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 embarra.s.sed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as he pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed. 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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."
CHAPTER IX
The news of Geoffrey"s resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice"s new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he accepted another order--a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a cathedral town--an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all inspiration.
"I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight," he said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party.
Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined.
Maurice had carried out his project of "petting" his father-in-law, but in spite of his b.u.t.terfly manner of gaiety Mr. Merrick"s mood showed little relaxation; his wounds were deep; they rankled; and now he received the news of guardianship, which Maurice imparted with an air of generous self-sacrifice, gravely.
"It"s our first separation," Maurice added. "You will have her all to yourself. My loss will be your gain."
His smile left Mr. Merrick"s gravity unchanged. The opportunity seemed to have come for the discharge of a painful duty.
"That I am to have Felicia all to myself, I question," he said, looking ahead at the swift lights of the moving town; for he did not care to meet his son-in-law"s eyes while he seized the opportunity.
"Well,"--Maurice good-humouredly yielded to his funny exact.i.tude--"not altogether; her friends will relieve guard now and then."
It was wiser to reach his purpose by slow approaches; Mr. Merrick evenly remarked, "My guard shall be unbroken," adding, "It will be doubly necessary."
He was rewarded by a light note of wonder in Maurice"s voice. "You seem to take it very seriously, my dear father."
"I take it seriously, Maurice."
Even from Mr. Merrick"s complacency such magnified significance was perplexing; Maurice turned an inquiring gaze upon him.
"What are you talking about?" he asked.