“Do you? Thanks.” Geoffrey looked at her. “You do remember, then, that I’m always there?”
“Always.” She looked back at him.
Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange moment, he had kissed her good-bye.
The little silence that followed her “always,” was unbroken when Maurice entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking down.
Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the words she had said to him at the door—words how well left unspoken! Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear and self-reproach.
For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no longer the hunted, unstable—yes, the base man who had written that letter. He was Felicia’s husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.
When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise. He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela’s consciousness if not in his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more equanimity. After all, Angela’s very coming proved how such fruitless episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen tears in her eyes and kissed her—it had not been then, with her at all events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her—for Angela’s sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of something indefinable and dangerous.
He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year’s sunshine almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him take a long breath.
“How good this is!” he said.
They both smiled at him.