Maurice was just finishing his dressing. He looked round at her inquiringly, laying down his brushes. Felicia’s indignations were rare, and therefore rather alarming; but seeing that this indignation was in no way connected with himself—Felicia’s whole aspect irradiated a sense of union, a conviction that he was to second her in her indignation—he took up the brushes again and put a finishing touch to his hair. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if Mr. Merrick had suddenly become insufferable, and rather hoping that such was the case and that Felicia would initiate a movement to get rid of him. “Nothing to bother you about your father, dear?” he added.
“Exactly. You remember last summer—Lady Angela and papa’s article? She came here this afternoon and asked me to forgive her. I couldn’t; it seemed cruel, I know; but I felt through and through me that I must not trust her. She went away, forgiving me, and now papa tells me that she met him and has been talking with him, and that he finds her charming, and that he is going to lunch with her! Imagine the audacity!”
Maurice, looking at her in the mirror, had turned white, feeling serpent-coils tightening about him again.
“How astonishing!” he ejaculated. But more than astonishment, he felt a sickening fear. What had Angela intended? What did she now intend?
“We must prevent it,” said Felicia. “I hate, dear, to bring you into it, but you must see as I do that it’s impossible. Try to explain it to papa; try to make him feel that she cannot be trusted, that she will poison everything; that in trusting her he divides himself from me.”
Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was a hope, clutched at, that Angela’s proffered friendship had been sincere, a dread lest Felicia’s rejection of it should call down upon her Angela’s revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the circumstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon she held—and withheld—the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It was the thought of this weapon, turned against his wife’s breast, and murdering there her love for him, that made him white.
“I will tell him, dear, anything you like,” he said, in a voice she recognized as strange. “And she was here, you say, this afternoon? Felicia, dearest”—he had managed now to draw through the loop of the white tie—“weren’t you a trifle hard on her?—a trifle cruel, as you say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been unconsciously—through taking too much for granted. You know you misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did.”
Something like terror was freezing Felicia’s anger. She steadied herself with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice’s point of view. “I said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me—that I am hard, cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can’t think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false, and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don’t know, except that she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates me.”
“Dearest,”—Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief—“I know all you feel; but you do grant, don’t you, that your dislike of her, instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her? I don’t think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it’s caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that that’s the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all, as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her utterly.”
“We must, we must,” said Felicia, “for her sake as well as ours, we must.”