

"I must actually seem to you to whine over myself," he said, presently. "Of course, I know that the drudgery is only a stepping-stone. I must fill my pockets with ammunition; find the pebble for my sling before I confront Goliath again. But tell me something.... I may ask it?" He hesitated. Under his light firmness he knew a shattered, groping mood. He could not think with clearness either for her or himself, and only felt that he must ask.

"Anything you like," Felicia answered gravely.

"Are you happy?"

He had never come so near as in asking the question; they both felt it. Some barrier was gone; the barrier of her happiness, perhaps. Felicia knew that the little moment suddenly trembled for her with that sense of nearness; in another she felt that her sadness would be a stronger barrier.

She looked up from her sewing.

"You know what I feel about papa and Lady Angela. I feel it foolishly perhaps."

"Apart from that, it's a pain, I know, but one can adjust oneself to pain."

"Apart from that, am I happy? What do you mean by happiness?"

"Are you satisfied? Is your life growing? Is it glad?" Each question was a stone thrown into a deep, deep well of sadness, but she answered with serenity over these shaken depths, even smiling at him with a flicker of the old malice. "It would not grow if I were satisfied, nor, perhaps, if I were altogether glad."

She saw by the look of accepted gloom that came to his face that he knew himself banished from that moment of nearness, and over the barrier felt herself putting out a hand of tender compunction and comradeship, as she went on more gravely, "I think I am happy, but happiness is not a thing one can look at. It's like a bird singing in a tree--one parts the branches to see it and it is silent."

"You hear it singing, then, when I don't ask you questions?" He had grasped the metaphorical hand, understanding and grateful; understanding, at all events, as much as she herself did.

"Yes; and when I don't stop to listen for it."

They talked on again: of his situation, his projects, but these things were now far from their minds. The fact of his broken life no longer held Geoffrey's thoughts; they were in a chaos of doubts and surmises. He had ruined himself, then, that she might hear the bird sing, and it was silent; and was it only silent? Had it flown? For the first time since he had played the part of a happy fate in her life he knew a passionate regret for what he had done. No doubt, no surmise, touched her love for her husband. The regret was for the chance he had lost--that other chance of making her happy. Why hadn't he ruthlessly held on to the advantage circumstance gave him, the advantage not only over Maurice's poverty, but over Maurice's weakness? A lurid thought went over that weakness. Would he, Geoffrey, whatever his poverty, have given her up? The "no" that thrilled sternly through his blood told him that to his strength the triumph might have come. He only quelled the tumult by remembering her strength. Dubious peace--to think that her strength would never have let him hope; her strength was great, no doubt, but was it as great as he had imagined? And would it have held her faithful to a finally fickle Maurice? Above all, would it have outmatched his own through years? The tumult was rising again, and he saw that the sudden, wild regret had been like the opening of a flood-gate to such tumults. He must endure them with as much composure as he could muster from contemplation of the fact that the past was irrevocable, that he had given her to her husband, and that she loved her husband; the last fact in particular laid a chill, sane hand on retrospect.

He and Felicia were still talking when Mr. Merrick entered.

Far from assuming a culprit's humility, Mr. Merrick's demeanour of late showed, towards Maurice and Felicia, an aggressive indifference, and towards Geoffrey a portentous gravity. He had made a habit of coming in upon _tête-à-têtes_, taking up a book, and seating himself, with a frosty nod and air of remonstrant determination that was more than a hint for Geoffrey's departure.

Geoffrey had ignored the hint on several recent occasions, continuing to talk until Maurice's appearance seemed to relieve Mr. Merrick from some sense of grim obligation; he would then arise, with no word, and stalk away. Geoffrey felt amusement in watching these manoeuvres, giving very little thought to their significance, and finding a schoolboy fun in the conviction that he annoyed Mr. Merrick very much by outsitting him. But to-day he was in no mood for annoying Mr. Merrick; Mr. Merrick's appearance, indeed, annoyed him too vividly for him to feel the fun of retaliation. He got up at once, and before the other had taken his place near the window.

"Good-bye," he said, taking Felicia's hand; his eyes lingered on her pallor, her wanness. "I won't silence the bird any more. I'll see you soon again. Tell Maurice I'm sorry to miss him."

He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused, book in hand, on his way to his chair.

His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and opened the book, observing, "I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send any of your guests away."

Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father's appearance. She had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it.

Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick resentment, she asked, "Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you could not do that."

Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust, real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot, speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, "I shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable intimacy."

Felicia's quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now, after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous shook the anger to sudden laughter.

"Papa! how ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "Really, your prejudices shouldn't make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr. Daunt is my dearest friend--Maurice's dearest friend."

"It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt is strong; he dominates you both."

"What folly, my dear father!"

"Very well, Felicia, folly be it. I can only say that your conduct in this, as in other respects, deeply distresses me. You are altogether changed."

"I changed? In what respect?"

Mr. Merrick paused to review swiftly all the respects, before saying, "You have become cynical, ungenerous, disloyal."

Felicia's amusement hardened to stern gravity. She grew even paler, laying down her sewing as she said, "Ungenerous? Disloyal? I?"

"You, Felicia. It has given me the very greatest pain."

"How have I been ungenerous? disloyal?"

Her father did not meet her eyes.

"You have been ungenerous to a very noble woman, who only asked to be your friend. You have been disloyal to me."

"To you!" Her interjections were like swift knives, cutting at his careful deliberateness. "What do you mean?"

"You thought fit, moved by this influence that I deplore--quite apart from its open antagonism to my claims on you--to scoff and jeer at my essay. It would have been enough to have expressed your dislike to me alone." His eyes now turned to her.

She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose. As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,--"That horrible woman!" she cried.

"It was your husband who told me," said Mr. Merrick quickly.

"Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?"

Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own steady.

"Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don't fancy you can deny, is the truth."

Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick's displeasure with a slight compunction.

"There, child," he said, rising as he spoke, "don't feel like that about it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real harm is your irrational hatred,--don't stare like that, Felicia--your irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against and must always protest against."

Still she was silent, though her gaze had dropped from him. Her silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, "Think it all over; think better of it all." Pausing at the door, he added, "_She_ bears no grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself, my poor child." She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence proved as much; and he had done his duty.

Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going; the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes; when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above her.

This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man. Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow, impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps, steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her that for a long time she had been trying to love him, and that now the effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion, were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn--scorn, the distorter of all truth--as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness, the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the thought close.

Some one entered, and she opened her eyes on Maurice. He had worked all the afternoon. The sitter was gone. He beamed with conscious merit, deserving her approbation, quite like a child let loose from school; smiling and radiant.

He came to her as she lay sunken in the chair, leaned to her for a kiss, and paused, meeting the hard fixed look of her eyes.

"What is the matter, dearest?" he asked, and his heart began to shake.

"Why did you tell papa that lie?"

He hardly understood the question, but her tone struck through him like a knife. "What lie?"

"You told him that I talked to Lady Angela of my dislike for his article."

"Didn't you?" Maurice asked feebly, for his brain was whirling. The added baseness did not urge her voice from its horrible, icy calm.

"I, Maurice? When you--you only talked to her of it?"

"Felicia, I swear you have mistaken it. Don't kill me in looking like that. Let me think. I told him--yes--I had to explain how it happened--your anger towards Angela, your sending her away. I muddled into the whole thing. I suppose I let him think that you had talked. How could I tell him that it was I? For Heaven's sake, be merely just, darling,--Felicia,--how could I tell him that, when I am half responsible for his publishing it? You remember the mess I got into to please you?"

"To please me? You are a coward, Maurice." She turned her eyes from him.

Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by, and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict; it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if, now, he were a thing put by and forgotten.

But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words--"a lie," "a coward," echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went through her; and suddenly the surging sense of her own cruelty, his piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a stifled moan to her lips. "Maurice!" She covered her face with her hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by sudden hope. They clung together like two children. "Forgive me; forgive me," she repeated. "Forgive me. Nothing--nothing could deserve such cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn't love you. I was so cruel that I didn't love you any longer."

She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities; they engulfed the vision of herself--dry, bitter, bereft of her love for him. It flitted away--a bat--in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who, holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had been bewildered, weak. "And weakness is more forgiveable--so far more forgiveable than cruelty, dear--dear," she said. "Horrible I! to have had such thoughts." She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone.

Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparing himself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick's red displeasure rather amused him, so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia's eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father's wounded vanity and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him.

"You have behaved in a way I don't care to characterize," Mr. Merrick remarked, when Maurice had finished with "If I had only had Felicia's courage at the beginning--only frankly told you that I didn't like the article--if I hadn't been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn't have got myself into such a series of messes."

And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned, replied that he deserved any reproach.

"Maurice has been weak, too complaisant," said Felicia, "but there has been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of hurting you. Forgive us both."

"You have nothing to forgive in Felicia," said Maurice; "she has been the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab."

"Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach. If she has been a target you have hidden behind it."

"Exactly." Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity. "In future you'll remember that whatever I say she can never deserve reproach."

Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr. Merrick interrupted her with "I only beg that in the future you will not whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only slightly."

Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of this scene of dauntless penance.

"Smile, smile, darling," Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips, and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by peril bravely fronted.

"Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you--that it was what you would have hoped of me."

"Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He is like a hurt child, Maurice."

"He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?"

She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered, "Don't ever remind me that you were not."