She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose. As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,—“That horrible woman!” she cried.
“It was your husband who told me,” said Mr. Merrick quickly.
“Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?”
Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own steady.
“Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don’t fancy you can deny, is the truth.”
Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick’s displeasure with a slight compunction.
“There, child,” he said, rising as he spoke, “don’t feel like that about it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real harm is your irrational hatred,—don’t stare like that, Felicia—your irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against and must always protest against.”
Still she was silent, though her gaze had dropped from him. Her silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, “Think it all over; think better of it all.” Pausing at the door, he added, “She bears no grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself, my poor child.” She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence proved as much; and he had done his duty.
Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going; the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes; when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above her.
This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man. Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow, impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps, steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her that for a long time she had been trying to love him, and that now the effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion, were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn—scorn, the distorter of all truth—as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness, the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the thought close.