He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair, he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering--would he discover it? Should she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward--though such a tragically belated one--had at last come to him? Even to hesitate seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly--was it the possible rapture that made the real dread--the rapture of seeing him claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost la.s.situde she thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question.
Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes.
Suddenly she thought sharply, "I must not tell." She wondered if it was an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most logical thing in life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter.
"Now you see. Now you understand all," she said.
He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it.
"Now you see. Now you understand," she repeated. "I do, Geoffrey."
She had never called him by his name before.
His eyes now rested on hers.
"Let me tell you," she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and calm. "Let me tell you that I see you and know you--and understand.
Don"t ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I hardly feel anything now except my grat.i.tude to you for your wonderful n.o.bility--your love. To see it--to know it--is worth the suffering."
He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head--the dear, proud head--to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.
"How could he. To you." It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, sickened wonder.
"He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn--and my pain; he didn"t love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him."
She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. "You thought he loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?"
"I?" Geoffrey"s stare was almost boyish.
"I?--who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?"
it said.
"Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel--a thing to be tossed appeasingly to a rival." Again she closed her eyes. "It makes me dizzy sometimes."
Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.
Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice--how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting--seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet--was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice"s baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.
He did not turn from the window as he said, "You must go back to him."
Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her.
She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty eyes to him.
"I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how incapable, now, he would be of it." She made no reply. There was no reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a quiver of blind presage run through it.
"He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply--more deeply than you can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with Angela--well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela--and sorry for her, and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward--what of it?
You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak as water--what of it? He adores you; I know it--and you loved him--once.
You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything--everything.
_You_ are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you."
Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with the sense of fighting in the dark--he knew not what--but fighting some force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.
He walked away from her up and down the room. "Only the other night--how I understand it now--he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die without you."
"Do you really want me to go?" Felicia asked.
Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. "I want what is best for him, and for you. You know I"m not a sentimentalist. I think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing life even with a husband she thinks she can"t care for, than drifting about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic roots--a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,--but a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial temperature, liable to shatterings--to witherings; not a flower well rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it."
"Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is poisoned? You want me to go back to him--not loving him; do you want me to go back hating?--for I do hate him."
Geoffrey still paused.
"I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love."
That memory of the lighthouse flash could no longer guide in this darkness where a blind and wilful giant"s hand steered for a sh.o.r.e of reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the open, unknown sea.
"Do you want me to go back, loving you?" she said.
"Loving me?" Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled round and fronted the tempestuous elements.
Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the others. She went on: "I wrote and told him that I despised him--hated him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you.
He will get that letter to-morrow--perhaps to-day."
Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice, Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had been too steady--in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic, shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back--back, and down--where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her.
She opened her eyes to him.
The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to emptiness; they were near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking deeply into each other"s eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke.
"I felt it."
"You did not know it, Geoffrey."
"I touched something in the dark."
"I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to him."
"Why not, Felicia?"
Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused.
"It seemed to make things less simple--more difficult."
"More difficult, perhaps," said Geoffrey, "but more simple, too, I think. Have you known for long?"
"Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been there--oh--for long, long--since the beginning perhaps. I can"t tell. I can"t see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength."
Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but, in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him.
"The threads go back and back--and they turn round one another. I can"t see them separately till now--when his is broken. You remember when you kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then--it must have been then--that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been woven into my life--into my love for my husband--I don"t know what was you and what was I."
His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to the window; turned to face him.