“Remember, I wouldn’t urge—I wouldn’t ask you to fear me or pity him unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life. Felicia, it’s his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, that makes the barrier that holds me from you now—my memory of his face—his voice—when he said that you were his life—that he would die without you. He thanked me for his happiness—you and I had ‘made him.’ He said: ‘You shall never regret it—so help me, God.’ Felicia, you have given him his soul. You must not rob him of it.”
“Geoffrey! Geoffrey!” she said, pressing her hands against her eyes—for his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, wrenched and broken limbs—“I have given him no soul. He has found his soul through me, perhaps, but I can’t rob him of it.”
“You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do pity him. And you must—you must pity him—and forgive him.”
“How could we go on,” she whispered, “after my letter to him? after he knows?”
“He doesn’t return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet. Besides, let him know the facts—but the facts from yourself. Tell him. Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest,” said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety.
“After his to her!”
“You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt. Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you will; let him have it straight; but don’t let him read it—alone. Poor old Maurice!” Geoffrey added.
The words, his comment on them, the “poor old Maurice!” that seemed a final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed suddenly before her a vision of Maurice—a piteous Maurice. The hatred of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey—so far away it seemed—saying, “Can you really bear to think of his reading that letter—alone?”
She went towards him—there was now no longer any fear in his nearness. He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.
Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from the rapture of abandonment that had called to her—to him. What had he not conquered in himself—and her—to do this great thing for her?—to save not only her, but through her, Maurice?