Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice—how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting—seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet—was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice’s baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.

He did not turn from the window as he said, “You must go back to him.”

Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her. She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty eyes to him.

“I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how incapable, now, he would be of it.” She made no reply. There was no reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a quiver of blind presage run through it.

“He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply—more deeply than you can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with Angela—well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela—and sorry for her, and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward—what of it? You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak as water—what of it? He adores you; I know it—and you loved him—once. You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything—everything. You are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you.”

Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with the sense of fighting in the dark—he knew not what—but fighting some force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.

He walked away from her up and down the room. “Only the other night—how I understand it now—he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die without you.”

“Do you really want me to go?” Felicia asked.

Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. “I want what is best for him, and for you. You know I’m not a sentimentalist. I think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing life even with a husband she thinks she can’t care for, than drifting about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic roots—a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,—but a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial temperature, liable to shatterings—to witherings; not a flower well rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it.”

“Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is poisoned? You want me to go back to him—not loving him; do you want me to go back hating?—for I do hate him.”