The latter"s composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said, "Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great a.s.s if you don"t find the culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material considerations as well as I do, so I"ll not urge them, but add to them the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it--and they might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision."
"Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don"t show me the nuggets under the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction--must charm me into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn"t jar upon you as it would upon me. When it"s got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to fall in love so completely that I shan"t be able to write a sonnet about it. Now, I"ve written several sonnets to Angela."
Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, "I don"t urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is, I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don"t allow an emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You"ve had quite enough of these experiments in feeling."
"Ah! but suppose--suppose," laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind him, "suppose that this were the permanent emotion."
"In that case," Geoffrey answered, "I should be very sorry for you, and for Angela and for the wild rose."
CHAPTER VIII
"You and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia," Mrs. Merrick said to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick"s mind was of the order that infers matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano and violin--whatever Mr. Wynne"s projects, Felicia ought not to count upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece"s worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not quite of bread and b.u.t.ter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure establishment.
These were Mrs. Merrick"s thoughts while she sorted the papers and remarked upon the rapid friendship.
"You know," she said, laying the one magazine upon the other, "that he is very poor. I fancy he has no settled income at all."
It had come, the inevitable grunt in the midst of the pastoral. Even in her displeasure, Felicia could feel some amus.e.m.e.nt in the sudden simile that suggested Aunt Kate as the un.o.bserved pig in its pig-sty among the orchards and rose-hedges where she had been happily strolling. She could almost see a flexible, inquiring snout pushing between the palings, above it the scrutiny of an observant eye. The simile so softened the displeasure that her voice had all its indolent mildness as she asked, "What has his poverty got to do with his friendship, Aunt Kate?" After all, it was easy to lean over the palings, and with a stick, indulgently to scratch the creature"s back.
"Ah! nothing--nothing at all, no doubt, especially since it is said that he is all but engaged to Lady Angela. He has admired her for years."
"And what then? Are any of his friendships a menace to his engagement do you think?"
"Of course not, Felicia. You jump at such odd conclusions. And I did not say that he was engaged, merely that he had admired her for years. It"s improbable that Lady Angela would accept him."
"At all events, a friendship of two days" standing can hardly be affected by anything you may or may not have heard. _You_ mustn"t jump at odd conclusions, Aunt Kate." Felicia could not repress this as she put her book under her arm and stepped from the window on to the lawn.
In spite of the lightness of her tone, the grunt had come as an ugly interruption in a melodious mood. To hear such things did affect the two days" friendship, though she did not believe them. She had known him for only two days, but the two days had been hers so exclusively that any other "admiration" must mean very little. Not that the two days meant much to either of them, she a.s.sured herself. They had only strolled among rose-hedges. A pity, though, that the pig-sty had to be faced.
On the lawn coming towards her were Angela, Maurice and Geoffrey. They personified the new life into which she seemed to have entered. To see them together pushed her back once more into the place of spectator.
Felicia had time to recognize her own hurt and almost angry mood as she approached them and smiled at them in pa.s.sing. But Angela, with a winning hand held out, detained her. "You are so fond of walking. Won"t you come with us? Just about the grounds?" she said. She drew Felicia"s hand within her arm. "I am not very strong, so I can"t make magnificent expeditions as you do--Maurice tells me--with him before breakfast. But even a little walk has twice the value if it"s a talking walk, don"t you think?"
"I suppose it has," said Felicia, feeling a slight confusion as she walked between them.
"Though a silent walk, with a companion one cares for, has even more, perhaps," Angela added. "Don"t you love silence?"
"I have had so much of it," said Felicia.
"So much silence; how exquisite! Isn"t that a picture, Maurice, that she makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness, much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me of it." Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between them. "Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very little?"
"Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could have so much silence as not to care much about it."
Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the shrinking irritability be simply--she asked it of herself with quite a pang of self-disgust--a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her eye in going over her went with something of a child"s large coldness.
Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitely undressed--a wan Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock, stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew--a frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm.
Let the contrast be as obvious as possible--as unbecoming to herself as possible.
"You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am here again," Angela went on; "may I? I can"t tell you how people interest me. I have always loved to look at other people"s lives--haven"t I, Maurice?" Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking; none of her pretty appeals included him.
"To meddle as well as look, you think--don"t you?" and her smile was now half sad in its humour.
"Oh, you meddle quite nicely," Maurice said; "Let her meddle with you, Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do you no harm."
"Rather scant encouragement for you!" laughed Angela, looking down, for she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; "but may I? What I really want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to be done; and so much apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn"t think me a Don Quixote--tilting at other people"s windmills; but wherever I go I confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there to live for?"
"I don"t help anybody," said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness, for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady Angela"s signature; "I don"t know anything about the charities here. We never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can"t be of much use, except as warnings, I suppose."
It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them.
The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification.
But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand, was speaking. "May I help _you_, then, to be of more use?" she said; "I know how circ.u.mstances--material circ.u.mstances--interfere. You live so far from the village, and your father"s interests, your interests, are intellectual, not ethical. You haven"t had an opportunity for thinking about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should love to talk to you about it all--the giving of oneself, the life for others, which is the only true living. You haven"t seen the spiritual and practical side of things--for practical and spiritual are one in reality. We know, only to do."
They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind their palings to seraphs in laces.
"I know very little," she said; "I certainly do nothing."
"Oh, come now!" Maurice broke in. "You talk to your father; you make a beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doing nothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved giving in the garden to the village children--pets of yours. I have no doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized charities."
"Ah! you do interest yourself then!" Angela turned on her a look of bright reproach. "How can you say you do nothing? I am so _glad_ you have the children--so glad that you don"t shut yourself away in a palace of art; nothing is more dangerous than that."
"That"s a hit at me," Maurice declared; "I inhabit the dangerous palace, and don"t intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always sounding her trumpet at its gate."
Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, "Might not a shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?"
The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr.
Daunt was a half-insolent c.o.xcomb, and she did not want Maurice to defend her motives.
Angela"s eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. "My dear Geoffrey," she said, "you say things at times that make me wonder whether you have not very delicate perceptions as well as a ruthless will. I don"t quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the suffering of life--so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?"
"It depends upon what"s in it, my dear Angela." Geoffrey watched his last, and very perfect ring, float softly against the blue.
"A shrine implies some sanctified presence."
"I am afraid that I haven"t much faith in miraculous healings."
"In anything, Geoffrey?"
"In no words," the Olympian answered. The sun glittered upon his golden head as he turned to smile at Angela with, Felicia felt, implacable indifference. Their walk had brought them near the house again.
"I must go and finish my book," said Felicia; "after these shrines and palaces I shall feel that I am creeping into a ditch when I return to it. I hope that ditches aren"t dangerous, too."
"Why do you also pretend not to be clever?" Angela asked her softly, suddenly, smiling closely into her eyes. "What is the book?" She bent her head to the t.i.tle, looking up at once gravely. "You like him?"
"I said it was like creeping into a ditch. But there is a certain splendour to be found even in ditches--he shows it to one, I think."