Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in silence, she went from the room.

Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her.

CHAPTER XIII

FELICIA stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.

Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, before the blaze, she would sit and rest—and sleep; there had been no sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets. Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to do now. Chintz-covers—she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just before her father’s arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.

Felicia’s mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future—the writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he returned to-night—or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause between a dagger’s uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, went with a sullen quiet—much like the flames among their logs—through the well-remembered words.

“I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now. That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey as he is—and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that your honour—a strange word to write to you—is safe between our hands; but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that you shall ever see from me.”

This letter was lying on Maurice’s dressing-table waiting for him.

There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night—the cold, calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly in her mind. “To him? From me?” She would think it dizzily; and dread clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.

But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would suffer—for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.