Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people's apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick's att.i.tude had always been what it now was--a calm down-smiling from a hill-top upon other people's dulness.

After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism--the one book, as sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date--Austin married a pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune.

Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of a sternly practical father, a pa.s.sionately transcendental mother, she seized upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to see life.

She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained; she was fearless, eager, full of faith.

Austin Merrick met her at a Paris _pension_ and his essentially irresolute soul was stirred by Miss Grey's resolute eyes, eyes large and clear, like a boy's. He stayed on at the _pension_ and made Miss Grey's acquaintance, an easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading _Flaubert_, with a dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece went sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey described in home letters as "very cultivated and high-minded," adding that she imagined him to belong to an "aristocratic family."

Felicia Grey's crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize; he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world's weights and measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be.

With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,--these words with capital letters--that he already felt it to be the fashion to scoff at a little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest scorn--were burning realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly equipped with dollars he would not so have abandoned himself. It was, indeed, a very modest equipment, but with his own tiny allowance, that didn't do at all--he was always in debt--would lift him above the material restrictions that had so long irked him. His indifference might really, then, equal hers.

He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, and of making her own living by teaching. "It seems to me that one would face life more directly--more truly--like that," remarked Miss Grey.

He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr.

Merrick very "cultivated and high-minded"; she equipped him further with a "great soul," and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him, too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness.

He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life should be lived with him.

So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin pa.s.sed fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.

She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull country-side, but her husband's character. She never doubted the great soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her affection.

Her husband's idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it, or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than the lives of any of the neighbouring squires--if as much. What did she and Austin _do_ in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like question.

She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick's mind was a lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive criticism, he found the att.i.tude of superiority more attainable by opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But with all his complacencies, indolences, and att.i.tudes, Austin Merrick was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head, looked hardly more than twenty when she died.

Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness, with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender, very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia remembered the navely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her.

"In this life to fail is to triumph," was one, and the pathos to Felicia was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother's own life. She had indeed "carried her soul like a white bird," through the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter apprehended.

She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jacka.s.ses for lions, and her only t.i.tle to commendation in her own eyes was that she, at all events, did not bray.

CHAPTER IV

Mrs. Merrick sent a cart for her niece's box next morning, and Felicia set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded easily to sunshine and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education, easily expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for her behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more potent mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk, smiling, behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia's mood was happy. She saw it in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled woods, in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-like song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was only an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the road, she met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the breeziness, the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming thus upon each other, both smiling to themselves, both looking, listening, and, as it were, expectant, it seemed only natural that their eyes should dwell upon each other with frank interest. Their steps slackened, a mute, pleased query pa.s.sed between them, and the young man, doffing his hat, and giving Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of sunlit auburn hair, said, "I beg your pardon, but I am sure that you are Miss Merrick."

"And you are Mr. Wynne," said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was not the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as natural as all the rest.

"I came to meet you," said Mr. Wynne. "I heard that you were arriving this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to meet you as near them as possible."

Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss Merrick.

Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair--hair the colour of sandal-wood--and her pale face. He would have climbed any number of hills to see the face--so significant, so resolute, so delicate.

Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her eye-brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet vivid tints of her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her eyelashes slanted across them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland water. Maurice was seeing all this, delightedly,--and that through the child-like moulding of the cheek, the lips' sweetness, the eyes'

tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous gaiety--a dryad laughing a little at her own new soul.

"You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me," said Felicia, "unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to them----"

"Perhaps you will show me both on some other day," said Maurice, "since I haven't missed you." He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia, also making inner comments, reflected that a person so a.s.sured of his own graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His looks, his words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the bird still sang on behind them.

"It isn't in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is unusual."

"I am sure that your garden is unusual--just as this first stage of my journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure in a Watteau landscape."

"If you had started a little earlier," Felicia said, smiling, "and met me on the hill-side, I shouldn't have been so in harmony. There the pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been incongruous."

"Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual," he returned; "there would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite bewilderingly radiant and charming?"

Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed as inevitable as the bird's song. She could hardly feel that his rights were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition.

He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair, small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale--into a veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the only natural thing in the world.

As they approached the lodge-gates--they had been talking without pause of music, books, pictures, even about life--he asked her how she had guessed that he was Maurice Wynne--"Because there is only one of you--but there are several of _us_--Mrs. Merrick's guests, I mean."

"She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the other."

"Poor Geoffrey!" Maurice e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with a laugh, "how you have guessed at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a tremendous friend of mine."

"Is he? I hope you don't mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest sc.r.a.p of conjecture."

"It isn't flippancy; it's intuition. Geoffrey _is_ that, only he is more. I don't mind a bit--I wouldn't mind flippancy, only I feel bound to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been since our boyhood." His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool approval to the stately friend.

"I suppose you have heard about the others, too," Maurice went on; "Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will strike you. You must tell me--even if it's flippant. She is clever, too; at all events, she is very effective."

"Do you think they are the same thing?"

"Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn't it?"

"If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect them, I suppose."

"But if they are stupid?" smiled Maurice, "and such heaps of people are, aren't they?"

"Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants out of their stupidity."

"Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does," said Maurice. It was what she had imagined of him. "And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly thing," he added.

"Oh; I don't know." Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. "It would depend, wouldn't it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?"

"He wants to get power."

"Well, there again, for what end?"