His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need, such love, and her?
“My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do understand. With her one can’t be straight. She led, you followed; how could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!”
She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her, leaning like a little child his head upon her breast.
“It is one of my horrors,” he said. “For a moment I saw myself as you might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you.”
“Darling Maurice—never, never. I hated her so—that blinded me. I hate so to think that she was ever near you—has any claim. Perhaps it is almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it.”
In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing, rose—rose and shook him. “Tell her now, tell her all.” Terror quenched longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed her, his eyes still closed, saying, “Don’t take your arms away until the horror is quite passed.”
CHAPTER V
THE spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Wynnes, after their round of country visits, had returned to London, usually finding Felicia alone, for Maurice was really working at a portrait, and Mr. Merrick spent most of his time at his club, watching life from its windows with an ironic eye. At tea-time Maurice would appear, tired yet merry, from the studio; friends came in, the quiet shining hour broke into sparkling facets; but the hours alone with her were personal possessions to Geoffrey, jewels that strung themselves in a rosary through his weeks and months. They talked, or Felicia played to him, declaring that his taste for music grew; they often sat silent, she sewing and he watching her. The thickets had been thorny of late, he had discovered that a curtailed and uncertain income could make life curiously nagging and difficult, but from these brambles it was comforting to look at the atoning cause of them. The hours with her so justified his first groping simile of the sunny opening among trees, grass, clouds and sky. His confidence in her happiness irradiated his own problems.
This afternoon the confidence received a little shock. He came late, after tea-time, and walking before the maid into the drawing-room had time, before Felicia saw him, to grasp the disturbing significance of her attitude. She was sitting alone near the window, her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. For a moment he thought that she was crying, and, like a pang, the memory of sunlight among young birches, snowdrops, a distant bird-song, went through him.
Felicia, however, was not crying; and as she looked round at him, he saw that the attitude might have been one of merely momentary weariness.