“Dearest, dearest Maurice (can one say
more than dearest?)—
“Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now how much I needed happiness.
“Your Angela.”
Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger—for even in the extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.
He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all events he would not see her face; and—
“My dear Angela,” he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic trust of her “dearest,” tore the sheet across, took another and began again with—
“Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick.” Maurice paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday morning—Angela’s tears, the kiss, the embrace—surged over him. “I did not know this yesterday,” he went on, writing rapidly. “We must forget yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She doesn’t take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half serious trifling is not to her what it is to us.”
Maurice’s forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of Angela. She, though not a “dear, simple little girl,” did not take things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But having so smoothed her way—and at Felicia’s expense—stabbed Maurice with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the messenger’s ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn’t what he had said really truer than that? Had not Felicia’s dear image grown dim? Was it not Felicia’s feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia’s sake? Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found? He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was in a sooty atmosphere one couldn’t escape smudges. By degrees the deeper truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly, endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia’s sake, he would be brutal enough, yes, he would—to intimate this even now.
He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. “You must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am necessary to her happiness—perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.
“Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I call myself