"Isn"t power an end in itself?"
"I should think it ought to have an aim."
"Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the ma.s.ses? all that sort of thing?"
"It is the part of the powerful person to say that."
Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. "You won"t like Geoffrey,"
he observed. "But though he hasn"t ideals I will say of him that he is dear of the usual reproach of the politician--he claims none. Now Lady Angela does," he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. "She lives under tremendously high pressure, you know." They had pa.s.sed down the uninteresting avenue, its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in what this pressure consisted.
CHAPTER V
Mrs. Merrick"s drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of _Art Nouveau_. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of painted gla.s.s, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick"s painfully acquired taste had not had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.
She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs.
Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with distorted bandy legs--a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up to one, winking and leering with all its decorations--and drawing off her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her aunt"s kaleidoscope.
Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-G.o.d. His height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes, were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia"s quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-G.o.d had a right to be so magnificent.
An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr.
Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession.
The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that.
Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.
She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid man--Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him--and in appearance she was very long and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her; clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale, shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A "touched-up" spectre. Lady Angela certainly did not please--nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela"s seemed to rest on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in the other.
"You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my opportunity to bring you something." His eyes smiling steadily, as if over the new bond they had found, said to her, "You don"t like your aunt--nor do I. You are out of your _milieu_ here. n.o.body here is capable of appreciating you; but I appreciate you." The smile was so infinitely more delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity in her, only made her happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost comrade.
As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt"s head turned towards them, and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received a more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He was displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela, and displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so freshly young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until he presently got up and went across the room to Lady Angela, interrupting her _tete-a-tete_ with such an air of evident purpose that Mr. Jones arose and wandered away.
Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. "What have you been doing this afternoon?" he asked.
From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his eyes were upon them as he spoke.
"Writing to my friends," Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was a probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her time, after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the same opinion.
That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her significance was shown by his next placid question, "What about?"--quite implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting to him.
Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, "About how I feel life--theirs and mine."
"You feel a good many things about it--don"t you?" Geoffrey smiled, though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, "I believe in feeling," she returned.
"You and Maurice are alike in that."
"Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an end; mine is a means."
"For the good of others?" Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one thing, but to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble Hermes is gently quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it was one that Geoffrey often gave her. He was one of the few people, she told herself, who almost made her angry. She flushed now, ever so slightly, at the tone. Yet with a sweet patience that he should have felt as the turning of the other cheek, she answered, "I own that I try to live for others."
"And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference."
Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at her wrist.
"You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;--wilful, isn"t it?--perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain att.i.tudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts it."
"Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?" Geoffrey inquired, raising his eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the palm-tree. "I hope not. Surely I am right in a.s.suming that to live for others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so."
"I have owned to an aim--not to an attainment. Why is it that those who do not aim cannot forgive those who do?--try always to smirch the effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not self-righteous, Geoffrey--I frankly recognize your intimation--why not make it as frankly?"
Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, "I am sure that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you a little."
"It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is strong, though I myself am weak."
Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it was now as if his thought had pa.s.sed away from her and her words, and his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but flattering. "Who is that girl?" he inquired.
Angela"s eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that Geoffrey"s interest in her, his relative, was only because of his interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision, she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be Maurice"s, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice"s indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at the girl under the palm--the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the talk to--she said vaguely, "A niece--a cousin--I forget which Mrs.
Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the world--the world to her. Quaint, isn"t it?"
"I shouldn"t like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick"s," Geoffrey observed. "An ugly woman," he went on, adding, "The niece doesn"t look provincial."
"No; oddly she doesn"t; not physically; but provincial in soul I should think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a shallow joy in life. It hasn"t suffered, isn"t capable of much suffering. She looks like a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive, alluring."
Geoffrey pa.s.sed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it was natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was clearly allured.
"Her dress isn"t provincial either," he said; "its simplicity is extremely sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods.
She is a young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress."
"And how to eat," mused Angela. "Dear child, it"s really delightful to see such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich."
"I beg your pardon, it is her fifth."
"You share Maurice"s interest."
"Is Maurice so interested?"
"Isn"t he?"
"While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a sketch of her."
Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it with, "Why did you come here, Geoffrey?"
"Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a quiet place where one can rest."
"And why did Maurice come?"