Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

CHAPTER XIV

WHILE Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when in Felicia’s presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future. Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.

Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; kinder? It was necessary.

A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela came back to London in February.

Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square house that was part of Angela’s large inheritance from her mother.

Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of his taste as in Angela’s house, where nothing made bids for notice, and where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter, and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have been a dream of no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish and an ugly part—as one sometimes does in dreams.

Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was perfect, seemed to invite encircling)—kiss her and say “Let this go on.” Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little as he looked at the print she held up.

“Do you know,” said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he was not thinking of the print, “I have a plan, Maurice. You have never painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my portrait. I want you to begin at once.”

“That will be delightful,” said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting.

“You must come here to do it,” Angela went on, patting the edges of the prints into place and closing the portfolio. “There is an excellent light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake, but for yours. You know, I think the time has come for you to strike some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,—selfish I!—I want to link myself, you see, with greatness.” She still patted the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness.