“Nor she for you—not really, I hope?”
“Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers.”
Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two days—the days of the happy secret—wondered, a poignancy in the wonder, if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition, hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice’s common-sense only that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love. Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out—the emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere conquest—to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent. The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility Angela could not forgive—and did not know she could not. She talked herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed Felicia’s unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had met. “I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does, you know.” Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.
Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful head of a Christ that she always carried with her.
“I have lived to my highest!—oh! I have,” she murmured; and at the sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed, came.
“This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him; and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings—to hurt me so.”
The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did not know that she hated Felicia.
CHAPTER XII
MAURICE and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the hill-top, in the garden he was at last to see, they were to say good-bye—good-bye for a little while. Felicia, in her new and blissful confidence, did not even think of asking for how long, it seemed sure to be so short. But Maurice was already asking himself the question, battling creeping doubts with passionate asseverations. And better than passionate asseverations was the meeting of such doubts by holding her more closely in the deep, lonely lane, dispelling shadows from his mind with a kiss. To hold her, to kiss her, was to keep alight a flame of joy within him, a flame that drooped and flickered when those sad thoughts blew over it; and without was sadness too; the fragrance of the white traveller’s-joy in the hedges seemed a sigh; the soft evening, the pale clouded sky, were grey-habited nuns, whispering of the crumbling of earthly hopes.
That Felicia heard no such whispers, no such sighs, her pensive but steadily gazing profile showed. The pensiveness was a dove brooding on a secure peace; her eyes, gazing ahead, had the gravity of a child’s seeing happy visions. He felt a pang of envy. Or was it ignorance that kept fear from her? Again he turned her face, white flower that it was, to him, bending his lips to hers. Only so he found some of her peace, her serenity.