“But they do now, because of you.”
“I may come again? I shall never trouble you—you know.”
“Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so utterly. You are my dear friend.”
Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face. He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must be helped. And helped soon.
He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on the forehead.
Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.
Geoffrey’s kiss, Maurice’s desolate, farewell face, were both far away. Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled in sleep.
CHAPTER XVI
GEOFFREY, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.
Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of vagueness, Felicia’s figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by the thought of her. What cruel tricks one’s brain played upon one, and how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms. Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him. This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of necessity—in Maurice’s philosophy all past fact became necessity—and not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.