“Perhaps a little for you. If I didn’t care for you, didn’t think you worth her caring for, I wouldn’t do it; but that would probably be for her sake again. Candidly, I don’t feel for you much just now, or think much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand that, of course, in another lover.”
“But it’s in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism.”
“It’s the best thing I can do for myself, isn’t it?” said Geoffrey, with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. “I wouldn’t do it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I would rather have her happy than miserable.”
“But, dearest Geoffrey”—the tears again rose to Maurice’s eyes as the wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy—“how can you tell that—with time—you couldn’t have hoped? People do outgrow their griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing—she would have seen that I wasn’t really worthy—and have recognized that you were.” That it was, apart from Felicia’s future attitude, a fact already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of Angela—ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with Felicia—this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, breaking his voice.
Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future possibility. He answered Maurice’s inner fear and his own inner regret with a brief “She might die before she outgrew it.”
The fact soothed Maurice’s qualms. “Dear, dear old Geoffrey,” he said brokenly. “How we will both love you. It won’t hurt you, I hope, to see a lot of us.”
“I’m not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it’s between you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a lucky speculation, a legacy—what you will. Her father will expect nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I’ve thought about it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in her cup.” He put his hand on Maurice’s shoulder as the young man stood beside him: “Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better.”
CHAPTER XVII
AND Angela? This was Maurice’s first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glaston’s opportune entrance had saved him from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his escape—and hers. But with the day Angela’s personality unpleasantly reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia’s had been. Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all, how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure he would cut in Angela’s eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, in kissing her, accepting her avowal.
By the time that he went to Geoffrey’s he had decided in a definite recoil from the pain and humiliation—for both of them—that he simply could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must not see her face to face when she learned the fact—this despite an undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.