“It’s that we have been rather unhappy, isn’t it, dear Maurice?”
“Never, never again,” he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back to such a distant day; “Do you remember once, long ago, when I first knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded—it’s only loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly dread of loss. I’ll never make you unhappy any more.”
“Ah! but what about me? It’s I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive me everything. You shall have no more dreads.”
She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go, smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must nerve his growing strength.
“Never, never again,” she repeated. “So go, dear, have all the virtues. We will both work. The eternity will pass.”
CHAPTER XI
MR. MERRICK, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her friends. The days passed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded, harassed.
Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard. Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a frightened silence. Mr. Merrick’s foundations seemed giving way beneath him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela’s defection was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by accusing himself of over-imaginativeness—nerves on edge—no wonder—and went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice’s fortnight was nearly over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had meditated a retreat on Paris, a week there to make the descent from London to the country less of a horrid jolt.
Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick’s sharpened suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his virtual dismissal from his children’s roof. After all, as he reflected, it was in a sense Angela’s doing. She might now at least from the frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him comprehension and compassion.
“To speak plainly, I’ve been turned out,” he said, stirring the cup of tea she had handed him.