Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the piano again.
“I say, I’m awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here tonight,” Maurice began. “I have been rather cursing myself for telling you about him and. …”
“It doesn’t matter at all,” Michael interrupted. “I’m not going to marry her.”
“Oh, that’s splendid!” Maurice exclaimed. “I’ve been tremendously worried about you.”
Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that Maurice could be “tremendously worried” by anything.
“I want you to arrange matters,” said Michael. “I can’t go near the place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the money. Get rid of the woman who’s there—Miss Harper her name is.”
“But I shall feel rather awkward. …”
“Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it, then!” Michael broke in fretfully. “I’ll ask Guy.”
“You’re getting awfully irascible,” Maurice complained. “Of course I’ll do anything you want, if you won’t always jump down my throat at the first word I utter. What has happened, though?”
“What do you expect to happen when you’re engaged to a girl like that?” Michael asked.
Maurice shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then, you see, I’m not a very great believer in women. What are you going to do yourself?”
“I haven’t settled yet. I’ve got to arrange one or two things in town, and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a week?”
“I daresay I might,” Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room. Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile comprehension.
The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
“This is where you ought to be, if you want to write,” Maurice proclaimed to Guy. “It’s ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the country. You’ll expire of stagnation.”
“Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are,” said Castleton. “I’m almost expiring from the violence with which I am being precipitated from one to another of Maurice’s energies.”
Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next morning Guy went back to Wychford.
Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part he had played in Lily’s life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice; already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a shade his present emotion proved that she was much more than that, for the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart. Then the indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill remained.
Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and they went to Bohème. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat unmoved tonight. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at night and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life itself, but he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any activity in the conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here at supper and for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was spiritually withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to the notion of a debased material comfort as the only condition worth achieving for a body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it almost seemed.
“Michael, have you been bored tonight?” his mother asked, when they had come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while Michael finished a cigar.
He shook his head.
“You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy Puccini, don’t you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?”
“I think summer in London is always tiring,” he said.
She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures of her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.
“Dear child, what is it?” she whispered, with fluttering arms outstretched to comfort him.
“Oh, I’ve finished with all that! I’ve finished with all that! You’ll be delighted—you mustn’t be worried because I seem upset for the moment. I found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I’m not going to marry her or even see her again.”
“Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?”
“Finished! Finished! Finished!” he sobbed.
“Nothing is finished at twenty-three,” she murmured, leaning over to pet him.
“I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day.”
It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself again; and he went off to bed.
Next day Michael’s depression was profound because he could perceive no reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her. She was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen to her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he
