Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice’s, pressing it firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a peace, a thankfulness.
“You see,” Maurice stammered, “I should die without her. She is life to me, Geoffrey. You don’t know what you’ve given me—I hardly knew. She is life to me—that’s all; and I should die without her.”
The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not real; Maurice’s conscience could not call such faint confession real. Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of safety.
Felicia, when she heard of her father’s proposed and accepted departure, acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and when Maurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick’s resolution to protect her, she said that she had suspected that. “I am glad you let him know the truth, too. It’s really better to let him see that he has only discovered what no one wishes to conceal.” She looked musingly up at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted—faint and far—across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey—the memory of it was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel passion, that horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the dark?
Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought.
“I can’t blame him—really—either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact nor to recognize the calibre of such a love.”
It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey’s love that kept Maurice’s faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy. Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true; it beautified her—that kiss of reverent pity and tenderness. The toad Angela flung became a flower on Felicia’s breast; that he could smile at such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm—colourless, serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, “You don’t mind, so much then, his going?”
“I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits.”
The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of lassitude, a little indifferent to her father’s pathos. Before this placidity his sadness became a sudden throb of gloom.
“You do mind my going?” he asked.