Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical.
Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very little of them.
Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly stirred her indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze.
In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave courtesy asked, "Your father is well, I hope?"
"Very well, thank you." She was still looking at him, and into both minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.
For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, and in this little silence something else pa.s.sed between them; it refused a.n.a.lysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events enmity was over.
"About your caring for the view," she said, going to the tea-table and busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; "it doesn"t make you happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven"t at all cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?"
Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. "No; I haven"t had time for cultivating my senses," he said, after the evident adjustment. "I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all that sort of thing; I could see it."
"Indeed, I don"t at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of thing"; she smiled her amus.e.m.e.nt at the idea of finding his negligence guilty.
"Certainly there are more important things in the world," Geoffrey answered, also with a smile. "I don"t understand making feelings--however exquisite--the object of life."
"Nor do I--I hope you see that too."
"Oh, yes; I see that." He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked--
"But what do you call the object of life?"
He was prompt, his eye echoing her amus.e.m.e.nt. "To express oneself actively; to do something; to succeed."
"The artist may do all that."
"The artist, yes; not the appreciator--the taster of life."
"Well, as to doing something--does not that rather depend on what the something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn"t it?"
"You can"t do much for other people unless you have done a great deal for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for others."
Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the smile that offered a bull"s-eye. He really waited to hear what she would say.
Felicia"s eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal.
"What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say that," she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his certainty, "You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!"
The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her, Geoffrey remarked: "In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose; the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know."
"Oh--I haven"t called your wisdom and goodness into question."
She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He had the sense of sunny playfulness--reminiscent of childhood, and the big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured b.a.l.l.s.
"I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid," Felicia went on, "but I have to be--to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man before. I suppose that you are a great man--for I can"t say that my littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of littleness, you see."
"But not satire; that"s the privilege of equality or superiority; you have a perfect right to it. It"s only potentially that I can be called a great man."
"Why, I see people reading whole columns of you--in the _Times_;--what is greatness, pray, if that isn"t?"
"You never read my speeches?"
"Never," she confessed; "besides, you have only made one or two, you know, since I ever knew any thing about you."
"Politics don"t interest you?"
"They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it."
"What _do_ you do?" he asked.
"Since I don"t read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of the dullest thing in nature--inertia. I exist--like the trees outside.
Things happen to me; the seasons pa.s.s over me; perhaps I have a branch lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except indolent vegetation." She really liked him so much that she had allowed her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, "I am matter, you see--and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force."
"Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?"
"But I know nothing about its direction!" Felicia protested.
And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized that the "force" was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he wanted to show her his direction--the battle under the flag. His whole visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own att.i.tude in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He no doubt built with other people"s ideals and intended himself to inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late, and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in.
Felicia saw on her father"s face a mingling of amazement and gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity.
"I liked him ever so much," said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his departure; "he is so different from what I thought."
Gratification at the testimony to his daughter"s attractiveness warred in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the latter as he answered--
"I don"t care for the type. He does well enough for you to study"; and gratification rose again as he added: "That"s the worth of our position.
We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste the flavour of life."
"We certainly do little else!" said Felicia.
"Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is there to do? You wouldn"t have me blindfold myself and rush into the political arena like this young _ambitieux_?--poor automaton! The fly on the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding of our powerlessness."
Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father, tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, "Let us be duped by all means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes." He settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction.
CHAPTER XIV
While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when in Felicia"s presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future.
Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.
Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but a.s.sociate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; kinder? It was necessary.
A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela came back to London in February.