He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his presence by his grief.
And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her face still hidden she held up the letter to him.
“I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?”
“He is ours. It is because of you—because of you that I——“ She could not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He had given him back to her and her to him.
“Dearest Felicia,” he read, “I was a coward. But I always loved you most—even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for me but you. And I am unworthy of you—and of my friend. All I can do for you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck’s poem, darling? I do smile; not only so that you shan’t cry, but for pure joy that at last I can really do something not ignoble in your eyes. Darling—darling—it is only horrible because I can’t see you again, and because you hate me and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don’t, ah! don’t hate me. Love me again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy, dearest one.—Maurice.”
A groan broke from Geoffrey’s lips. Had it been any other woman at his feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from herself.
“Oh, Maurice—my Maurice, I have killed you,” Felicia said. “How can I live?”
He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at Maurice.
And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she shuddered with dreadful sobs.
“He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness—so afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me—loving me—and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might always hate him. I can’t live. I can’t.”