Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by, and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict; it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if, now, he were a thing put by and forgotten.
But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words—“a lie,” “a coward,” echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went through her; and suddenly the surging sense of her own cruelty, his piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a stifled moan to her lips. “Maurice!” She covered her face with her hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by sudden hope. They clung together like two children. “Forgive me; forgive me,” she repeated. “Forgive me. Nothing—nothing could deserve such cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn’t love you. I was so cruel that I didn’t love you any longer.”
She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities; they engulfed the vision of herself—dry, bitter, bereft of her love for him. It flitted away—a bat—in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who, holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had been bewildered, weak. “And weakness is more forgiveable—so far more forgiveable than cruelty, dear—dear,” she said. “Horrible I! to have had such thoughts.” She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone.
Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparing himself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick’s red displeasure rather amused him, so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia’s eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father’s wounded vanity and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him.
“You have behaved in a way I don’t care to characterize,” Mr. Merrick remarked, when Maurice had finished with “If I had only had Felicia’s courage at the beginning—only frankly told you that I didn’t like the article—if I hadn’t been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn’t have got myself into such a series of messes.”
And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned, replied that he deserved any reproach.
“Maurice has been weak, too complaisant,” said Felicia, “but there has been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of hurting you. Forgive us both.”
“You have nothing to forgive in Felicia,” said Maurice; “she has been the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab.”
“Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach. If she has been a target you have hidden behind it.”
“Exactly.” Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity. “In future you’ll remember that whatever I say she can never deserve reproach.”