Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey’s calm gaze at him, in Maurice’s kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man’s genial patronage—an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement; she saw these things in relation to Felicia’s attitude towards them, her placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him, she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed, came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia’s stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a halo.
“How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick,” Angela said to her hostess; “I see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he must jar upon you and your husband—could I fail to see it? And yet how kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I suppose, their only outlook on life.”
Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was now enabled to see him with Lady Angela’s clearer vision. She saw herself, too, as very kind indeed.
To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. “What a type! That’s what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of the century!” Since coming into the country she had not been so near Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.
“He encouraged me magnificently this morning,” Maurice in his mirth confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile, understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was failing her; she couldn’t tell herself with truth that she was indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt’s derivative discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging as of appreciating him.
Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor—he was always taking the floor—got up and strolled away, quite as if he were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela’s sad and vacant eyes, and Maurice’s deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.
Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye that, seeing through her evasions, said, “I understand everything. Command me, you charming friend.” To keep silence towards him, to escape for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.
It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father’s arrival, while at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.
Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his brother’s vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, ready to bubble up.
Maurice’s eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much against her all the rest.