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Title: The Spoils of Poynton
Author: Henry James
Release Date: August 2, 2010 [EBook #33325]
Language: English
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The Spoils of Poynton
By Henry James
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1897
Copyright, 1896,
By HENRY JAMES.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
I
Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly
it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till
church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal,
and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be
near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way
down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of
decoration, the æsthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a
return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything
she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she
consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had
had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be
sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air,
into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity
of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in
color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have
heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are
usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly
didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look
presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her
room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled
across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always
added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the
only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the
horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be
conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have
looked _endimanchée_.
She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other
women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire
end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that
struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have
been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have
taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came
on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and
lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards:
she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative
reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen
would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from
no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from
her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her
own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It
would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought
hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty,
but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been
straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment,
of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps
with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other,
especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth
had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is
amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls
in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and
black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion
an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters
of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance,
this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the
soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine.
They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually
introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of
their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly
dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude.
The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat
together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe?
Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing,
almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy,
as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda
Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been
moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no
less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the
immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too
dreadful?"
"Horrible--horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really
a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her
ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity,
her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful.
Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a
passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in,
contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly
in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more
soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the
acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden
spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate
ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked
while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil
sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness
fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the
Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been
extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other
principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated
instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took
the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience,
but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving
mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.
When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two
aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
his manner of proceeding.
Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.
The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the
horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom,
however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of
the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek
a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an
even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact
that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had
been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the
girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had
other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with
Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that
young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great
bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an
influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely
beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from
herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near
distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come
at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant
effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense--of a
pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and
horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his
lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if
she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked
to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She
was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that
flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life
became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from
her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on
the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was
a future full of the things she particularly loved.
II
These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had
time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the
south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her
disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her
son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before,
and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a
house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and
brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda
Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should
suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered
together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but
the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their
confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that,
thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince
wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such
warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life
had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own
house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but
Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to
compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there
was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune
had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had
gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.
There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early
Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a
matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's
sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord
and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a
long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied,
there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience
of the collector--a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had
enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't
have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there
had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life,
and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every
corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor
Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and
whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English
lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and
conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a
victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and
her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister
would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to
have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid
some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had
lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year
in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an
impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions,
or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told
her she liked her because she had an extraordinary _flair_; but under
the circumstances a _flair_ was a questionable boon: in the dry places
in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh.
She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was
out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed,
should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly
exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her
imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in
telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there
was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be
freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told
Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen
the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection,
which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were
a blank to everybody else.
The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her
early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but
even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the
poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that
haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to
sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona
Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would
have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her
companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to
be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to
a product of Waterbath--that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation
at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should
know the place. She did know Waterbath, and she despised it--she had
that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she
read deep into the matter; she stared, aghast, as it came home to her
for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of
the lonely mother. Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man,
but Mr. Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The
house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object;
everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a
maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had
been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which
she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them
worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with
them. He appeared to have assumed that she would settle questions with
her son, that he could depend upon Owen's affection. And in truth, as
poor Mrs. Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a
prevision--he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything
repulsive--of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been
in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare.
Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir
to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to
a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs. Gereth spoke of poor Mona's taint
as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who
had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the
girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy
never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home.
"Well, then, if he doesn't care!"--Fleda exclaimed, with some
impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence.
Mrs. Gereth looked at her rather hard. "If he doesn't care?"
Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well--he'll
give them up."
"Give what up?"
"Why, those beautiful things."
"Give them up to whom?" Mrs. Gereth more boldly stared.
"To you, of course--to enjoy, to keep for yourself."
"And leave his house as bare as your hand? There's nothing in it that
isn't precious."
Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity
by which she was slightly disconcerted. "I don't mean of course that he
should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to
which you're most attached."
"I think he would if he were free," said Mrs. Gereth.
"And do you mean, as it is, that _she_'ll prevent him?" Mona Brigstock,
between these ladies, was now nothing but "she."
"By every means in her power."
"But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?"
"No," Mrs. Gereth replied, "but because they belong to the house and the
house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything, she would
simply say, with that motionless mask: 'It goes with the house.' And day
after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of
generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the
squeeze of a doll's stomach: 'It goes with the house--it goes with the
house.' In that attitude they'll shut themselves up."
Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gereth
had turned this over--had faced, if indeed only to recognize its
futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her
to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before;
she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend's
continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to
extremities? Was no good-humored, graceful compromise to be imagined or
brought about? Couldn't the same roof cover them? Was it so very
inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share
with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of
years to making beautiful for him? Mrs. Gereth hailed this question with
a wan, compassionate smile; she replied that a common household, in such
a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over
the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever
conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a "mistake," a piece of
overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable
of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been
capable, they would still have Mona's hatred to reckon with. Fleda's
breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which,
on Mrs. Gereth's lips, the course of discussion could take. This was the
first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not
needed Mrs. Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady
would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps
almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to
having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation
with her young friend, Mrs. Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her
despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with
the new proprietors and accept--or call it, for a day, endure--the
horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they
wouldn't after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs. Gereth
admitted when pushed that she didn't quite suppose they would. What she
meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to
clumsy servants (there wasn't an object of them all but should be
handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace
them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the
convenient. Above all, she saw in advance, with dilated eyes, the
abominations they would inevitably mix up with them--the maddening
relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings
of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the "household
art" and household piety of Mona's hideous home. Wasn't it enough simply
to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a
Brigstock, and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her
acquisition? Did Fleda really see _her_, Mrs. Gereth demanded, spending
the remainder of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye?
Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that Waterbath had
been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she
privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted, and
that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his
betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It
seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted
himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of
his mother's wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her
conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air
of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know
how little really she did this, and that she was there, since Mrs.
Gereth had insisted, not to betray, but essentially to confirm and
protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have
made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to
Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself
as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy
youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune, a
limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came
and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly
furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, "It's
awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy." As well as his quick
speech, which shyness made obscure--it was usually as desperate as a
"rush" at some violent game--his child's eyes in his man's face put it
to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he
hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself,
was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a
beauty in the candor and even in the modesty which apparently kept him
from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with
Owen Gereth.
III
They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating
girl had the full revelation. "_Now_ do you know how I feel?" Mrs.
Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their
arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a
roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture
of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She
perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt--she had understood but
meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the
tightening of their bond--tears which on the younger one's part were the
natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not
the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the
first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house,
had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened
her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the
poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes,
nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so
grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought
themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gereth had achieved was indeed
an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in
selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of
creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda's _flair_, and Fleda
now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away
from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she
passed in this initiation.
Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made
preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at
open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had
not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the
record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form,
the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all
France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you
looked out of old windows--it was England that was the wide embrace.
While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and
refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the
brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian
velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and
pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures--the
panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great
wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck
Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine
arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never
compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to
her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not
known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an
equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it--that thought ached in her
breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness
separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had
dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest
attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she
too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs. Gereth's remaining
there would have offered her a sort of future--stretching away in safe
years on the other side of a gulf--the advent of the others could only
be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still
water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was
almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The
museums had done something for her, but nature had done more.
If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was
because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of
whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small
vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed
in his conduct another ambiguity--something that required explaining so
long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what
was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The
mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in
which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth
cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her
down--he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into
each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the
reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona
didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her.
She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more
like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from
pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she
approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally
been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth
wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine
consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better
the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which
it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so
primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all
about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it?
Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself
of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some
collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain--a
hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the
measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to
thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in
the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the
sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare
French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine
people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not
missing.
The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a
prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious,
before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost
as much as Mrs. Gereth's her taste was her life, but her life was
somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was
some one she wouldn't have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a
young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much
delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish
to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about,
show her the house, and cover up her ignorance. Owen's announcement had
been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves
for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs. Gereth, true to her
system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining
and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what
rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form.
Fleda was appalled, after the first hour, by the rash innocence with
which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by
the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine
scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a
manner on her companion's, and it was this that made her want to entice
the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona
met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads,
the only ones she had--eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen
Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a
confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that
helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in
common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out
like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as
content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had
been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs. Gereth contrived
at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was
brutally ignorant; but Fleda more subtly discovered that her ignorance
was obscurely active.
She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely
knew what, was expected of her that she couldn't give; and the only mode
her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her
big feet and pull another way. Mrs. Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow
or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn't: very well, she
couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that
suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the
hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a
girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that,
a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being
effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and
therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of
her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank
about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her
as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an
air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through
such an appeal--an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being,
as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she _was_ the girl stiffly to draw
back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly
caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually
administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up
for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking,"
and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to
strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration,
which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something
else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had
seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and
poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had
brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased
at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which,
as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly
offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman
who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense
of the beautiful.
By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged,
the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt
the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his
mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming
in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried
out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vagueness,
played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that
they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a
silken thread she could clutch in the gloom--she would never give Owen
away. He might give himself--he even certainly would; but that was his
own affair, and his blunders, his innocence, only added to the appeal he
made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond
thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any
more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute
mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs. Gereth, there was a
flaw in her frankness: her admirable friend continued to know everything
she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive.
From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl
saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a
listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great florid
picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gereth's hand. Mona kept
dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her
patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man's and which she kicked
forward a little--it gave her an odd movement--to help her see what she
thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs. Gereth was in the
breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed
in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It
immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn't he
been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks
departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been
waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda
contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it
was not the reflection of Mona's big boot-toes. She could bear well
enough that young lady herself, but she couldn't bear Owen's opinion of
her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement
was checked by Mrs. Gereth's suddenly drawing her close, as if for the
morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of
the night's repose, breaking out: "Well, my dear boy, what _does_ your
young friend there make of our odds and ends?"
"Oh, she thinks they're all right!"
Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say
what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs.
Gereth's belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover,
that his tribute to Mona's taste was a repetition of the eloquent words
in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with
all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. "Don't you think
it's rather jolly, the old shop?" "Oh, it's all right!" Mona had
graciously remarked; and then they had probably, with a slap on a back,
run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs. Gereth had not
yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she
feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend's arm round her and not
become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange
intention. Owen's reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a
discussion of Mona's sensibilities; but Mrs. Gereth went on, in a
moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold
hypocrisy: "Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?" The
question was as fresh as the morning light.
"Oh, of course she likes everything that's nice." And Owen, who
constitutionally disliked questions--an answer was almost as hateful to
him as a "trick" to a big dog--smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that
she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Fleda,
however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh,
held her so hard that she hurt her.
"I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could
trust, I could respect." The girl heard her voice tremble under the
effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the
sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be
on one's knees before one's high standard. "The best things here, as you
know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we
worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes," cried Mrs. Gereth,
with a fine freedom of fancy, "there are things in the house that we
almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they
were _us_! And now they're only _me_--except that they're also _you_,
thank God, a little, you dear!" she continued, suddenly inflicting on
Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. "There
isn't one of them I don't know and love--yes, as one remembers and
cherishes the happiest moments of one's life. Blindfold, in the dark,
with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They're
living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But
I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another
affection, another conscience. There's a care they want, there's a
sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a
woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I'd deface them with my own hands.
Can't you see me, Fleda, and wouldn't you do it yourself?"--she appealed
to her companion with glittering eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of
such a woman here--I _couldn't_. I don't know what she'd do; she'd be
sure to invent some deviltry, if it should be only to bring in her own
little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in
this awful age, and they're thrust in at one at every turn. They'd be
thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save _them_
for me--I ask you who _would_?" and she turned again to Fleda with a
dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have
been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of
this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her
exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as
it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such
perfect teeth) with which poor Owen's slow cerebration gaped. "_You_
would, of course--only you, in all the world, because you know, you
feel, as I do myself, what's good and true and pure." No severity of the
moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the
young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed.
"_You_ would replace me, _you_ would watch over them, _you_ would keep
the place right," she austerely pursued, "and with you here--yes, with
you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!" She threw herself on
Fleda's neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off,
had burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might
perhaps have been understood.
IV
A week later Owen Gereth came down to inform his mother that he had
settled with Mona Brigstock; but it was not at all a joy to Fleda,
conscious how much to himself it would be a surprise, that he should
find her still in the house. That dreadful scene before breakfast had
made her position false and odious; it had been followed, after they
were left alone, by a scene of her own making with her extravagant
friend. She notified Mrs. Gereth of her instant departure: she couldn't
possibly remain after being offered to Owen, that way, before her very
face, as his mother's candidate for the honor of his hand. That was all
he could have seen in such an outbreak and in the indecency of her
standing there to enjoy it. Fleda had on the prior occasion dashed out
of the room by the shortest course and in her confusion had fallen upon
Mona in the garden. She had taken an aimless turn with her, and they had
had some talk, rendered at first difficult and almost disagreeable by
Mona's apparent suspicion that she had been sent out to spy, as Mrs.
Gereth had tried to spy, into her opinions. Fleda was sagacious enough
to treat these opinions as a mystery almost awful; which had an effect
so much more than reassuring that at the end of five minutes the young
lady from Waterbath suddenly and perversely said: "Why has she never had
a winter garden thrown out? If ever I have a place of my own I mean to
have one." Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing--something glazed and
piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants and cane sofas; a shiny
excrescence on the noble face of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a
conservatory where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed
cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough and a waterless fountain composed
of shells stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona if her idea
would be to make something like this conservatory; to which Mona
replied: "Oh no, much finer; we haven't got a winter garden at
Waterbath." Fleda wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only
grandeur they lacked, and in a moment Mona went on: "But we have got a
billiard-room--that I will say for us!" There was no billiard-room at
Poynton, but there would evidently be one, and it would have, hung on
its walls, framed at the "Stores," caricature-portraits of celebrities,
taken from a "society-paper."
When the two girls had gone in to breakfast it was for Fleda to see at a
glance that there had been a further passage, of some high color,
between Owen and his mother; and she had turned pale in guessing to what
extremity, at her expense, Mrs. Gereth had found occasion to proceed.
Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen in still
clearer terms? Mrs. Gereth would practically have said to him: "If
you'll take _her_, I'll move away without a sound. But if you take any
one else, any one I'm not sure of, as I am of her--heaven help me, I'll
fight to the death!" Breakfast, this morning, at Poynton, had been a
meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which
Mrs. Brigstock turned up the underside of plates and the knowing but
alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Some
one had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Fleda, who,
while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what
Owen thought of a girl still indelicately anxious, after she had been
grossly hurled at him, to prove by exhibitions of her fine taste that
she was really what his mother pretended. This time, at any rate, their
fate was sealed: Owen, as soon as he should get out of the house, would
describe to Mona that lady's extraordinary conduct, and if anything more
had been wanted to "fetch" Mona, as he would call it, the deficiency was
now made up. Mrs. Gereth in fact took care of that--took care of it by
the way, at the last, on the threshold, she said to the younger of her
departing guests, with an irony of which the sting was wholly in the
sense, not at all in the sound: "We haven't had the talk we might have
had, have we? You'll feel that I've neglected you, and you'll treasure
it up against me. _Don't_, because really, you know, it has been quite
an accident, and I've all sorts of information at your disposal. If you
should come down again (only you won't, ever,--I feel that!) I should
give you plenty of time to worry it out of me. Indeed there are some
things I should quite insist on your learning; not permit you at all, in
any settled way, _not_ to learn. Yes indeed, you'd put me through, and I
should put you, my dear! We should have each other to reckon with, and
you would see me as I really am. I'm not a bit the vague, mooning, easy
creature I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't;
_n'en parlons plus_. It _is_ stupid here after what you're accustomed
to. We can only, all round, do what we can, eh? For heaven's sake, don't
let your mother forget her precious publication, the female magazine,
with the what-do-you-call-'em?--the grease-catchers. There!"
Mrs. Gereth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the
periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful--tossed it toward
the carriage the retreating party was about to enter. Mona, from the
force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped
out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as
easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket.
"Good catch!" Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no
notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the
accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that
the carriage had rolled away; but it was while that laughter was still
in the air that Fleda Vetch, white and terrible, had turned upon her
hostess with her scorching "How _could_ you? Great God, how _could_
you?" This lady's perfect blankness was from the first a sign of her
serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even
know what Fleda meant by resenting her late offense to every
susceptibility gave our young woman a sore, scared perception that her
own value in the house was just the value, as one might say, of a good
agent. Mrs. Gereth was generously sorry, but she was still more
surprised--surprised at Fleda's not having liked to be shown off to Owen
as the right sort of wife for him. Why not, in the name of wonder, if
she absolutely _was_ the right sort? She had admitted on explanation
that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as
Fleda called it, at his feet; but it struck the girl that the admission
was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gereth was secretly surprised
at her not being as happy to be sacrificed to the supremacy of a high
standard as she was happy to sacrifice her. She had taken a tremendous
fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy--to Poynton of
course--Fleda herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great
after all? Fleda felt that she could declare it to be great indeed when
really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered and,
after reproaches and tears, asseverations and kisses, after learning
that she was cared for only as a priestess of the altar and a view of
her bruised dignity which left no alternative to flight, could accept
the shame with the balm, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin
comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all
Mrs. Gereth's scruples were on one side and that her ruling passion had
in a manner despoiled her of her humanity. On the second day, after the
tide of emotion had somewhat ebbed, she said soothingly to her
companion: "But you _would_, after all, marry him, you know, darling,
wouldn't you, if that girl were not there? I mean of course if he were
to ask you," Mrs. Gereth had thoughtfully added.
"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!"
The question had not come up with this definiteness before, and Mrs.
Gereth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment. "Not
even to have Poynton?"
"Not even to have Poynton."
"But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her.
Fleda colored; she hesitated. "Because he's too stupid!" Save on one
other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader
may believe it, she never came nearer to betraying to Mrs. Gereth that
she was in love with Owen. She found a dim amusement in reflecting that
if Mona had not been there and he had not been too stupid and he verily
had asked her, she might, should she have wished to keep her secret,
have found it possible to pass off the motive of her action as a mere
passion for Poynton.
Mrs. Gereth evidently thought in these days of little but things
hymeneal; for she broke out with sudden rapture, in the middle of the
week: "I know what they'll do: they _will_ marry, but they'll go and
live at Waterbath!" There was positive joy in that form of the idea,
which she embroidered and developed: it seemed so much the safest thing
that could happen. "Yes, I'll have you, but I won't go _there_!" Mona
would have said with a vicious nod at the southern horizon: "we'll leave
your horrid mother alone there for life." It would be an ideal solution,
this ingress the lively pair, with their spiritual need of a warmer
medium, would playfully punch in the ribs of her ancestral home; for it
would not only prevent recurring panic at Poynton--it would offer them,
as in one of their gimcrack baskets or other vessels of ugliness, a
definite daily felicity that Poynton could never give. Owen might manage
his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gereth would manage
everything else. When, in the hall, on the unforgettable day of his
return, she had heard his voice ring out like a call to a terrier, she
had still, as Fleda afterwards learned, clutched frantically at the
conceit that he had come, at the worst, to announce some compromise; to
tell her she would have to put up with the girl, yes, but that some way
would be arrived at of leaving her in personal possession. Fleda Vetch,
whom from the first hour no illusion had brushed with its wing, now held
her breath, went on tiptoe, wandered in outlying parts of the house and
through delicate, muffled rooms, while the mother and son faced each
other below. From time to time she stopped to listen; but all was so
quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of
contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it
was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen
stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively
lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation
in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her
arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured
the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she
presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and
wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with
whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl,
without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render
Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested
attachment, the scene had been tremendous.
She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to
look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in
their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had
terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he
stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of
the ordeal--a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the
particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course
aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had
neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when
they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on
to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much
better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have
it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have
fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner
for service--conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made
him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage,
but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should
have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that
whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her
kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had
begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a
right to judge and even a reason to loathe her, didn't judge and didn't
loathe, let her down gently, treated her as if she pleased him, and in
fact evidently liked her to be just where she was. She asked herself
what he did when Mona denounced her, and the only answer to the question
was that perhaps Mona didn't denounce her. If Mona was inarticulate he
wasn't such a fool, then, to marry her. That he was glad Fleda was there
was at any rate sufficiently shown by the domestic familiarity with
which he said to her: "I must tell you I've been having an awful row
with my mother. I'm engaged to be married to Miss Brigstock."
"Ah, really?" cried Fleda, achieving a radiance of which she was
secretly proud. "How very exciting!"
"Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating
her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'"
"Why, she's lovely!" Fleda exclaimed.
"Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round."
"Only give her time," said Fleda. She had advanced to the threshold of
the door thus thrown open to her and, without exactly crossing it, she
threw in an appreciative glance. She asked Owen when his marriage would
take place, and in the light of his reply read that Mrs. Gereth's
wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the event,
absolutely fixed when he came down, and distant by only three months. He
liked Fleda's seeming to be on his side, though that was a secondary
matter, for what really most concerned him now was the line his mother
took about Poynton, her declared unwillingness to give it up.
"Naturally I want my own house, you know," he said, "and my father made
every arrangement for me to have it. But she may make it devilish
awkward. What in the world's a fellow to do?" This it was that Owen
wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness
than his air of depending on Fleda Vetch to tell him. She questioned
him, they spent an hour together, and, as he gave her the scale of the
concussion from which he had rebounded, she found herself saddened and
frightened by the material he seemed to offer her to deal with. It _was_
devilish awkward, and it was so in part because Owen had no imagination.
It had lodged itself in that empty chamber that his mother hated the
surrender because she hated Mona. He didn't of course understand why she
hated Mona, but this belonged to an order of mysteries that never
troubled him: there were lots of things, especially in people's minds,
that a fellow didn't understand. Poor Owen went through life with a
frank dread of people's minds: there were explanations he would have
been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore
nothing that accounted for anything, though in its way it was vivid
enough, in his picture to Fleda of his mother's virtual refusal to move.
That was simply what it was; for didn't she refuse to move when she as
good as declared that she would move only with the furniture? It was the
furniture she wouldn't give up; and what was the good of Poynton without
the furniture? Besides, the furniture happened to be his, just as
everything else happened to be. The furniture--the word, on his lips,
had somehow, for Fleda, the sound of washing-stands and copious bedding,
and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs.
Gereth. The girl, in this interview with him, spoke of the contents of
the house only as "the works of art." It didn't, however, in the least
matter to Owen what they were called; what did matter, she easily
guessed, was that it had been laid upon him by Mona, been made in effect
a condition of her consent, that he should hold his mother to the
strictest accountability for them. Mona had already entered upon the
enjoyment of her rights. She had made him feel that Mrs. Gereth had been
liberally provided for, and had asked him cogently what room there would
be at Ricks for the innumerable treasures of the big house. Ricks, the
sweet little place offered to the mistress of Poynton as the refuge of
her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gereth, a
considerable time before his death, by an old maternal aunt, a good lady
who had spent most of her life there. The house had in recent times been
let, but it was amply furnished, it contained all the defunct aunt's
possessions. Owen had lately inspected it, and he communicated to Fleda
that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like
Poynton--what dower-house ever was?--but it was an awfully jolly little
place, and Mona had taken a tremendous fancy to it. If there were a few
things at Poynton that were Mrs. Gereth's peculiar property, of course
she must take them away with her; but one of the matters that became
clear to Fleda was that this transfer would be immediately subject to
Miss Brigstock's approval. The special business that she herself now
became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gereth safely
and singly off the premises.
Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the
ugliness of this duty--with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close
conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in
roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room,
that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would
have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and
lose it. It was odious to _her_ to have to look for solutions: what a
strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental
tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it
Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think
so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth
would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The
fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very
different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching
day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her
hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of
inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which
a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude,
up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace
with which she would have filled the air if only something might have
been that could never have been.
V
"I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on
the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to
say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she
"required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman
would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn
from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of
her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics,
diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with
this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to
be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble:
it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately
wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there
like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch
from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would
die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame
would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to
expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism
gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she
had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning
queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could
show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.
Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for
Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at
the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature
like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like
Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he
take it so low? She wondered that she didn't despise him for this, but
there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing
else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this
moment the medium of communication with him.
"He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the
following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written,
Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once
"nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn't like the
row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn't a sense of beauty he had
after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly
announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house
vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda,
his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in
club-windows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then
I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs
to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a
deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs.
Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take
everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might
perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean
page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with?
What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of
the _objets d'art_ of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's
maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had
been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be
her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she
should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to
her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for
believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with
the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would
ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out
into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would
conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.
The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct
by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut
herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose
herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables.
"Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton
had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be
most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now
to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the
tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had
visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and
fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the
world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all
was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to
which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it
passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in
other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself,
whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and
envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the
bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not
his "taking up" with Mona--that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an
accidental form: it was his failure from the first to understand what it
was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of
the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose,
and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry
about her. One's mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine
young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a
subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleda of her
friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black,
crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her
every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house
in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in
spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy),
because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about
everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again
and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless
virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the
consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn't, alas, and this was what she had
at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course
fully aware of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away
with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared
that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put
him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There wasn't a thing in the
house that she didn't like best, and what she liked better still was to
be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without
being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often
gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from
Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when
interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole
life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better
Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a
mixture!
All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise
to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen
came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose
proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had
really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing.
He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and
he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard
to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The
tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these
offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as
himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he
might have to make: she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated
encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's
repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to
write to him; he wouldn't have wished any more than herself that she
should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made
it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense
that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that
she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather
monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself
suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he
didn't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how _she_ would have first made
him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as
disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's
behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of
articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to
talk the matter over; to say if she didn't think a dozen pieces, chosen
absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to
consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by
Mrs. Gereth mightn't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen
wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his
side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his
offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he
couldn't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he
could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda
reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the
hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of
the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation
pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him
that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't in
these days like him at all, and she was of course and always on Mrs.
Gereth's side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage
went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of
these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda
and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great
matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually
replied: "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she's
really thinking over what she'll take." When her friend asked her what
Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, dear lady,
to see what _you_ do!"
Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did
something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went
to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train
from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed
against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag
had been given her by her friend. "Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a
few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a
friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated
such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when
they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and
containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing
their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted
her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering
of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles
from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was
practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling
guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of
crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray
sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite
fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam
papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to
remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this
remark would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say
nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw
her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of
doors especially Mrs. Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the
world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to
end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances
to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.
It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded
and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be
contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded
with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the
futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly
and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home,
could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt;
they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to
have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources,
without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to
some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could
hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt
of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence
urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would
have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little
story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a
sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though
different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of
course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was
the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it
wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a
certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen
over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed,
taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done
with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy
about the maiden-aunt--she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm
sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.
VI
It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful
move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been
from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence
was probable--a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an
imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity
and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her,
Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be
there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting
page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to
walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying
vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot
and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even
that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in
an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was
no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found
her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid
and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to
meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence,
almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards
thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of
an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of
defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs.
Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better
take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a
concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem
of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.
It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to
lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the
odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the
exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one
wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said,
condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In
such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up
and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to
them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these
faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little
enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place,
perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up.
It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light,
larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow,
which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the
air--every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle.
Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she
prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance
of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent
itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and
bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a
radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and
patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.
Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this
was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off
easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her
feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that
really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my
possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then
you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile
certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty
was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at
least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By
good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to
Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to
rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the
royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first,
why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business
he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he
was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one
monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had
said--such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he
himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was
arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would
meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own,
Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his
mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about
trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press
lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her
meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she
really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that
he was watching--just insultingly watching. He _was_ watching, no doubt;
but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda
knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him
to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and
made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a
silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow
of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this
was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she
speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put
him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that
he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back
for Mona.
From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say
to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid,
this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more
repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she
privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she
had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his
mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and
that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand
over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical
unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire,
as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close.
She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to
see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication,
into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to
hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug
a counter-mine. Besides, people _were_ saying that she fastened like a
leech on other people--people who had houses where something was to be
picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now
distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had
almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery,
suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to
exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering,
turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go
up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at
West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him
justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they
existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as
heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she
wouldn't at present miss any visit of Owen's, for Owen was shooting at
Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at
Poynton.
The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady's having
accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from
Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently
as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. "Yes, I've literally
come," she wrote, "with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I've crossed the
Rubicon, I've taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold
water: I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I
shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week;
when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn't write to you to
meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and
because, besides, I'm too savage and odious to be fit company even for
you. You'd say I really go too far, and there's no doubt whatever I do.
I'm here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain
things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton
all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day,
and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time,
what's even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?"
The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a
big shop in Oxford Street--a journey that she achieved circuitously,
first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these
vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and
while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella,
and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that,
close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the
brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen
Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an
exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had
almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn't
give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way
he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the
shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn't
matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she
had come to buy a trimming for her sister's frock, and he expressed an
hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out
of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than
ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good
time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an
instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to
this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He
stammered out that it was for _her_ he would like to buy something,
something "ripping," and that she must give him the pleasure of telling
him what would best please her: he couldn't have a better opportunity
for making her a present--the present, in recognition of all she had
done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.
Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up
and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in
questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in
wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not
her doing--they were Owen's; and Owen, inconsequent and even
extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke
off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he
made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the
uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving
Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had
to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would
have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be
nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn't made him so,
and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck
to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her:
there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made
her incongruous offers--a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for
breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of
somebody's "works." His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the
"works" would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he
wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the
articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart:
what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one
of the splendid stuffs for a gown--a choice proscribed by his fear of
seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her
deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of
her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a
small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked
out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this
discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her
name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she
had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no
word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a
parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least his "form;" and then reflected
that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in
which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of
course he wasn't doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but
there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged.
That punctilio didn't prevent Owen from remaining with her after they
had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from
pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she
might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments.
There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that
his tribute would be, if analyzed, a tribute to her insignificance. But
all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him:
what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she
didn't count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home
with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was
a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion
when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona
would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she
had now to think for Owen as well as for herself--she couldn't think for
Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved
westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool
grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything
else dim. He wanted to stay with her--he wanted not to leave her: he had
dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What
was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She
grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was
too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt
differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling
differently to _her_, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she
was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something
to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels
about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had
surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former
tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his
very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But
whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a
former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person
for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the
very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately
happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the
small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own
affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a
tie--at least what _she_ called one--for Owen. The old one, at any rate,
was Mona--Mona whom he had known so very much longer.
They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by
the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand
to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively
take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was
a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his
mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to
Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and
it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to
the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at
it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to
the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as
Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different
ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked
at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an
expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to
any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at
this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong.
He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know--I want
you to understand."
What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out,
and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to
arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as
she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her
face. He liked her--it was stupefying--more than he really ought: that
was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate;
so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who
finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.
"Good-bye, Mr. Gereth--I _must_ get on!" she declared with a
cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away
from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning
altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she
threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before
she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was
almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with
which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a
kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away,
though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk,
every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from
afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it,
glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously
obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had
violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that
she was on the point of bursting into tears.
VII
As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at
Ricks--a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given;
and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there,
complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and
pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had
indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the
summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to
Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then
yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to
Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme
clash, and Mrs. Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out
that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter, and too
tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the
new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it
was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in
the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time,
the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come
off--she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute;
she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and
admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the
house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the
austerity of Fleda's own secret, under the discipline of which she had
repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having
cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act,
on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father's selfishness a
sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited
so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of
everything, even to how the "quietness" of the wedding should be
relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle.
Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks
she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life.
She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs.
Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said,
of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold
made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived,
and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of
a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an
admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been
dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had
abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment,
folded in Mrs. Gereth's arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had
already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other
house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly
toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she
could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring
with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet
that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was
sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as
many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend's struggle. By this
time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had
thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that
she could recognize, would have recognized among a thousand, without
dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of
dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself whether she should
notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How
could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the
lustres tinkling at her and with Mrs. Gereth, beside her and staring at
her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like
Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs.
Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her,
bracing herself, and preparing the same face of confession and defiance
she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the
corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to
participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft.
This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda's silence, and the very
violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature
detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed
her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare
walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent--she didn't
know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs.
Gereth's hand once more on her arm. "I've arranged a charming room for
you--it's really lovely. You'll be very happy there." This was spoken
with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant, "Oh, I know
what you're thinking; but what does it matter when you're so loyally on
my side?" It had come indeed to a question of "sides," Fleda thought,
for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one
fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied
her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty
leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a
certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great
effect, the climax of the impression.
"It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"--the visitor met
her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy--that friend herself so
pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental
air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as
stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such
was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the
delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went
on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought
away absolutely everything!"
"Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of
a house. I only brought away what I required."
Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the
very best pieces--the _morceaux de musée_, the individual gems!"
"I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs.
Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes;
with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed
her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great
piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being
"rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this
insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one
after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that
in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault,
were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each,
in every chink and charm--knew them by the personal name their
distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt
how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as
so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval,
and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to
her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda
exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!"
That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied,
at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of
delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence
and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years
before, by an odd and romantic chance--a clue followed through mazes of
secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed.
"'Even' the Maltese cross?" Mrs. Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the
words. "My dear child, you don't suppose I'd have sacrificed _that_! For
what in the world would you have taken me?"
"A _bibelot_ the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little
difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the
greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness--and with a
quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain
meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to
the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness.
Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that
she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a
resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get
off with them?"
Mrs. Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that
surprised the girl. "By calculating, by choosing my time. I _was_ quiet,
and I _was_ quick. I manoeuvred; then at the last rushed!" Fleda drew
a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than
sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state
to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she
had done as from the way she had done it--by as brilliant a stroke as
any commemorated in the annals of crime. "I succeeded because I had
thought it all out and left nothing to chance: the whole process was
organized in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but
a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly
extravagant--I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be
had--a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of
every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging
in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven't paid it yet;
there'll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing's done! Expedition
pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. 'I can give you two
days,' I said; 'I can't give you another second.' They undertook the
job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a
Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of
them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over
them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I
was inspired--they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I
was as calm as I am now. I didn't know what was in me; it was worth
finding out. I'm very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own
arms. I'm tired, very, very tired; but there's neither a scratch nor a
nick, there isn't a teacup missing." Magnificent both in her exhaustion
and in her triumph, Mrs. Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her
eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear
betrayal. "Upon my word," she laughed, "they really look better here!"
Fleda had listened in awe. "And no one at Poynton said anything? There
was no alarm?"
"What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone:
I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a
descent." Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it
would scarcely do to ask Mrs. Gereth if she hadn't stood in fear of her
servants. She knew, moreover, some of the secrets of her humorous
household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to
curiosity--a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned
to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs. Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her
visitor's thought, caught it up with fine frankness. "You mean that I
was watched--that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they
should see what I was 'up to'? Precisely. I know the three persons you
have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with
them--I settled them."
Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in
the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs. Gereth spoke added to her
suspense. "What did you do to them?"
"I took hold of them hard--I put them in the forefront. I made them
work."
"To move the furniture?"
"To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them;
it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked
each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he'd
gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified _me_. They were too stupid!"
Mrs. Gereth massed herself there more and more as an immoral woman, but
Fleda had to recognize that she too would have been stupid and she too
would have gratified her. "And when did all this take place?"
"Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We've worked here as fast as
we worked there, but I'm not settled yet: you'll see in the rest of the
house. However, the worst is over."
"Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he,
after the fact, as it were, accept it?"
"Owen--what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth.
"Does Mona?"
"You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?"
"I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But
have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?"
"Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't
know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."
"But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?"
"They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it
struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed
from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to
gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in
some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange;
but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady
only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She
had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed
was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?
All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the
chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the
objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been
reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it
was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower.
It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined--old
chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her
friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl
in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there
was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours
that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look
gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they
came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned
them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton
dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the
parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before
going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose
expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen's, from top to
bottom--there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had
been exterminated--no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to
think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her
memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old
combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that
gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her
greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes,
fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the
darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed
to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had
looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had
done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest,
confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy.
Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him?
Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him
over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the
last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth
had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for
an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth.
Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely
definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again
to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution
that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After
this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had
become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as
possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to
it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she
couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that
everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of
violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated.
The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across
Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very
necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress,
wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do
with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast
and in view of any light they might shed on the question of motive, of
not suffering her invidious expression of a difference to be accompanied
by the traces of tears; but it none the less came to pass, downstairs,
that after she had subtly put her back to the window, to make a mystery
of the state of her eyes, she stupidly let a rich sob escape her before
she could properly meet the consequences of being asked if she wasn't
delighted with her room. This accident struck her on the spot as so
grave that she felt the only refuge to be instant hypocrisy, some
graceful impulse that would charge her emotion to the quickened sense of
her friend's generosity--a demonstration entailing a flutter round the
table and a renewed embrace, and not so successfully improvised but that
Fleda fancied Mrs. Gereth to have been only half reassured. She had been
startled, at any rate, and she might remain suspicious: this reflection
interposed by the time, after breakfast, the girl had recovered
sufficiently to say what was in her heart. She accordingly didn't say it
that morning at all: she had absurdly veered about; she had encountered
the shock of the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might
wonder why the deuce (she often wondered in that phrase) she had grown
so warm about Owen's rights. She would doubtless, at a pinch, be able to
defend them on abstract grounds, but that would involve a discussion,
and the idea of a discussion made her nervous for her secret. Until in
some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue, she must
keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having
forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence.
Directly after luncheon Mrs. Gereth took her into the garden for a
glimpse of the revolution--or at least, said the mistress of Ricks, of
the great row--that had been decreed there; but the ladies had scarcely
placed themselves for this view before the younger one found herself
embracing a prospect that opened in quite another quarter. Her attention
was called to it, oddly, by the streamers of the parlor-maid's cap,
which, flying straight behind the neat young woman who unexpectedly
burst from the house and showed a long red face as she ambled over the
grass, seemed to articulate in their flutter the name that Fleda lived
at present only to catch. "Poynton--Poynton!" said the morsels of
muslin; so that the parlor-maid became on the instant an actress in the
drama, and Fleda, assuming pusillanimously that she herself was only a
spectator, looked across the footlights at the exponent of the principal
part. The manner in which this artist returned her look showed that she
was equally preoccupied. Both were haunted alike by possibilities, but
the apprehension of neither, before the announcement was made, took the
form of the arrival at Ricks, in the flesh, of Mrs. Gereth's victim.
When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the
drawing-room, the blank "Oh!" emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate
as the sound on her hostess's lips, besides being, as she felt, much
less pertinent. "I thought it would be somebody," that lady afterwards
said; "but I expected on the whole a solicitor's clerk." Fleda didn't
mention that she herself had expected on the whole a pair of constables.
She was surprised by Mrs. Gereth's question to the parlor-maid.
"For whom did he ask?"
"Why, for _you_, of course, dearest friend!" Fleda interjected, falling
instinctively into the address that embodied the intensest pressure. She
wanted to put Mrs. Gereth between her and her danger.
"He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that
brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen.
"Quite proper," said Mrs. Gereth austerely. Then to Fleda: "Please go to
him."
"But what to do?"
"What you always do--to see what he wants." Mrs. Gereth dismissed the
maid. "Tell him Miss Vetch will come." Fleda saw that nothing was in the
mother's imagination at this moment but the desire not to meet her son.
She had completely broken with him, and there was little in what had
just happened to repair the rupture. It would now take more to do so
than his presenting himself uninvited at her door. "He's right in asking
for you--he's aware that you're still our communicator; nothing has
occurred to alter that. To what he wishes to transmit through you I'm
ready, as I've been ready before, to listen. As far as _I_'m concerned,
if I couldn't meet him a month ago, how am I to meet him to-day? If he
has come to say, 'My dear mother, you're here, in the hovel into which
I've flung you, with consolations that give me pleasure,' I'll listen to
him; but on no other footing. That's what you're to ascertain, please.
You'll oblige me as you've obliged me before. There!" Mrs. Gereth turned
her back and, with a fine imitation of superiority, began to redress the
miseries immediately before her. Fleda meanwhile hesitated, lingered for
some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate
still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and
it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two
things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she
had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great
awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before--the day
the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at
Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept
thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally
acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth
disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance
from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could
absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain.
She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his
carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went
to him fast.
VIII
"I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from
the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought
you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it."
"You didn't know I was here?"
"No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that
day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you
were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still."
"I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for
a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was
with your mother you wouldn't have come down?"
The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than
she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention
but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already
see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element
he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different
sort--the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and
lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she
became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel
that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people
called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had
never seen a person with whom she wished more to be light and easy, to
be exceptionally human. The account he presently gave of the matter was
that he indeed wouldn't have come if he had known she was on the spot;
because then, didn't she see? he could have written to her. He would
have had her there to let fly at his mother.
"That would have saved me--well, it would have saved me a lot. Of course
I would rather see you than her," he somewhat awkwardly added. "When the
fellow spoke of you, I assure you I quite jumped at you. In fact I've no
real desire to see Mummy at all. If she thinks I _like_ it--!" He sighed
disgustedly. "I only came down because it seemed better than any other
way. I didn't want her to be able to say I hadn't been all right. I dare
say you know she has taken everything; or if not quite everything, why,
a lot more than one ever dreamed. You can see for yourself--she has got
half the place down. She has got them crammed--you can see for
yourself!" He had his old trick of artless repetition, his helpless
iteration of the obvious; but he was sensibly different, for Fleda, if
only by the difference of his clear face, mottled over and almost
disfigured by little points of pain. He might have been a fine young man
with a bad toothache; with the first even of his life. What ailed him
above all, she felt, was that trouble was new to him: he had never known
a difficulty; he had taken all his fences, his world wholly the world of
the personally possible, rounded indeed by a gray suburb into which he
had never had occasion to stray. In this vulgar and ill-lighted region
he had evidently now lost himself. "We left it quite to her honor, you
know," he said ruefully.
"Perhaps you've a right to say that you left it a little to mine." Mixed
up with the spoils there, rising before him as if she were in a manner
their keeper, she felt that she must absolutely dissociate herself. Mrs.
Gereth had made it impossible to do anything but give her away. "I can
only tell you that, on my side, I left it to her. I never dreamed either
that she would pick out so many things."
"And you don't really think it's fair, do you? You _don't_!" He spoke
very quickly; he really seemed to plead.
Fleda faltered a moment. "I think she has gone too far." Then she added:
"I shall immediately tell her that I've said that to you."
He appeared puzzled by this statement, but he presently rejoined: "You
haven't then said to mamma what you think?"
"Not yet; remember that I only got here last night." She appeared to
herself ignobly weak. "I had had no idea what she was doing; I was taken
completely by surprise. She managed it wonderfully."
"It's the sharpest thing I ever saw in _my_ life!" They looked at each
other with intelligence, in appreciation of the sharpness, and Owen
quickly broke into a loud laugh. The laugh was in itself natural, but
the occasion of it strange; and stranger still, to Fleda, so that she
too almost laughed, the inconsequent charity with which he added: "Poor
dear old Mummy! That's one of the reasons I asked for you," he went
on--"to see if you'd back her up."
Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How
can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has
made a great mistake?"
"A great mistake! That's all right." He spoke--it wasn't clear to her
why--as if this declaration were a great point gained.
"Of course there are many things she hasn't taken," Fleda continued.
"Oh yes, a lot of things. But you wouldn't know the place, all the
same." He looked about the room with his discolored, swindled face,
which deepened Fleda's compassion for him, conjuring away any smile at
so candid an image of the dupe. "You'd know this one soon enough,
wouldn't you? These are just the things she ought to have left. Is the
whole house full of them?"
"The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her
lovely room.
"I never knew how much I cared for them. They're awfully valuable,
aren't they?" Owen's manner mystified her; she was conscious of a return
of the agitation he had produced in her on that last bewildering day,
and she reminded herself that, now she was warned, it would be
inexcusable of her to allow him to justify the fear that had dropped on
her. "Mother thinks I never took any notice, but I assure you I was
awfully proud of everything. Upon my honor, I _was_ proud, Miss Vetch."
There was an oddity in his helplessness; he appeared to wish to persuade
her and to satisfy himself that she sincerely felt how worthy he really
was to treat what had happened as an injury. She could only exclaim,
almost as helplessly as himself: "Of course you did justice! It's all
most painful. I shall instantly let your mother know," she again
declared, "the way I've spoken of her to you." She clung to that idea as
to the sign of her straightness.
"You'll tell her what you think she ought to do?" he asked with some
eagerness.
"What she ought to do?"
"_Don't_ you think it--I mean that she ought to give them up?"
"To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again.
"To send them back--to keep it quiet." The girl had not felt the impulse
to ask him to sit down among the monuments of his wrong, so that,
nervously, awkwardly, he fidgeted about the room with his hands in his
pockets and an effect of returning a little into possession through the
formulation of his view. "To have them packed and dispatched again,
since she knows so well how. She does it beautifully"--he looked close
at two or three precious pieces. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander!"
He had laughed at his way of putting it, but Fleda remained grave. "Is
that what you came to say to her?"
"Not exactly those words. But I did come to say"--he stammered, then
brought it out--"I did come to say we must have them right back."
"And did you think your mother would see you?"
"I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try--to put it to her kindly,
don't you see? If she won't see me, then she has herself to thank. The
only other way would have been to set the lawyers at her."
"I'm glad you didn't do that."
"I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow
to do if she won't meet a fellow?"
"What do you call meeting a fellow?" Fleda asked, with a smile.
"Why, letting _me_ tell her a dozen things she can have."
This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying
to represent to herself. "If she won't do that--?" she went on.
"I'll leave it all to my solicitor. _He_ won't let her off: by Jove, I
know the fellow!"
"That's horrible!" said Fleda, looking at him in woe.
"It's utterly beastly!"
His want of logic as well as his vehemence startled her; and with her
eyes still on his she considered before asking him the question these
things suggested. At last she asked it. "Is Mona very angry?"
"Oh dear, yes!" said Owen.
She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning.
After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She
has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?"
"Oh dear, yes!" Owen repeated.
Fleda disliked to appear not to take account of his brevity, but it was
just because she was struck by it that she felt the pressure of the
desire to know more. What it suggested was simply what her intelligence
supplied, for he was incapable of any art of insinuation. Wasn't it at
all events the rule of communication with him to say for him what he
couldn't say? This truth was present to the girl as she inquired if Mona
greatly resented what Mrs. Gereth had done. He satisfied her promptly;
he was standing before the fire, his back to it, his long legs apart,
his hands, behind him, rather violently jiggling his gloves. "She hates
it awfully. In fact, she refuses to put up with it at all. Don't you
see?--she saw the place with all the things."
"So that of course she misses them."
"Misses them--rather! She was awfully sweet on them." Fleda remembered
how sweet Mona had been, and reflected that if that was the sort of plea
he had prepared it was indeed as well he shouldn't see his mother. This
was not all she wanted to know, but it came over her that it was all she
needed. "You see it puts me in the position of not carrying out what I
promised," Owen said. "As she says herself"--he hesitated an
instant--"it's just as if I had obtained her under false pretenses."
Just before, when he spoke with more drollery than he knew, it had left
Fleda serious; but now his own clear gravity had the effect of exciting
her mirth. She laughed out, and he looked surprised, but went on: "She
regards it as a regular sell."
Fleda was silent; but finally, as he added nothing, she exclaimed: "Of
course it makes a great difference!" She knew all she needed, but none
the less she risked, after another pause, an interrogative remark. "I
forget when it is that your marriage takes place?"
Owen came away from the fire and, apparently at a loss where to turn,
ended by directing himself to one of the windows. "It's a little
uncertain; the date isn't quite fixed."
"Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and
that it was near at hand."
"I dare say I did; it was for the 19th. But we've altered that--she
wants to shift it." He looked out of the window; then he said: "In fact,
it won't come off till Mummy has come round."
"Come round?"
"Put the place as it was." In his offhand way he added: "You know what I
mean!"
He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the
sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell
her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed,
she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at
putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading
only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial
than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered
from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept
it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt
with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called
prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed
been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter
in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had
even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was--or rather, all
that there was not--in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the
difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after
considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is
that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?"
"Yes, please. It's tremendously good of you."
"Very well, then. Will you wait?"
"For Mummy's answer?" Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and
more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. "Don't you think
that if I'm here she may hate it worse--think I may want to make her
reply bang off?"
Fleda thought. "You don't, then?"
"I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?--treat her as if I
gave her more than just an hour or two."
"I see," said Fleda. "Then, if you don't wait--good-bye."
This again seemed not what he wanted. "Must _you_ do it bang off?"
"I'm only thinking she'll be impatient--I mean, you know, to learn what
will have passed between us."
"I see," said Owen, looking at his gloves. "I can give her a day or two,
you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep," he went on. "The inn
seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains--having no idea you
were here." Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the
absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. "I mean
because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have
felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy."
"We've already talked a long time," smiled Fleda.
"Awfully, haven't we?" He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to.
Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because
he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to
him to go. "There's one thing, please," he mentioned, as if there might
be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona."
She didn't understand. "About Mona?"
"About its being _her_ that thinks she has gone too far." This was still
slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come
from _her_ at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse."
Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about
explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep
consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet
at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he
should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the
question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled
presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before
her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent
rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for
disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his
mother had left him--he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural
avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught
him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so
sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before
Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by
another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even
now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in
its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do
with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and
carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him
in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of
what she had lost--quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the
privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though
she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than
one might have supposed--assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.
"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be
the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours,
and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."
"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen
exclaimed.
"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no
doubt of my being on hers."
"Then of course she won't like your changing."
"I dare say she won't like it at all."
"Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"
"I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall
naturally have a great deal of discussion--if she consents to discuss
the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three
days."
"I see you think she _may_ refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen.
"I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to
have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public
surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard
with her pride."
Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I
suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the
first time it had occurred to him.
"You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.
"I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as
clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he
went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that
will really fetch her."
"Neither do I, as yet. I must think--I must pray!" the girl pursued,
smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I _want_ to try, you
know--I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that
she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite
alone with her. You must go straight back."
"Back to the inn?"
"Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."
He turned about vaguely for his hat.
"There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid."
"Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?"
"I've got a perfect case--I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's
simple stealing."
"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to
remark without solemnity.
"It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder.
Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such
rapid transitions.
She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none
of mine."
"Well, at any rate, you don't call her names."
Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her
to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she
holds out!"
Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his
hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?"
He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know
what you mean by a set-to."
"Well, if she calls _you_ names."
"I don't think she'll do that."
"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up--what will
you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know."
"She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what
I shall do. You mustn't worry about me."
She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't
go away, I hope?"
"Go away?"
"If she does take it ill of you."
Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You
must have patience and see."
"Of course I must," said Owen--"of course, of course." But he took no
more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and
I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If
you _should_ leave my mother, where would you go?"
Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea."
"I suppose you'd go back to London."
"I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated.
"You don't--a--live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went
on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he
felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the
circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her
own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she
would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was
indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain
about it.
Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the
matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I _won't_ leave your
mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her
absolutely."
"I believe you will, if you look at her like that!"
She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in
her pale, fine little face--a light that, while, for all return, at
first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own.
"I'll make her see it--I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver
bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed;
but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became
aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had
opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had
done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on
the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken
it was the sense of those seconds of silence.
"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can
I tell you the difference? And _she_'s so different, so ugly and vulgar,
in the light of this squabble. No, like _you_ I've never known one. It's
another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't
something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at
Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more
reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one
thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this
if she had to be horrid.
"Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door
with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things
afterwards--for she was to think of them forever--she wondered in what
tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she
encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth
had come in.
"No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back
road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would
have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that
parlor-maid.
"Please open the house-door," said Fleda.
Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the
hall--looked even wistfully up the staircase--while the neat young woman
complied with Fleda's request. Owen's eyes then wandered out of the open
door. "I think it's awfully nice here," he observed; "I assure you I
could do with it myself."
"I should think you might, with half your things here! It's Poynton
itself--almost. Good-bye, Mr. Gereth," Fleda added. Her intention had
naturally been that the neat young woman, opening the front door, should
remain to close it on the departing guest. That functionary, however,
had acutely vanished behind a stiff flap of green baize which Mrs.
Gereth had not yet had time to abolish. Fleda put out her hand, but Owen
turned away--he couldn't find his umbrella. She passed into the open
air--she was determined to get him out; and in a moment he joined her in
the little plastered portico which had small resemblance to any feature
of Poynton. It was, as Mrs. Gereth had said, like the portico of a house
in Brompton.
"Oh, I don't mean with all the things here," he explained in regard to
the opinion he had just expressed. "I mean I could put up with it just
as it was; it had a lot of good things, don't you think? I mean if
everything was back at Poynton, if everything was all right." He brought
out these last words with a sort of smothered sigh. Fleda didn't
understand his explanation unless it had reference to another and more
wonderful exchange--the restoration to the great house not only of its
tables and chairs, but of its alienated mistress. This would imply the
installation of his own life at Ricks, and obviously that of another
person. Such another person could scarcely be Mona Brigstock. He put out
his hand now; and once more she heard his unsounded words: "With
everything patched up at the other place, I could live here with _you_.
Don't you see what I mean?"
Fleda saw perfectly, and, with a face in which she flattered herself
that nothing of this vision appeared, gave him her hand and said:
"Good-bye, good-bye."
Owen held her hand very firmly and kept it even after an effort made by
her to recover it--an effort not repeated, as she felt it best not to
show she was flurried. That solution--of her living with him at
Ricks--disposed of him beautifully, and disposed not less so of herself;
it disposed admirably too of Mrs. Gereth. Fleda could only vainly wonder
how it provided for poor Mona. While he looked at her, grasping her
hand, she felt that now indeed she was paying for his mother's
extravagance at Poynton--the vividness of that lady's public plea that
little Fleda Vetch was the person to insure the general peace. It was to
that vividness poor Owen had come back, and if Mrs. Gereth had had more
discretion little Fleda Vetch wouldn't have been in a predicament. She
saw that Owen had at this moment his sharpest necessity of speech, and
so long as he didn't release her hand she could only submit to him. Her
defense would be perhaps to look blank and hard; so she looked as blank
and as hard as she could, with the reward of an immediate sense that
this was not a bit what he wanted. It even made him hang fire, as if he
were suddenly ashamed of himself, were recalled to some idea of duty and
of honor. Yet he none the less brought it out. "There's one thing I dare
say I ought to tell you, if you're going so kindly to act for me; though
of course you'll see for yourself it's a thing it won't do to tell
_her_." What was it? He made her wait for it again, and while she
waited, under firm coercion, she had the extraordinary impression that
Owen's simplicity was in eclipse. His natural honesty was like the scent
of a flower, and she felt at this moment as if her nose had been brushed
by the bloom without the odor. The allusion was undoubtedly to his
mother; and was not what he meant about the matter in question the
opposite of what he said--that it just _would_ do to tell her? It would
have been the first time he had said the opposite of what he meant, and
there was certainly a fascination in the phenomenon, as well as a
challenge to suspense in the ambiguity. "It's just that I understand
from Mona, you know," he stammered; "it's just that she has made no
bones about bringing home to me--" He tried to laugh, and in the effort
he faltered again.
"About bringing home to you?"--Fleda encouraged him.
He was sensible of it, he achieved his performance. "Why, that if I
don't get the things back--every blessed one of them except a few
_she_'ll pick out--she won't have anything more to say to me."
Fleda, after an instant, encouraged him again. "To say to you?"
"Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?"
Owen's legs, not to mention his voice, had wavered while he spoke, and
she felt his possession of her hand loosen so that she was free again.
Her stare of perception broke into a lively laugh. "Oh, you're all
right, for you _will_ get them. You will; you're quite safe; don't
worry!" She fell back into the house with her hand on the door.
"Good-bye, good-bye." She repeated it several times, laughing bravely,
quite waving him away and, as he didn't move and save that he was on the
other side of it, closing the door in his face quite as he had closed
that of the drawing-room in hers. Never had a face, never at least had
such a handsome one, been so presented to that offense. She even held
the door a minute, lest he should try to come in again. At last, as she
heard nothing, she made a dash for the stairs and ran up.
IX
In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from
knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with
her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck
her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first
time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond
his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to
extremities; if his negotiation with his mother should fail he would be
completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he
had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to
aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs.
Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the
young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the
negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to
Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her
return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to
failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so
conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective
introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked
Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance
Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life,
and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having
practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back
road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed.
There was something _she_ enjoyed; but that was a very different matter.
To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings
that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a
flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been
fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house,
they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for
her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for
him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could
it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His
attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't
believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion.
She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to
be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it,
and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He
had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick
themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having
kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown.
She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there
was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which
throbbed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she
after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's
relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his
wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt--as
sharply as she felt on his behalf--that so long as those relations were
not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no
right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an
escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he
must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one
else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate--it was her
own case that was in question--couldn't dream of assisting him save in
the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn
in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness
to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have
"ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained
even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really
straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and
now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some
high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short,
unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing
to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily.
Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred.
How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well
what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she
could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have
loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to
the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much
as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready
to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be
generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally
understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she
proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him
tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in
the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it
would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's
shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the
matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with
her own silly self?
Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly
to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be
tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only
to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as
he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst
aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the
fact--since one was facing facts--that but the other day his strong arms
must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had
permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which
Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to
reflection. She herself had no beauty, and _her_ permissions were the
stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room--a consciousness
of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that
made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that
generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering
just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw
what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out;
at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even
should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the
contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under
stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have
said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should
come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation
that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total
of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that
while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it
and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that
consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was
no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom
to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he
hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have
dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she
indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely
living thing that she had caught and could keep--keep vivid and helpless
in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She
had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window,
she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet
her.
X
Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of
the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a
question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you
shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the
railway will carry it."
The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose
there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was
in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a
place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events
that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda
could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril
was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest.
At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the
sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to
legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the
warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and
presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear
everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her
attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in.
"Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her
cloak.
"Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.
"I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing."
"Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I
suppose, coercion."
"What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth.
"Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you."
"Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested
curiosity.
"That's what he calls it," said Fleda.
Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed
lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only
with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a
slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession
nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send
them down here?"
"I dare say he thinks it may come to that."
"The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously
remarked.
"I suppose he means them--in the first place, at least--to try to talk
you over."
"In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?"
Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could
disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know."
"Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What
then were you doing all the while?"
"I didn't ask very much," said her companion. "He has been gone some
time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he
wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned."
"My just giving everything back?"
"Your just giving everything back."
"Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.
Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the
words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now
committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled,
but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth
had begun to look at her with some fixedness.
"Did he seem very angry?"
"He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard," Fleda added.
"And how does _she_ take it?"
"Ah, that--that I felt a delicacy about asking."
"So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise.
Fleda was embarrassed; she had not made up her mind definitely to lie.
"I didn't think you'd care." That small untruth she would risk.
"Well--I don't!" Mrs. Gereth declared; and Fleda felt less guilty to
hear her, for the statement was as inexact as her own. "Didn't you say
anything in return?" Mrs. Gereth presently continued.
"Do you mean in the way of justifying you?"
"I didn't mean to trouble you to do that. My justification," said Mrs.
Gereth, sitting there warmly and, in the lucidity of her thought, which
nevertheless hung back a little, dropping her eyes on the gravel--"my
justification was all the past. My justification was the cruelty--" But
at this, with a short, sharp gesture, she checked herself. "It's too
good of me to talk--now." She produced these sentences with a cold
patience, as if addressing Fleda in the girl's virtual and actual
character of Owen's representative. Our young lady crept to and fro
before the bench, combating the sense that it was occupied by a judge,
looking at her boot-toes, reminding herself in doing so of Mona, and
lightly crunching the pebbles as she walked. She moved about because she
was afraid, putting off from moment to moment the exercise of the
courage she had been sure she possessed. That courage would all come to
her if she could only be equally sure that what she should be called
upon to do for Owen would be to suffer. She had wondered, while Mrs.
Gereth spoke, how that lady would describe her justification. She had
described it as if to be irreproachably fair, give her adversary the
benefit of every doubt, and then dismiss the question forever. "Of
course," Mrs. Gereth went on, "if we didn't succeed in showing him at
Poynton the ground we took, it's simply that he shuts his eyes. What I
supposed was that you would have given him your opinion that if I was
the woman so signally to assert myself, I'm also the woman to rest upon
it imperturbably enough."
Fleda stopped in front of her hostess. "I gave him my opinion that
you're very logical, very obstinate, and very proud."
"Quite right, my dear: I'm a rank bigot--about that sort of thing!" and
Mrs. Gereth jerked her head at the contents of the house. "I've never
denied it. I'd kidnap--to save them, to convert them--the children of
heretics. When I know I'm right I go to the stake. Oh, he may burn me
alive!" she cried with a happy face. "Did he abuse me?" she then
demanded.
Fleda had remained there, gathering in her purpose. "How little you know
him!"
Mrs. Gereth stared, then broke into a laugh that her companion had not
expected. "Ah, my dear, certainly not so well as you!" The girl, at
this, turned away again--she felt she looked too conscious; and she was
aware that, during a pause, Mrs. Gereth's eyes watched her as she went.
She faced about afresh to meet them, but what she met was a question
that reinforced them. "Why had you a 'delicacy' as to speaking of Mona?"
She stopped again before the bench, and an inspiration came to her. "I
should think _you_ would know," she said with proper dignity.
Blankness was for a moment on Mrs. Gereth's brow; then light broke--she
visibly remembered the scene in the breakfast-room after Mona's night at
Poynton. "Because I contrasted you--told him _you_ were the one?" Her
eyes looked deep. "You were--you are still!"
Fleda gave a bold dramatic laugh. "Thank you, my love--with all the best
things at Ricks!"
Mrs. Gereth considered, trying to penetrate, as it seemed; but at last
she brought out roundly: "For you, you know, I'd send them back!"
The girl's heart gave a tremendous bound; the right way dawned upon her
in a flash. Obscurity indeed the next moment engulfed this course, but
for a few thrilled seconds she had understood. To send the things back
"for her" meant of course to send them back if there were even a dim
chance that she might become mistress of them. Fleda's palpitation was
not allayed as she asked herself what portent Mrs. Gereth had suddenly
perceived of such a chance: that perception could come only from a
sudden suspicion of her secret. This suspicion, in turn, was a tolerably
straight consequence of that implied view of the propriety of surrender
from which, she was well aware, she could say nothing to dissociate
herself. What she first felt was that if she wished to rescue the spoils
she wished also to rescue her secret. So she looked as innocent as she
could and said as quickly as possible: "For me? Why in the world for
me?"
"Because you're so awfully keen."
"Am I? Do I strike you so? You know I hate him," Fleda went on.
She had the sense for a while of Mrs. Gereth's regarding her with the
detachment of some stern, clever stranger. "Then what's the matter with
you? Why do you want me to give in?"
Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son
wants it. I haven't said _I_ do."
"Then say it and have done with it!"
This was more peremptory than any word her friend, though often speaking
in her presence with much point, had ever yet directly addressed to her.
It affected her like the crack of a whip, but she confined herself, with
an effort, to taking it as a reminder that she must keep her head. "I
know he has his engagement to carry out."
"His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!"
"Why should _I_ loathe it?" Fleda asked with a strained smile. Then,
before Mrs. Gereth could reply, she pursued: "I'm thinking of his
general undertaking--to give her the house as she originally saw it."
"To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth
of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it
was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale.
"I'm thinking," Fleda continued, "of the simple question of his keeping
faith on an important clause of his contract: it doesn't matter whether
it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of
his honor and his good name."
"The honor and good name of a man you hate?"
"Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should
talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that
assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he
put his case to me."
"Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an
accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of
any consequence had passed between you."
"Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young
lady declared.
"I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her
large laugh.
Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she
returned at last.
"Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired.
"Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?"
Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her
young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of
Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a
little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They
strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He
_was_ eloquent, then, poor dear--he poured forth the story of his
wrongs?"
Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed,
leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and
cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything
that I didn't know pretty well already."
"It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty
mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the
world. If you were inane, like most girls--like every one, in fact--I
would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would
have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth
went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary,
would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner,
but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you
would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute--as indeed
I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow
Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility
this spirited picture. She praised her cleverness and her patience; then
she said it was getting cold and dark and they must go in to tea. She
delayed quitting the place, however, and reverted instead to Owen's
ultimatum, about which she asked another question or two; in particular
whether it had struck Fleda that he really believed she would comply
with such a summons.
"I think he really believes that if I try hard enough I can make you:"
after uttering which words our young lady stopped short and emulated the
embrace she had received a few moments before.
"And you've promised to try: I see. You didn't tell me that, either,"
Mrs. Gereth added as they went on. "But you're rascal enough for
anything!" While Fleda was occupied in thinking in what terms she could
explain why she had indeed been rascal enough for the reticence thus
denounced, her companion broke out with an inquiry somewhat irrelevant
and even in form somewhat profane. "Why the devil, at any rate, doesn't
it come off?"
Fleda hesitated. "You mean their marriage?"
"Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the
least idea."
"You didn't ask him?"
"Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone.
"Fancy your putting a question so indelicate? _I_ should have put it--I
mean in your place; but I'm quite coarse, thank God!" Fleda felt
privately that she herself was coarse, or at any rate would presently
have to be; and Mrs. Gereth, with a purpose that struck the girl as
increasing, continued: "What, then, _was_ the day to be? Wasn't it just
one of these?"
"I'm sure I don't remember."
It was part of the great rupture and an effect of Mrs. Gereth's
character that up to this moment she had been completely and haughtily
indifferent to that detail. Now, however, she had a visible reason for
being clear about it. She bethought herself and she broke out--"Isn't
the day past?" Then, stopping short, she added: "Upon my word, they must
have put it off!" As Fleda made no answer to this she sharply went on:
"_Have_ they put it off?"
"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.
Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you--didn't
he say anything about it?"
Fleda, meanwhile, had had time to make her reflections, which were
moreover the continued throb of those that had occupied the interval
between Owen's departure and his mother's return. If she should now
repeat his words, this wouldn't at all play the game of her definite
vow; it would only play the game of her little gagged and blinded
desire. She could calculate well enough the effect of telling Mrs.
Gereth how she had had it from Owen's troubled lips that Mona was only
waiting for the restitution and would do nothing without it. The thing
was to obtain the restitution without imparting that knowledge. The only
way, also, not to impart it was not to tell any truth at all about it;
and the only way to meet this last condition was to reply to her
companion, as she presently did: "He told me nothing whatever: he didn't
touch on the subject."
"Not in any way?"
"Not in any way."
Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they
are waiting for the things?"
"How should I have? I'm not in their counsels."
"I dare say they are--or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she
had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not
break off."
"She'll never, never break off!" said Fleda.
"Are you sure?"
"I can't be sure, but it's my belief."
"Derived from _him_?"
The girl hung fire a few seconds. "Derived from him."
Mrs. Gereth gave her a long last look, then turned abruptly away. "It's
an awful bore you didn't really get it out of him! Well, come to tea,"
she added rather dryly, passing straight into the house.
XI
The sense of her adversary's dryness, which was ominous of something she
couldn't read, made Fleda, before complying, linger a little on the
terrace; she felt the need moreover of taking breath after such a flight
into the cold air of denial. When at last she rejoined Mrs. Gereth she
found her erect before the drawing-room fire. Their tea had been set out
in the same quarter, and the mistress of the house, for whom the
preparation of it was in general a high and undelegated function, was in
an attitude to which the hissing urn made no appeal. This omission, for
Fleda, was such a further sign of something to come that, to disguise
her apprehension, she immediately and without an apology took the duty
in hand; only, however, to be promptly reminded that she was performing
it confusedly and not counting the journeys of the little silver shovel
she emptied into the pot. "Not _five_, my dear--the usual three," said
her hostess, with the same dryness; watching her then in silence while
she clumsily corrected her mistake. The tea took some minutes to draw,
and Mrs. Gereth availed herself of them suddenly to exclaim: "You
haven't yet told me, you know, how it is you propose to 'make' me!"
"Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her
question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why,
by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I
shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having
gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of
you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first
thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me--endless and
beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your
own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a
postage-stamp."
"Give me a cup of tea," said Mrs. Gereth. A moment later, taking the
cup, she replied: "No, you've never asked me for a postage-stamp."
"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling.
"Puts you in the situation of expecting that I shall do this thing just
simply to oblige you?"
The girl hesitated. "You said a while ago that for me you _would_ do
it."
"For you, but not for your eloquence. Do you understand what I mean by
the difference?" Mrs. Gereth asked as she stood stirring her tea.
Fleda, to postpone answering, looked round, while she drank it, at the
beautiful room. "I don't in the least like, you know, your having taken
so much. It was a great shock to me, on my arrival here, to find you had
done so."
"Give me some more tea," said Mrs. Gereth; and there was a moment's
silence as Fleda poured out another cup. "If you were shocked, my dear,
I'm bound to say you concealed your shock."
"I know I did. I was afraid to show it."
Mrs. Gereth drank off her second cup. "And you're not afraid now?"
"No, I'm not afraid now."
"What has made the difference?"
"I've pulled myself together." Fleda paused; then she added: "And I've
seen Mr. Owen."
"You've seen Mr. Owen"--Mrs. Gereth concurred. She put down her cup and
sank into a chair, in which she leaned back, resting her head and gazing
at her young friend. "Yes, I did tell you a while ago that for you I'd
do it. But you haven't told me yet what you'll do in return."
Fleda thought an instant. "Anything in the wide world you may require."
"Oh, 'anything' is nothing at all! That's too easily said." Mrs. Gereth,
reclining more completely, closed her eyes with an air of disgust, an
air indeed of inviting slumber.
Fleda looked at her quiet face, which the appearance of slumber always
made particularly handsome; she noted how much the ordeal of the last
few weeks had added to its indications of age. "Well then, try me with
something. What is it you demand?"
At this, opening her eyes, Mrs. Gereth sprang straight up. "Get him away
from her!"
Fleda marveled: her companion had in an instant become young again.
"Away from Mona? How in the world--?"
"By not looking like a fool!" cried Mrs. Gereth very sharply. She kissed
her, however, on the spot, to make up for this roughness, and summarily
took off her hat, which, on coming into the house, our young lady had
not removed. She applied a friendly touch to the girl's hair and gave a
businesslike pull to her jacket. "I say don't look like an idiot,
because you happen not to be one, not the least bit. _I_'m idiotic; I've
been so, I've just discovered, ever since our first days together. I've
been a precious donkey; but that's another affair."
Fleda, as if she humbly assented, went through no form of controverting
this; she simply stood passive to her companion's sudden refreshment of
her appearance. "How _can_ I get him away from her?" she presently
demanded.
"By letting yourself go."
"By letting myself go?" She spoke mechanically, still more like an
idiot, and felt as if her face flamed out the insincerity of her
question. It was vividly back again, the vision of the real way to act
upon Mrs. Gereth. This lady's movements were now rapid; she turned off
from her as quickly as she had seized her, and Fleda sat down to steady
herself for full responsibility.
Her hostess, without taking up her ejaculation, gave a violent poke at
the fire and then faced her again. "You've done two things, then,
to-day--haven't you?--that you've never done before. One has been asking
me the service, or favor, or concession--whatever you call it--that you
just mentioned; the other has been telling me--certainly too for the
first time--an immense little fib."
"An immense little fib?" Fleda felt weak; she was glad of the support of
her seat.
"An immense big one, then!" said Mrs. Gereth irritatedly. "You don't in
the least 'hate' Owen, my darling. You care for him very much. In fact,
my own, you're in love with him--there! Don't tell me any more lies!"
cried Mrs. Gereth with a voice and a face in the presence of which Fleda
recognized that there was nothing for her but to hold herself and take
them. When once the truth was out, it was out, and she could see more
and more every instant that it would be the only way. She accepted
therefore what had to come; she leaned back her head and closed her eyes
as her companion had done just before. She would have covered her face
with her hands but for the still greater shame. "Oh, you're a wonder, a
wonder," said Mrs. Gereth; "you're magnificent, and I was right, as soon
as I saw you, to pick you out and trust you!" Fleda closed her eyes
tighter at this last word, but her friend kept it up. "I never dreamed
of it till a while ago, when, after he had come and gone, we were face
to face. Then something stuck out of you; it strongly impressed me, and
I didn't know at first quite what to make of it. It was that you had
just been with him and that you were not natural. Not natural to _me_,"
she added with a smile. "I pricked up my ears, and all that this might
mean dawned upon me when you said you had asked nothing about Mona. It
put me on the scent, but I didn't show you, did I? I felt it was _in_
you, deep down, and that I must draw it out. Well, I _have_ drawn it,
and it's a blessing. Yesterday, when you shed tears at breakfast, I was
awfully puzzled. What has been the matter with you all the while? Why,
Fleda, it isn't a crime, don't you know that?" cried the delighted
woman. "When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such
nice people as Owen. I didn't behave as well as you; compared with you I
think I must have been horrid. But if you're proud and reserved, it's
your own affair; I'm proud too, though I'm not reserved--that's what
spoils it. I'm stupid, above all--that's what I am; so dense that I
really blush for it. However, no one but you could have deceived me. If
I trusted you, moreover, it was exactly to be cleverer than myself. You
must be so now more than ever!" Suddenly Fleda felt her hands grasped:
Mrs. Gereth had plumped down at her feet and was leaning on her knees.
"Save him--save him: you _can_!" she passionately pleaded. "How could
you _not_ like him, when he's such a dear? He _is_ a dear, darling;
there's no harm in my own boy! You can do what you will with him--you
know you can! What else does he give us all this time for? Get him away
from her; it's as if he besought you to, poor wretch! Don't abandon him
to such a fate, and I'll never abandon _you_. Think of him with that
creature, that future! If you'll take him I'll give up everything.
There, it's a solemn promise, the most sacred of my life! Get the better
of her, and he shall have every stick I removed. Give me your word, and
I'll accept it. I'll write for the packers to-night!"
Fleda, before this, had fallen forward on her companion's neck, and the
two women, clinging together, had got up while the younger wailed on the
other's bosom. "You smooth it down because you see more in it than there
can ever be; but after my hideous double game how will you be able to
believe in me again?"
"I see in it simply what _must_ be, if you've a single spark of pity.
Where on earth was the double game, when you've behaved like such a
saint? You've been beautiful, you've been exquisite, and all our trouble
is over."
Fleda, drying her eyes, shook her head ever so sadly. "No, Mrs. Gereth,
it isn't over. I can't do what you ask--I can't meet your condition."
Mrs. Gereth stared; the cloud gathered in her face again. "Why, in the
name of goodness, when you adore him? I know what you see in him," she
declared in another tone. "You're right!"
Fleda gave a faint, stubborn smile. "He cares for her too much."
"Then why doesn't he marry her? He's giving you an extraordinary
chance."
"He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he,
if you didn't?"
"It wasn't with me you were in love, my duck." Then Mrs. Gereth added:
"I'll go and tell him."
"If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,--absolutely,
literally never!"
Mrs. Gereth looked hard at her young friend, showing she saw she must
believe her. "Then you're perverse, you're wicked. Will you swear he
doesn't know?"
"Of course he doesn't know!" cried Fleda indignantly.
Her interlocutress was silent a little. "And that he has no feeling on
_his_ side?"
"For me?" Fleda stared. "Before he has even married her?"
Mrs. Gereth gave a sharp laugh at this. "He ought at least to appreciate
your wit. Oh, my dear, you _are_ a treasure! Doesn't he appreciate
anything? Has he given you absolutely no symptom--not looked a look, not
breathed a sigh?"
"The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it."
"Then he's as big a donkey as his mother! But you know you must account
for their delay," Mrs. Gereth remarked.
"Why must I?" Fleda asked after a moment.
"Because you were closeted with him here so long. You can't pretend at
present, you know, not to have any art."
The girl hesitated an instant; she was conscious that she must choose
between two risks. She had had a secret and the secret was gone. Owen
had one, which was still unbruised, and the greater risk now was that
his mother should lay her formidable hand upon it. All Fleda's
tenderness for him moved her to protect it; so she faced the smaller
peril. "Their delay," she brought herself to reply, "may perhaps be
Mona's doing. I mean because he has lost her the things."
Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep
them?"
Fleda winced. "I've told you what I believe about that. She'll make
scenes and conditions; she'll worry him. But she'll hold him fast;
she'll never give him up."
Mrs. Gereth turned it over. "Well, I'll keep them, to try her," she
finally pronounced; at which Fleda felt quite sick, as if she had given
everything and got nothing.
XII
"I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter
with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you
wish me to write to him?"
"Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth.
Fleda looked very blank. "What on earth am I to see him for?"
"For anything you like."
The girl would have been struck with the levity of this had she not
already, in an hour, felt the extent of the change suddenly wrought in
her commerce with her friend--wrought above all, to that friend's view,
in her relation to the great issue. The effect of what had followed
Owen's visit was to make that relation the very key of the crisis.
Pressed upon her, goodness knew, the crisis had been, but it now seemed
to put forth big, encircling arms--arms that squeezed till they hurt and
she must cry out. It was as if everything at Ricks had been poured into
a common receptacle, a public ferment of emotion and zeal, out of which
it was ladled up to be tasted and talked about; everything at least but
the one little treasure of knowledge that she kept back. She ought to
have liked this, she reflected, because it meant sympathy, meant a
closer union with the source of so much in her life that had been
beautiful and renovating; but there were fine instincts in her that
stood off. She had had--and it was not merely at this time--to recognize
that there were things for which Mrs. Gereth's _flair_ was not so happy
as for bargains and "marks." It wouldn't be happy now as to the best
action on the knowledge she had just gained; yet as from this moment
they were still more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt
would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in
which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the
best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good
intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be
the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare--the
loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like
any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate
island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took
account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she
could make of it--a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a
hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's
answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have
occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she
had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be
bettered.
"Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?"
she presently inquired.
"Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It _was_
bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case
when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion
said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know--to do what you please
with. Deal with him in your own clever way--I ask no questions. All I
ask is that you succeed."
"That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll
be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an
answer from you to the message I was to give you."
"The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have
everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you."
"You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting
him that news?"
"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I
speak the word myself?"
"Oh, if _you_ speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy
at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself
warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on
a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've
despoiled him far more than is just or merciful--for if I expected you
to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to take
everything--how can I stay here without a sense that I'm backing you up
in your cruelty and participating in your ill-gotten gains?" Fleda was
determined that if she had the chill of her exposed and investigated
state she would also have the convenience of it, and that if Mrs. Gereth
popped in and out of the chamber of her soul she would at least return
the freedom. "I shall quite hate, you know, in a day or two, every
object that surrounds you--become blind to all the beauty and rarity
that I formerly delighted in. Don't think me harsh; there's no use in my
not being frank now. If I leave you, everything's at an end."
Mrs. Gereth, however, was imperturbable: Fleda had to recognize that her
advantage had become too real. "It's too beautiful, the way you care for
him; it's music in my ears. Nothing else but such a passion could make
you say such things; that's the way I should have been too, my dear. Why
didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have gone right in for you; I never would
have moved a candlestick. Don't stay with me if it torments you; don't,
if you suffer, be where you see the old rubbish. Go up to town--go back
for a little to your father's. It need be only for a little; two or
three weeks will see us through. Your father will take you and be glad,
if you only will make him understand what it's a question of--of your
getting yourself off his hands forever. _I_'ll make him understand, you
know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare
your being bored; we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a
bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course
that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen--I should be
fatally in the way. Your chance is there--your chance is to be alone;
for God's sake, use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've
a little I can give you. But I ask no questions--not a question as small
as your shoe!"
She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for
granted. Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On
the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen; her emotion had to a
certain degree cleared itself--there was something she could say
briefly. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got
nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted--it took but a
night--against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to
serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too
sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and
a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so
much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So
what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with
his mother, but that he must be patient and give her time. It was
difficult, as they both had expected, but she was working her hardest
for him. She had made an impression--she would do everything to follow
it up. Meanwhile he must keep intensely quiet and take no other steps;
he must only trust her and pray for her and believe in her perfect
loyalty. She made no allusion whatever to Mona's attitude, nor to his
not being, as regarded that young lady, master of the situation; but she
said in a postscript, in reference to his mother, "Of course she wonders
a good deal why your marriage doesn't take place." After the letter had
gone she regretted having used the word "loyalty;" there were two or
three milder terms which she might as well have employed. The answer she
immediately received from Owen was a little note of which she met all
the deficiencies by describing it to herself as pathetically simple, but
which, to prove that Mrs. Gereth might ask as many questions as she
liked, she at once made his mother read. He had no art with his pen, he
had not even a good hand, and his letter, a short profession of friendly
confidence, consisted of but a few familiar and colorless words of
acknowledgment and assent. The gist of it was that he would certainly,
since Miss Vetch recommended it, not hurry mamma too much. He would not
for the present cause her to be approached by any one else, but he would
nevertheless continue to hope that she would see she _must_ come round.
"Of course, you know," he added, "she can't keep me waiting
indefinitely. Please give her my love and tell her that. If it can be
done peaceably I know you're just the one to do it."
Fleda had awaited his rejoinder in deep suspense; such was her
imagination of the possibility of his having, as she tacitly phrased it,
let himself go on paper that when it arrived she was at first almost
afraid to open it. There was indeed a distinct danger, for if he should
take it into his head to write her love-letters the whole chance of
aiding him would drop: she would have to return them, she would have to
decline all further communication with him: it would be quite the end of
the business. This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily
embraced all the heights and depths and extremities of things; that made
a single mouthful, in particular, of any tragic or desperate necessity.
She was perhaps at first just a trifle disappointed not to find in the
note in question a syllable that strayed from the text; but the next
moment she had risen to a point of view from which it presented itself
as a production almost inspired in its simplicity. It was simple even
for Owen, and she wondered what had given him the cue to be more so than
usual. Then she saw how natures that are right just do the things that
are right. He wasn't clever--his manner of writing showed it; but the
cleverest man in England couldn't have had more the instinct that, under
the circumstances, was the supremely happy one, the instinct of giving
her something that would do beautifully to be shown to Mrs. Gereth. This
was a kind of divination, for naturally he couldn't know the line Mrs.
Gereth was taking. It was furthermore explained--and that was the most
touching part of all--by his wish that she herself should notice how
awfully well he was behaving. His very bareness called her attention to
his virtue; and these were the exact fruits of her beautiful and
terrible admonition. He was cleaving to Mona; he was doing his duty; he
was making tremendously sure he should be without reproach.
If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of
the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment
after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the
world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about
the day, the _day_, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of
superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked
than its absence--an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it
prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled
for--that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona?
Such a challenge Fleda was obliged in some manner to take up. "You may
be settling Mona," she returned with a smile, "but I can hardly regard
it as sufficient evidence that you're settling Mona's lover."
"Why not, with such a studied omission on his part to gloss over in any
manner the painful tension existing between them--the painful tension
that, under providence, I've been the means of bringing about? He gives
you by his silence clear notice that his marriage is practically off."
"He speaks to me of the only thing that concerns me. He gives me clear
notice that he abates not one jot of his demand."
"Well, then, let him take the only way to get it satisfied."
Fleda had no need to ask again what such a way might be, nor was her
support removed by the fine assurance with which Mrs. Gereth could make
her argument wait upon her wish. These days, which dragged their length
into a strange, uncomfortable fortnight, had already borne more
testimony to that element than all the other time the two women had
passed together. Our young lady had been at first far from measuring the
whole of a feature that Owen himself would probably have described as
her companion's "cheek." She lived now in a kind of bath of boldness,
felt as if a fierce light poured in upon her from windows opened wide;
and the singular part of the ordeal was that she couldn't protest
against it fully without incurring, even to her own mind, some reproach
of ingratitude, some charge of smallness. If Mrs. Gereth's apparent
determination to hustle her into Owen's arms was accompanied with an air
of holding her dignity rather cheap, this was after all only as a
consequence of her being held in respect to some other attributes rather
dear. It was a new version of the old story of being kicked upstairs.
The wonderful woman was the same woman who, in the summer, at Poynton,
had been so puzzled to conceive why a good-natured girl shouldn't have
contributed more to the personal rout of the Brigstocks--shouldn't have
been grateful even for the handsome puff of Fleda Vetch. Only her
passion was keener now and her scruple more absent; the fight made a
demand upon her, and her pugnacity had become one with her constant
habit of using such weapons as she could pick up. She had no imagination
about anybody's life save on the side she bumped against. Fleda was
quite aware that she would have otherwise been a rare creature; but a
rare creature was originally just what she had struck her as being. Mrs.
Gereth had really no perception of anybody's nature--had only one
question about persons: were they clever or stupid? To be clever meant
to know the marks. Fleda knew them by direct inspiration, and a warm
recognition of this had been her friend's tribute to her character. The
girl had hours, now, of sombre wishing that she might never see anything
good again: that kind of experience was evidently not an infallible
source of peace. She would be more at peace in some vulgar little place
that should owe its _cachet_ to Tottenham Court Road. There were nice
strong horrors in West Kensington; it was as if they beckoned her and
wooed her back to them. She had a relaxed recollection of Waterbath; and
of her reasons for staying on at Ricks the force was rapidly ebbing. One
of these was her pledge to Owen--her vow to press his mother close; the
other was the fact that of the two discomforts, that of being prodded by
Mrs. Gereth and that of appearing to run after somebody else, the former
remained for a while the more endurable.
As the days passed, however, it became plainer to Fleda that her only
chance of success would be in lending herself to this low appearance.
Then, moreover, at last, her nerves settling the question, the choice
was simply imposed by the violence done to her taste--to whatever was
left of that high principle, at least, after the free and reckless
meeting, for months, of great drafts and appeals. It was all very well
to try to evade discussion: Owen Gereth was looking to her for a
struggle, and it wasn't a bit of a struggle to be disgusted and dumb.
She was on too strange a footing--that of having presented an ultimatum
and having had it torn up in her face. In such a case as that the envoy
always departed; he never sat gaping and dawdling before the city. Mrs.
Gereth, every morning, looked publicly into "The Morning Post," the only
newspaper she received; and every morning she treated the blankness of
that journal as fresh evidence that everything was "off." What did the
Post exist for but to tell you your children were wretchedly
married?--so that if such a source of misery was dry, what could you do
but infer that for once you had miraculously escaped? She almost taunted
Fleda with supineness in not getting something out of somebody--in the
same breath indeed in which she drenched her with a kind of appreciation
more onerous to the girl than blame. Mrs. Gereth herself had of course
washed her hands of the matter; but Fleda knew people who knew Mona and
would be sure to be in her confidence--inconceivable people who admired
her and had the privilege of Waterbath. What was the use therefore of
being the most natural and the easiest of letter-writers, if no sort of
side-light--in some pretext for correspondence--was, by a brilliant
creature, to be got out of such barbarians? Fleda was not only a
brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for
new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer
conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous
beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had
impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication
very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised
and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she
scarcely understood--arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in
good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and
fill out blanks.
These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a
brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step:
they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted
her to do. "I want you to cut in!"--that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and
comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again
and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too
slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior
attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say
that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not
have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation
to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown
almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other
day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on
this very spot, utterly alone with you--?" The poor girl at this point
never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be
trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda
wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to
her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her
to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been
delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with
her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the
platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and
seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as
usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing--nothing--nothing: don't
tell _me_!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of
the marriage. An instant later the train was off, but, moving quickly
beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her
friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go,
darling--only let yourself go!"
XIII
That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved
by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from
Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate
that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a
correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been
amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to
signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news
for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She
was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither,
on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona
was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so
glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had
sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near,
was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on
"The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired
sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment
of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth
triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with
a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was
most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the
circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to
the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these
circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was
quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her
intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of
intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around
her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had
fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people
considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the
privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined
itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of
that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in
no reminders nor knocked at any doors; she wandered vaguely in the
western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that "household art" for
which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge.
Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the
attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she felt like a lonely fly
crawling over a dusty chart.
How had Mrs. Gereth known in advance that if she had chosen to be "vile"
(that was what Fleda called it) everything would happen to help
her?--especially the way her poor father, after breakfast, doddered off
to his club, showing seventy when he was really fifty-seven, and leaving
her richly alone for the day. He came back about midnight, looking at
her very hard and not risking long words--only making her feel by
inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to
alter all his hours. She had in their common sitting-room the company of
the objects he was fond of saying that he had collected--objects, shabby
and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old
brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed
with an assortment of pen-wipers and ash-trays, a harvest he had
gathered in from penny bazaars. He was blandly unconscious of that side
of Fleda's nature which had endeared her to Mrs. Gereth, and she had
often heard him wish to goodness there was something striking she cared
for. Why didn't she try collecting something?--it didn't matter what.
She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end of
little curiosities one could easily pick up. He was conscious of having
a taste for fine things which his children had unfortunately not
inherited. This indicated the limits of their acquaintance with
him--limits which, as Fleda was now sharply aware, could only leave him
to wonder what the mischief she was there for. As she herself echoed
this question to the letter she was not in a position to clear up the
mystery. She couldn't have given a name to her errand in town or
explained it save by saying that she had had to get away from Ricks. It
was intensely provisional, but what was to come next? Nothing could come
next but a deeper anxiety. She had neither a home nor an
outlook--nothing in all the wide world but a feeling of suspense.
Of course she had her duty--her duty to Owen--a definite undertaking,
reaffirmed, after his visit to Ricks, under her hand and seal; but there
was no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible
sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide
wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she
was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short,
wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she
would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part
with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck
deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar
parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she
could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the
Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature
of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The
mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored
air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and
distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and
unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a
quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if _she_ were
mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned
there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her
campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar
its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of
a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to
collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered
and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any
daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication
in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into
his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the
museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood
beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A
fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such
times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post.
Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any
question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to
give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted
from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling
bell to it. A frank relation with him was only superficially
discredited: she ought for his own sake to send him a word of cheer. So
she repeatedly reasoned, but she as repeatedly delayed performance: if
her general plan had been to be as still as a mouse, an interview like
the interview at Ricks would be an odd contribution to that ideal.
Therefore with a confused preference of practice to theory she let the
days go by; she felt that nothing was so imperative as the gain of
precious time. She shouldn't be able to stay with her father forever,
but she might now reap the benefit of having married her sister.
Maggie's union had been built up round a small spare room. Concealed in
this apartment she might try to paint again, and abetted by the grateful
Maggie--for Maggie at least was grateful--she might try to dispose of
her work. She had not indeed struggled with a brush since her visit to
Waterbath, where the sight of the family splotches had put her immensely
on her guard. Poynton moreover had been an impossible place for
producing; no active art could flourish there but a Buddhistic
contemplation. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble
accomplishments; her hands were imbrued neither with ink nor with
water-color. Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man
who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists'
materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy
experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small
studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady
without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought
them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been
snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she herself was
doing. They never had been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they
were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It
was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from
them; besides which, when she now quitted the house, she had to look for
reasons after she was out. The only place to find them was in the
shop-windows. They made her feel like a servant-girl taking her
"afternoon," but that didn't signify: perhaps some day she would
resemble such a person still more closely. This continued a fortnight,
at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated. She had stopped
as usual in the presence of the little pictures; then, as she turned
away, she had found herself face to face with Owen Gereth.
At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one
at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this
encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that
the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that
he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had
information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said
with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way.
I've been at your house."
"How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.
"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you
were there?"
Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you
know, why did you come?"
"Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world
didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He
hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to
me--fancy!"
They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him
there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that
they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her
with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had
done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this
was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form,
as he would have called it--"turned out" as he was turned out in town.
In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had
always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume.
This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious
as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the
earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the
birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair
of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately
dressed, shining and splendid--that he had a higher hat and light gloves
with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon
decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him--for she never
could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of
his vocabulary--a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he
looked at her, the great fact of their situation--his pull was
tremendous. She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling
in her voice as she said to him with more surprise than she really felt:
"You've then reopened relations with her?"
"It's she who has reopened them with me. I got her letter this morning.
She told me you were here and that she wished me to know it. She didn't
say much; she just gave me your address. I wrote her back, you know,
'Thanks no end. Shall go to-day.' So we _are_ in correspondence again,
aren't we? She means of course that you've something to tell me from
her, eh? But if you have, why haven't you let a fellow know?" He waited
for no answer to this, he had so much to say. "At your house, just now,
they told me how long you've been here. Haven't you known all the while
that I'm counting the hours? I left a word for you--that I would be back
at six; but I'm awfully glad to have caught you so much sooner. You
don't mean to say you're not going home!" he exclaimed in dismay. "The
young woman there told me you went out early."
"I've been out a very short time," said Fleda, who had hung back with
the general purpose of making things difficult for him. The street would
make them difficult; she could trust the street. She reflected in time,
however, that to betray to him she was afraid to admit him would give
him more a feeling of facility than of anything else. She moved on with
him after a moment, letting him direct their course to her door, which
was only round a corner: she considered as they went that it might not
prove such a stroke to have been in London so long and yet not to have
called him. She desired he should feel she was perfectly simple with
him, and there was no simplicity in that. None the less, on the steps of
the house, though she had a key, she rang the bell; and while they
waited together and she averted her face she looked straight into the
depths of what Mrs. Gereth had meant by giving him the "tip." This had
been perfidious, had been monstrous of Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda wondered
if her letter had contained only what Owen repeated.
XIV
When Owen and Fleda were in her father's little place and, among the
brandy-flasks and pen-wipers, still more disconcerted and divided, the
girl--to do something, though it would make him stay--had ordered tea,
he put the letter before her quite as if he had guessed her thought.
"She's still a bit nasty--fancy!" He handed her the scrap of a note
which he had pulled out of his pocket and from its envelope. "Fleda
Vetch," it ran, "is at 10 Raphael Road, West Kensington. Go to see her,
and try, for God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of intelligence." When
in handing it back to him she took in his face she saw that its
heightened color was the effect of his watching her read such an
allusion to his want of wit. Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and
his pathetic air of having received this buffet, tall and fine and kind
as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her
knowledge. For a minute she was kept silent by an angered sense of the
trick that had been played her. It was a trick because Fleda considered
there had been a covenant; and the trick consisted of Mrs. Gereth's
having broken the spirit of their agreement while conforming in a
fashion to the letter. Under the girl's menace of a complete rupture she
had been afraid to make of her secret the use she itched to make; but in
the course of these days of separation she had gathered pluck to hazard
an indirect betrayal. Fleda measured her hesitations and the impulse
which she had finally obeyed and which the continued procrastination of
Waterbath had encouraged, had at last made irresistible. If in her
high-handed manner of playing their game she had not named the thing
hidden, she had named the hiding-place. It was over the sense of this
wrong that Fleda's lips closed tight: she was afraid of aggravating her
case by some ejaculation that would make Owen prick up his ears. A
great, quick effort, however, helped her to avoid the danger; with her
constant idea of keeping cool and repressing a visible flutter, she
found herself able to choose her words. Meanwhile he had exclaimed with
his uncomfortable laugh: "That's a good one for me, Miss Vetch, isn't
it?"
"Of course you know by this time that your mother's very sharp," said
Fleda.
"I think I can understand well enough when I know what's to be
understood," the young man asserted. "But I hope you won't mind my
saying that you've kept me pretty well in the dark about that. I've been
waiting, waiting, waiting; so much has depended on your news. If you've
been working for me I'm afraid it has been a thankless job. Can't she
say what she'll do, one way or the other? I can't tell in the least
where I am, you know. I haven't really learnt from you, since I saw you
there, where _she_ is. You wrote me to be patient, and upon my soul I
have been. But I'm afraid you don't quite realize what I'm to be patient
with. At Waterbath, don't you know? I've simply to account and answer
for the damned things. Mona looks at me and waits, and I, hang it, I
look at you and do the same." Fleda had gathered fuller confidence as he
continued; so plain was it that she had succeeded in not dropping into
his mind the spark that might produce the glimmer invoked by his mother.
But even this fine assurance gave a start when, after an appealing
pause, he went on: "I hope, you know, that after all you're not keeping
anything back from me."
In the full face of what she was keeping back such a hope could only
make her wince; but she was prompt with her explanations in proportion
as she felt they failed to meet him. The smutty maid came in with
tea-things, and Fleda, moving several objects, eagerly accepted the
diversion of arranging a place for them on one of the tables. "I've been
trying to break your mother down because it has seemed there may be some
chance of it. That's why I've let you go on expecting it. She's too
proud to veer round all at once, but I think I speak correctly in saying
that I've made an impression."
In spite of ordering tea she had not invited him to sit down; she
herself made a point of standing. He hovered by the window that looked
into Raphael Road; she kept at the other side of the room; the stunted
slavey, gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful gentleman and either stupidly
or cunningly bringing but one thing at a time, came and went between the
tea-tray and the open door.
"You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked.
"I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more
strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty."
Owen waited a little. "And having done that, you departed?"
Fleda felt the full need of giving a reason for her departure; but at
first she only said with cheerful frankness: "I departed."
Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to
her for several months."
"Well," Fleda replied, "I couldn't stay. I didn't like it. I didn't like
it at all--I couldn't bear it," she went on. "In the midst of those
trophies of Poynton, living with them, touching them, using them, I felt
as if I were backing her up. As I was not a bit of an accomplice, as I
hate what she has done, I didn't want to be, even to the extent of the
mere look of it--what is it you call such people?--an accessory after
the fact." There was something she kept back so rigidly that the joy of
uttering the rest was double. She felt the sharpest need of giving him
all the other truth. There was a matter as to which she had deceived
him, and there was a matter as to which she had deceived Mrs. Gereth,
but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She
busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the
table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the
vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion
than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous.
Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder.
"My reason for not writing to you," she pursued, "was simply that I was
hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that."
"But you've heard nothing?"
"Not a word."
"Then what I understand," said Owen, "is that, practically, you and
Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it--I mean you personally--for
_me_."
"Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only
diverged."
"You've diverged uncommonly far!"--Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her
hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these
objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own,
measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware
too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's
simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous
fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was
all the more content he should thus see she _had_ acted, as the cost of
it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have
happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not
moved her!"
Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that,
notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen
it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean
in their turn only one? "The difficulty is, you understand, that she
doesn't really see into your situation." She hesitated. "She doesn't
comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place."
Owen stared. "Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take
another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be
there. You see, everything _was_ there the day of that fatal visit."
"Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks," said Fleda; "but I
haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk
with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could
speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to
notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him
and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him
all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a
corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as
she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less
certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions
and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't
seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she
thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she
believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda
felt was lucid enough.
So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel.
"So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she _has_ at last tired
Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.
Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him.
"Do you mean your marriage is off?"
Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where
or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the
point things have reached, isn't _on_. I haven't seen Mona for ten days,
and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every
week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't
budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she _does_ chuck me,
will mother come round?"
Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test--felt
that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to
push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion
would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the
conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That
conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the
place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less
urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth--there was a limit to the
impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most
to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he
had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did
she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of
which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest
of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is
really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken."
"That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean
the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up."
Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you--not
hesitate to renounce you?"
Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on,
as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully
keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the
only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me
time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much.
She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so
hard, don't you see?"
"I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered
her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about
_that_!" the girl declared.
Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does,
that I _must_ send down the police?"
The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much
she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no,
not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course
to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if
Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very
high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by
your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready--is that
it!--to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had
entered upon with joy."
Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with
success--a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with
decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added;
"she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or
not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want _me_. If she can't get
them she doesn't want anything at all."
This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in
them?"
"So it appears."
"So much that they're _all_, and that she can let everything else
absolutely depend upon them?"
Owen weighed her question as if he felt the responsibility of his
answer. But that answer came in a moment, and, as Fleda could see, out
of a wealth of memory. "She never wanted them particularly till they
seemed to be in danger. Now she has an idea about them; and when she
gets hold of an idea--Oh dear me!" He broke off, pausing and looking
away as with a sense of the futility of expression: it was the first
time Fleda had ever heard him explain a matter so pointedly or embark at
all on a generalization. It was striking, it was touching to her, as he
faltered, that he appeared but half capable of floating his
generalization to the end. The girl, however, was so far competent to
fill up his blank as that she had divined, on the occasion of Mona's
visit to Poynton, what would happen in the event of the accident at
which he glanced. She had there with her own eyes seen Owen's betrothed
get hold of an idea. "I say, you know, _do_ give me some tea!" he went
on irrelevantly and familiarly.
Her profuse preparations had all this time had no sequel, and, with a
laugh that she felt to be awkward, she hastily complied with his
request. "It's sure to be horrid," she said; "we don't have at all good
things." She offered him also bread and butter, of which he partook,
holding his cup and saucer in his other hand and moving slowly about the
room. She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without
wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit. She was struck with
the extinction of the unwillingness she had felt at Ricks to contribute
to the bandying between them of poor Mona's name; and under this
influence she presently resumed: "Am I to understand that she engaged
herself to marry you without caring for you?"
Owen looked out into Raphael Road. "She _did_ care for me awfully. But
she can't stand the strain."
"The strain of what?"
"Why, of the whole wretched thing."
"The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its
effect upon her," Fleda said.
Her visitor turned sharp round. "You _can_?" There was a light in his
strong stare. "You can understand it's spoiling her temper and making
her come down on _me_? She behaves as if I were of no use to her at
all!"
Fleda hesitated. "She's rankling under the sense of her wrong."
"Well, was it _I_, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I
can to get the thing arranged?"
The ring of his question made his anger at Mona almost resemble for a
minute an anger at Fleda; and this resemblance in turn caused our young
lady to observe how handsome he looked when he spoke, for the first time
in her hearing, with that degree of heat, and used, also for the first
time, such a term as "perpetrated." In addition, his challenge rendered
still more vivid to her the mere flimsiness of her own aid. "Yes, you've
been perfect," she said. "You've had a most difficult part. You've _had_
to show tact and patience, as well as firmness, with your mother, and
you've strikingly shown them. It's I who, quite unintentionally, have
deceived you. I haven't helped you at all to your remedy."
"Well, you wouldn't at all events have ceased to like me, would you?"
Owen demanded. It evidently mattered to him to know if she really
justified Mona. "I mean of course if you _had_ liked me--liked me as
_she_ liked me," he explained.
Fleda looked this inquiry in the face only long enough to recognize
that, in her embarrassment, she must take instant refuge in a superior
one. "I can answer that better if I know how kind to her you've been.
_Have_ you been kind to her?" she asked as simply as she could.
"Why, rather, Miss Vetch!" Owen declared. "I've done every blessed thing
she wished. I rushed down to Ricks, as you saw, with fire and sword, and
the day after that I went to see her at Waterbath." At this point he
checked himself, though it was just the point at which her interest
deepened. A different look had come into his face as he put down his
empty teacup. "But why should I tell you such things, for any good it
does me? I gather that you've no suggestion to make me now except that I
shall request my solicitor to act. _Shall_ I request him to act?"
Fleda scarcely heard his words; something new had suddenly come into her
mind. "When you went to Waterbath after seeing me," she asked, "did you
tell her all about that?"
Owen looked conscious. "All about it?"
"That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at
all?"
"Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind,
and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands."
Fleda was silent a moment. "Perhaps that displeased her," she at last
suggested.
"It displeased her fearfully," said Owen, looking very queer.
"Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was
startled.
"She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not
honest."
"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I
see."
"She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you--"
She checked him with a gesture. "Don't tell me what she did!" She had
colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face,
she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great
flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was entitled to.
While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object
of her magnanimity had been pronouncing her "not honest." She took it
all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile.
She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was
strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled
about you. It's much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about
_me_."
Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is,
don't you know, that Mona, if you don't mind my saying so, has taken it
into her head to be jealous."
"I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very
odd."
"They've looked very beautiful, and they've been very beautiful. Oh,
I've told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued.
"That of course hasn't made her love me better."
"No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves
me."
"And do you say you love her?"
"I say nothing else--I say it all the while. I said it the other day a
dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she
could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "_Am_ I to
tell my solicitor to act?"
She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because
she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine
him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut
in Mrs. Gereth's face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and
fight, flying the flag of a passionate, an heroic defense. The case
would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer
than Mona's patience or Owen's propriety. With a formal rupture he would
be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string
that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you 'say' you
love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You
wouldn't say so, would you, if it's not true? What in the world has
become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your
engagement?"
"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It
seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close
to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he
looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed
you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I
couldn't help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known
you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the
world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued,
"and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she
herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way
she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She
destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just
the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She
wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you
and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was
passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy.
She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if
you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be
hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of
any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had,
wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't
you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a
single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her
confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about
it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better
come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's
natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half
mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I
_really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and
Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the
closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness:
it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no
present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which
after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would
be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the
consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the
instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth
should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter
of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their
eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion,
still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had
begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a
grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice
dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a
pressure--"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"
The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him:
"Your mother!"
The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
Brigstock!"
XV
Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants
of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a
small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was
the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a
perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that
subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it
off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any
rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of
some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as
of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements
made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled
by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a
longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising
in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of
Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never
paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so
employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but
never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond.
She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a
bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she
dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her
whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock
quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the
associate of Mrs. Gereth's misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was
to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who
could think ten thoughts at once--a circumstance which, even putting her
present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person
who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very
vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock's
spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the
sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with
everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward
silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected
with friendly aid an embarrassed transit to the sofa. Owen would be
useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in
as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly
in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt
for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said,
and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at
the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was
her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona's mother; but she
couldn't entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that
he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock's daughter. Mona's mother
declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to
remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be
dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the
hint.
"I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday,
somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister's marriage that you
sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn't be
present--it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to
myself that I might find you here."
"I'm very glad to be at home," Fleda responded.
"Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked
round afresh at Fleda's home.
"Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don't
know when."
"We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course
of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might
perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.
"I'm sorry he's out. He's always out--all day long."
Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"
"All day long," Fleda smiled.
"Leaving you quite to yourself?"
"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their
sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the
movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him
at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed
to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose
for which you would like my father to call on you?"
Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be
unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance:
"I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of
course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home."
"No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night--I've several matters to
attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her
companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your
conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point,
had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been
confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was;
she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person
Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of
person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see
her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of
which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind
that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark
it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor
blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated
like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the
kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to
do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite
prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it
wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it
wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in
leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more
specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much
taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel."
Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?"
"About the contents of the house. Aren't you looking after them for
him?"
"She knows how awfully kind you've been to me," Owen said. He showed
such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda
found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the
wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her
to bring to pass for him.
She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day,
asked me particularly to see him for her."
"And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs.
Brigstock's hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated
truth; and it was on Fleda's lips to reply that such had indeed been
Mrs. Gereth's request. But she checked herself, and before she could say
anything else Owen had addressed their companion.
"I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you
see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning."
"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance,"
Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have
prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly
wouldn't have come."
"I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda
asked.
Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face
but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with _me_."
There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted.
As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to
assent; then, for fear that he wouldn't, and would thereby make his case
worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be
very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt
that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as
if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if
she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I've not
seen him for a long time--I've particular things to say to him."
"So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With
this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure.
The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going
to do?"
"Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded.
"That and several other things."
"Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and
make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is
the first time you've been to see me."
This appeal had evidently a certain effect; Mrs. Brigstock visibly
wavered. "I can't talk with him whenever I like," she returned; "he
hasn't been near us since I don't know when. But there are things that
have brought me here."
"They are not things of any importance," Owen, to Fleda's surprise,
suddenly asserted. He had not at first taken up Mrs. Brigstock's
expression of a wish to carry him off: Fleda could see that the instinct
at the bottom of this was that of standing by her, of seeming not to
abandon her. But abruptly, all his soreness working within him, it had
struck him that he should abandon her still more if he should leave her
to be dealt with by her other visitor. "You must allow me to say, you
know, Mrs. Brigstock, that I don't think you should come down on Miss
Vetch about anything. It's very good of her to take the smallest
interest in us and our horrid little squabble. If you want to talk about
it, talk about it with _me_." He was flushed with the idea of protecting
Fleda, of exhibiting his consideration for her. "I don't like your
cross-questioning her, don't you see? She's as straight as a die: _I_'ll
tell you all about her!" he declared with an excited laugh. "Please come
off with me and let her alone."
Mrs. Brigstock, at this, became vivid at once; Fleda thought she looked
most peculiar. She stood straight up, with a queer distention of her
whole person and of everything in her face but her mouth, which she
gathered into a small, tight orifice. Fleda was painfully divided; her
joy was deep within, but it was more relevant to the situation that she
should not appear to associate herself with the tone of familiarity in
which Owen addressed a lady who had been, and was perhaps still, about
to become his mother-in-law. She laid on Mrs. Brigstock's arm a
repressive hand. Mrs. Brigstock, however, had already exclaimed on her
having so wonderful a defender. "He speaks, upon my word, as if I had
come here to be rude to you!"
At this, grasping her hard, Fleda laughed; then she achieved the exploit
of delicately kissing her. "I'm not in the least afraid to be alone with
you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you
can possibly dream of putting to me."
"I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke
in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He
was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he
could be so firm.
"But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is
that?" Fleda cried.
"It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted
to know, but I think I know it now."
"Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he
impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat.
Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw
she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further
exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely
because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that
he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that
Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that
benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently
said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're
laboring under some great mistake."
Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly
than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a
certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled
everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing
what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an
explanation. I may owe somebody one--I dare say I do; but not you, no!"
"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?"
Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to
ask, if she came to ask any at all."
Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I
believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."
Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of
those bad women in a play?"
The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was
lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a
presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had
a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken
for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper,
even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came
to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather
mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much."
"I'm completely at your service." Owen held out his hand to Fleda.
"Good-bye, Miss Vetch. I hope to see you again to-morrow." He opened the
door for Mrs. Brigstock, who passed before the girl with an oblique,
averted salutation. Owen and Fleda, while he stood at the door, then
faced each other darkly and without speaking. Their eyes met once more
for a long moment, and she was conscious there was something in hers
that the darkness didn't quench, that he had never seen before and that
he was perhaps never to see again. He stayed long enough to take it--to
take it with a sombre stare that just showed the dawn of wonder; then he
followed Mrs. Brigstock out of the house.
XVI
He had uttered the hope that he should see her the next day, but Fleda
could easily reflect that he wouldn't see her if she were not there to
be seen. If there was a thing in the world she desired at that moment,
it was that the next day should have no point of resemblance with the
day that had just elapsed. She accordingly aspired to an absence: she
would go immediately down to Maggie. She ran out that evening and
telegraphed to her sister, and in the morning she quitted London by an
early train. She required for this step no reason but the sense of
necessity. It was a strong personal need; she wished to interpose
something, and there was nothing she could interpose but distance, but
time. If Mrs. Brigstock had to deal with Owen she would allow Mrs.
Brigstock the chance. To be there, to be in the midst of it, was the
reverse of what she craved: she had already been more in the midst of it
than had ever entered into her plan. At any rate she had renounced her
plan; she had no plan now but the plan of separation. This was to
abandon Owen, to give up the fine office of helping him back to his own;
but when she had undertaken that office she had not foreseen that Mrs.
Gereth would defeat it by a manoeuvre so simple. The scene at her
father's rooms had extinguished all offices, and the scene at her
father's rooms was of Mrs. Gereth's producing. Owen, at all events, must
now act for himself: he had obligations to meet, he had satisfactions to
give, and Fleda fairly ached with the wish that he might be equal to
them. She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she
became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be
superior, be perhaps even sublime. She obscurely made out that
superiority, that sublimity, mightn't after all be fatal. She closed her
eyes and lived for a day or two in the mere beauty of confidence. It was
with her on the short journey; it was with her at Maggie's; it glorified
the mean little house in the stupid little town. Owen had grown larger
to her: he would do, like a man, whatever he should have to do. He
wouldn't be weak--not as she was: she herself was weak exceedingly.
Arranging her few possessions in Maggie's fewer receptacles, she caught
a glimpse of the bright side of the fact that her old things were not
such a problem as Mrs. Gereth's. Picking her way with Maggie through the
local puddles, diving with her into smelly cottages and supporting her,
at smellier shops, in firmness over the weight of joints and the taste
of cheese, it was still her own secret that was universally inter-woven
In the puddles, the cottages, the shops she was comfortably alone with
it; that comfort prevailed even while, at the evening meal, her
brother-in-law invited her attention to a diagram, drawn with a fork on
too soiled a tablecloth, of the scandalous drains of the Convalescent
Home. To be alone with it she had come away from Ricks; and now she knew
that to be alone with it she had come away from London. This advantage
was of course menaced, but not immediately destroyed, by the arrival, on
the second day, of the note she had been sure she should receive from
Owen. He had gone to West Kensington and found her flown, but he had got
her address from the little maid and then hurried to a club and written
to her. "Why have you left me just when I want you most?" he demanded.
The next words, it was true, were more reassuring on the question of his
steadiness. "I don't know what your reason may be," they went on, "nor
why you've not left a line for me; but I don't think you can feel that I
did anything yesterday that it wasn't right for me to do. As regards
Mrs. Brigstock, certainly, I just felt what was right and I did it. She
had no business whatever to attack you that way, and I should have been
ashamed if I had left her there to worry you. I won't have you worried
by any one; no one shall be disagreeable to you but me. I didn't mean to
be so yesterday, and I don't to-day; but I'm perfectly free now to want
you, and I want you much more than you've allowed me to explain. You'll
see if I'm not all right, if you'll let me come to you. Don't be
afraid--I'll not hurt you nor trouble you. I give you my honor I'll not
hurt any one. Only I _must_ see you, on what I had to say to Mrs. B. She
was nastier than I thought she could be, but I'm behaving like an angel.
I assure you I'm all right--that's exactly what I want you to see. You
owe me something, you know, for what you said you would do and haven't
done; what your departure without a word gives me to understand--doesn't
it?--that you definitely can't do. Don't simply forsake me. See me, if
you only see me once. I shan't wait for any leave--I shall come down
to-morrow. I've been looking into trains and find there's something that
will bring me down just after lunch and something very good for getting
me back. I won't stop long. For God's sake, be there."
This communication arrived in the morning, but Fleda would still have
had time to wire a protest. She debated on that alternative; then she
read the note over and found in one phrase an exact statement of her
duty. Owen's simplicity had expressed it, and her subtlety had nothing
to answer. She owed him something for her obvious failure, and what she
owed him was to receive him. If indeed she had known he would make this
attempt she might have been held to have gained nothing by her flight.
Well, she had gained what she had gained--she had gained the interval.
She had no compunction for the greater trouble she should give the young
man; it was now doubtless right that he should have as much trouble as
possible. Maggie, who thought she was in her confidence, but was
immensely not, had reproached her for having left Mrs. Gereth, and
Maggie was just in this proportion gratified to hear of the visitor with
whom, early in the afternoon, she would have to ask to be left alone.
Maggie liked to see far, and now she could sit upstairs and rake the
whole future. She had known that, as she familiarly said, there was
something the matter with Fleda, and the value of that knowledge was
augmented by the fact that there was apparently also something the
matter with Mr. Gereth.
Fleda, downstairs, learned soon enough what this was. It was simply
that, as he announced the moment he stood before her, he was now all
right. When she asked him what he meant by that state he replied that he
meant he could practically regard himself henceforth as a free man: he
had had at West Kensington, as soon as they got into the street, such a
horrid scene with Mrs. Brigstock.
"I knew what she wanted to say to me: that's why I was determined to get
her off. I knew I shouldn't like it, but I was perfectly prepared," said
Owen. "She brought it out as soon as we got round the corner; she asked
me point-blank if I was in love with you."
"And what did you say to that?"
"That it was none of her business."
"Ah," said Fleda, "I'm not so sure!"
"Well, _I_ am, and I'm the person most concerned. Of course I didn't use
just those words: I was perfectly civil, quite as civil as she. But I
told her I didn't consider she had a right to put me any such question.
I said I wasn't sure that even Mona had, with the extraordinary line,
you know, that Mona has taken. At any rate the whole thing, the way _I_
put it, was between Mona and me; and between Mona and me, if she didn't
mind, it would just have to remain."
Fleda was silent a little. "All that didn't answer her question."
"Then you think I ought to have told her?"
Again our young lady reflected. "I think I'm rather glad you didn't."
"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had
the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations."
Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that
when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'"
"What then did she mean to do?"
"What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me."
"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?"
"For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully
designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you."
Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken
possession."
"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and
gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between
which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her
that we're singularly intimate."
"I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed.
Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to
know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs.
Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to
find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and
shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She
doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."
"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
say to her," Owen returned.
"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.
Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
straightest of women."
"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
you up to."
"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
mine, isn't innocent."
"What did she mean by that?"
"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
she meant that it's excessively unnatural."
Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.
"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
me off."
"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
arms a little and dropping them.
Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
a stone?"
She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
some little help for you."
Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as
beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He
remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself
up. "What I want you to say is that you like me--what I want you to say
is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to
say is that you'll _save_ me!"
Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just
now that you're a free man?"
He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that
I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry
me."
Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which
quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at
him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still
smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said.
"I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you
disposed of her question."
"I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free."
"What bearing have _her_ feelings, pray?" Fleda asked.
"Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me
up."
"Then why doesn't she do it?"
"She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her."
"Tells her what?" Fleda inquired.
"Why, that I'm in love with _you_!"
Fleda debated. "Are you so very sure she will?"
"Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will
finish her!" Owen declared.
This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in
her being 'finished'--a poor girl you've once loved?"
Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity
startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have
_really_ loved her, you know," he replied.
Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the
emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really'
love--anybody else?"
"Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen.
"I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't
give you up?" she added.
Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why,
that's just where you come in."
"To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His
blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic;
but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost
most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr.
Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"
Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you _will_ talk of
them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You
_will_ listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear--when, when?"
"Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a
sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her
pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from
him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round
her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might
have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself--she poured out her
tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed;
something deep and sweet surged up--something that came from far within
and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference
and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the
relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten
with his full divination. What she did, what she _had_ done, she
scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what
had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that,
with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a
bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a
secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the
great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest
thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.
"Ah, all the while you _cared_?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so
great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his
sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all
perhaps elsewhere.
"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were
confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must
never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't
speak of it, don't speak!"
It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words.
He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an
altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and
while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real
and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a
touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into
a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with
closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
"I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your
word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.
She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense
of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"
Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
why is it hideous for _me_?"
"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.
"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to
the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the
effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what
mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do;
and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I
said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said
she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to
trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so
tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she
trusts me, if possible, still less."
Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to
that, naturally, she has reason."
"Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away,
simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call
looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know
what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!"
"You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You
mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You
make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them."
But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the
world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?"
"I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you
ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem
to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't
break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so
that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me."
The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in
self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't
know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've
been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go.
Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said
entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever."
"Forever?" Owen gasped.
"I mean unless everything is different."
"Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!"
Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to
whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace.
"You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at
this point."
He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of
frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford
to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her
with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so
awfully happy!" he exclaimed.
She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have
to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked.
He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness,
he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just
because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend
to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!"
"So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the
most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she
lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for
not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his
hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He
wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage
he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for
beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other
things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear
out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner
come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution,
on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you
say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?"
Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town,
don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself
that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get
home."
"Where did you separate?" Fleda asked.
"At the West Kensington station--she was going to Victoria. I had walked
with her there, and our talk was all on the way."
Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have
heard from Waterbath by this time."
"I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning."
"She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on
the spot."
"Oh yes, she _will_ have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded.
Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having
got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest
to-day. You see she has had plenty of time."
Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady
showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your
extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."
"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
that one time," Fleda observed.
"By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you."
Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."
Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he
began. He began, but there he left it.
"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you."
"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
whispered, "that she loathes me."
Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted
stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't
she prove it in the only clear way?"
"She _has_ proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?"
"I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train."
Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he
sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the
banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must
marry a woman I hate?"
From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's
not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not
true--it's not true!"
He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and
repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a
woman?"
Fleda hesitated; he held her fast. "No. Anything is better than that."
"Then, in God's name, what must I do?"
"You must settle that with her. You mustn't break faith. Anything is
better than that. You must at any rate be utterly sure. She _must_ love
you--how can she help it? _I_ wouldn't give you up!" said Fleda. She
spoke in broken bits, panting out her words. "The great thing is to keep
faith. Where _is_ a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so cruel.
So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!" Fleda repeated. "I couldn't have a hand
in _that_, you know: that's my position--that's mine. You offered her
marriage: it's a tremendous thing for her." Then looking at him another
moment, "_I_ wouldn't give you up!" she said again. He still had hold of
her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she
reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a
force that doubled the force of her words. "Never, never, never!" she
cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and,
scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got
away from him at Ricks.
XVII
Ten days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs.
Gereth--a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date.
"Come up immediately and stay with me here"--it was characteristically
sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also
characteristically kind. "Here" was an hotel in London, and Maggie had
embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some
yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant,
and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda's
hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's
own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's summons she
shouldn't know what she should be "in for." Her friend's summons,
however, was but another name for her friend's appeal; and Mrs. Gereth's
bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance.
In the event--that is at the end of her hour--she testified to her
gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by leaving her
luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train,
however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her
mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat
in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered.
Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth; it had been so
exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's
prevision of Mrs. Brigstock's action upon her daughter, this action was
at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness, all
round, had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time
a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at
which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now;
she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from
Owen--poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious
letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that
this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared
herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of
all reasons--the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the
letter had not been written he would simply have had to introduce some
large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his
young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able,
on the contrary, to extend that picture; and his present submission was
all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had
prescribed.
It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large;
Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be
impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive
maiden at Waterbath _was_ successful from the moment she could entertain
her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her
to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight; there was something
positive and portentous in her quietude. "What game are they all
playing?" poor Fleda could only ask; for she had an intimate conviction
that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying
if he really hated Mona; and if he didn't really hate her what had
brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's? Fleda had no real light,
but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last
meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that
she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been
simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would
have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect
faith--faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a
reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he
was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing
Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were
nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the
impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She
wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and
reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of
Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As
The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more
confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely
to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform
against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs.
Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her
having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had
let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at
Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed,
but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda
felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her
to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at
Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy.
Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue
in her distinguished face--a sign, as she privately remarked, of the
strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been
having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that
this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect
proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence
had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had
been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her
mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't
simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very
brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda
felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly
quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted
seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of
weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar
nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had
happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that
seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption
that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The
absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her
companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it
and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.
Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first.
"What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to
ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain,
without making preparations."
"Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!" Mrs. Gereth was
most emphatic. "You're going abroad with me."
Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night--to-morrow?"
"In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now." Fleda's
heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference
in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion.
"I've made my plan," her friend continued: "I go for at least a year. We
shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't
look to you, however," she added, "to stay with me all that time. That
will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as
possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm
convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change;
it will put in a decent interval."
Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she
presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she
scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really
have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?"
If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her
smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son.
Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her
present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs.
Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more
than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded
Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had
met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of
Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she
wished. "Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!" she
said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at
arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her
shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. "You bad,
false thing, why didn't you tell me?" Her tone softened her harshness,
and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs.
Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it
was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could
only fumble in a penniless pocket. "You must perfectly have known at
Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and
false!" It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.
"I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking
about," Fleda said.
Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. "You've
done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of
you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you."
Fleda hesitated. "Has he informed _you_, dear Mrs. Gereth?"
Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. "How could he, when our situation is
such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so
tortuous you conceal everything?"
"Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in
town?" Fleda asked.
"He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you."
Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost
insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of
responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned
comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could
only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce,
after a moment, a question. "How then do you come to know that your son
has ever thought--"
"That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a
visit from Mrs. Brigstock."
Fleda opened her eyes. "She went down to Ricks?"
"The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything."
Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to
show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity
equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having
produced the hush of the last ten days. "There are things she doesn't
know!" she presently exclaimed.
"She knows he would do anything to marry you."
"He hasn't told her so," Fleda said.
"No, but he has told you. That's better still!" laughed Mrs. Gereth. "My
dear child," she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of
blind profanity, "don't try to make yourself out better than you are.
_I_ know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing.
You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have
thought me in my good time! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot.
You're pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I
wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes
in." Then with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda
strange, she added: "It's all right."
"I've seen him but twice," said Fleda.
"But twice?" Mrs. Gereth still smiled.
"On the occasion, at papa's, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one
day, since then, down at Maggie's."
"Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor
creatures at best." Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped
with light for an instant a real conviction. "I don't know what you've
got in your veins: you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough
is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together--!" She
checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she
should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she
slowly rubbed her hands.
The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her
companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet,
for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth's certitude: the visit of the lady of
Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. "Is it permitted to be
surprised," Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brigstock's thinking it
would help her to see you?"
"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools,"
said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of
happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me."
Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with _me_," she then
honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your
opposition so marked from the first?"
"She didn't know I want _you_, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my
violence--the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid
as an owl--she doesn't feel your charm."
Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell
her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?"
"For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey."
"So as not to aggravate Mona?" Fleda suggested.
"So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to
steer, but thank God we're at last in the open!"
"What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth?" Fleda demanded. Then as the
other faltered: "Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day?"
Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your
own affair. I can bear it if _you_ can."
"Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least
idea where he is."
"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mrs. Gereth broke out with a
change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she
had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the
next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more
patiently. "Don't you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly,
I've trusted you?" Her tone was indeed a supplication.
Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I
understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?"
"She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the
day before, by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted
down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on
leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had
suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your
two faces: she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen
was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was
with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do,
you know?'--that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother
do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to
break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from
the moment she opened on _you_, from the moment she denounced Owen's
falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it
was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her
child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was
studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I
didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage
hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I
showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared
his responsibility. It was she who had killed _him_--it was she who had
destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was
estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She
reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that
she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was
not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted
was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully
bedeviled--she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'--but it was
simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would
see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was
possible I could want him to marry you."
Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her
interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her
breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere
expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the
air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that
came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in
cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.
"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger--the danger of her going home
and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to
learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off
my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."
"Your issue?" Fleda murmured.
"I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen."
Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your
hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?"
"Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered
was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an
angel of delicacy--I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me
to have done all that and then figure to such a woman as having done the
opposite. Besides, it was none of her business."
"Is that what you said to her?" Fleda asked.
"I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the
nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no
relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for
months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt
to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton
what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I
was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you I would at
least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me."
"And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer?"
"She was visibly relieved."
"It was fortunate for you," said Fleda, "that she's apparently not aware
of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him
at Poynton."
Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity
remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to
invidious allusions to it. "How should she be aware of it?"
"She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona."
"Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from
Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you!" Mrs.
Gereth declared.
Fleda shook her head wearily. "No--I was only in love with him!"
Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled
her fire. "You dear old wretch!" she exclaimed; and she again, with
ferocity, embraced her young friend.
Fleda submitted like a sick animal: she would submit to everything now.
"Then what further passed?"
"Only that she left me thinking she had got something."
"And what had she got?"
"Nothing but her luncheon. But _I_ got everything!"
"Everything?" Fleda quavered.
Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her
from a tremendous height. "Don't fail me now!"
It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the
poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?"
Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. "I've
settled you." She filled the room, to Fleda's scared vision, with the
glare of her magnificence. "I've sent everything back."
"Everything?" Fleda gasped.
"To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same
people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty." Then as if, for a crowning
splendor, to check all deprecation, "They're yours, you goose!" Mrs.
Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white
hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes.
XVIII
She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she
felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness
was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she
become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend? The treachery
increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive magnificent as
a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her and
had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her
honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is
weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a
light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was
that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender
imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard
used by young men with whom she danced: the only word to fit Mrs.
Gereth's intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to "fetch" her. It
was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and
said simply: "That's what I do for you!" What Fleda was to do in return
required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had
done made her almost cry aloud with pain; but her first endeavor, in the
face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion.
How little she had done Mrs. Gereth didn't yet know, and possibly there
would be still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her
own side too Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted,
but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been
treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a
conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As
high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She
admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the
utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it
instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary: it transformed at
a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier
she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling
with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken.
She had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds
of Poynton; now however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void
that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from
the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea.
Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim; poor little Ricks had been
laid bare in a night. If Fleda's feeling about the old things had taken
precipitate form the form would have been a frantic command. It was
indeed for mere want of breath that she didn't shout: "Oh, stop
them--it's no use; bring them back--it's too late!" And what most kept
her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as
never before the purity of such a passion; it made Mrs. Gereth august
and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish--she cared nothing for
mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best
for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the
one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself,
and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that
could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed
that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was also that she measured as
if for the first time Mrs. Gereth's view of the natural influence of a
fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last
doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more
than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one
thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution
would be made; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble
trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she
should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old
corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs.
Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so
far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had
been made sure of!
She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her
exposure. "Why didn't you wait, dearest? Ah, why didn't you wait?"--if
that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before
it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude
helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as
too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands, she did
homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the
midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the
wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth's glimpse of this despair
suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the
false courage of endearments. "Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as
this that you've really lost him?"
The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had
nothing from this moment but terror. "I don't know, Mrs. Gereth; how can
I say?" she asked. "I've not seen him for so long; as I told you just
now, I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his," she
hurried on: "he would have been with me every day if I had consented.
But I made him understand, the last time, that I'll receive him again
only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and
definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see, and that's why he hasn't been
back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be
miserable. When he does come he'll be in a better position. He'll be
tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me
to feel that you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having
done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it,"
said Fleda, in desperate optimism, "when he hears of it--" There indeed,
regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless
to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don't know what he
won't make of you and how he won't hug you!" she had to content herself
with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa with a vague
instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time; but it was
a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient
again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a "hug." Fleda
found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying
to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made
simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an
immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in
dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her
companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and
then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in
happier days had been her "secret." "You mustn't think I don't adore him
when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I'd die for him--I
love him so that it's horrible. Don't look at me therefore as if I had
not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my
tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as
if you feel what I've been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss
the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride; I used to have, but
it's gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any
one who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me. It's
not so very fine, my secret, and the less one really says about it the
better; but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I
want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can
very well be. It serves me right," Fleda laughed, "if I was ever proud
and horrid to you! I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at
Ricks, to do, but I don't think you can have wanted much more than what
I've done. The other day at Maggie's I did things that made me,
afterwards, think of you! I don't know what girls may do; but if he
doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his--!" Fleda
sighed as if she couldn't express it; she piled it up, as she would have
said; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for
the effect of these words. "It's idiotic," she wearily smiled; "it's so
strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is
that it isn't even happiness. It's anguish--it was from the first; from
the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you
every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either: he's a dear,
I assure you he's a dear. I'd trust him to the last breath; I don't
think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a
show of; he's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that
you wanted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to
discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful
things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,"
said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a
quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even
perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out
"bad"--it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to
her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry
to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared,
"because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it
makes up for everything!"
This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute,
her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that
she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to
come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his
kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again
from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the
majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after
I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which
I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that
I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back--is it a
part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"
There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and
in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had
been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of
rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an
instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She
herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet
innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an
arm. "Don't blame him--don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for
me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made
him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to
say to him except on another footing."
Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing?
What other footing?"
"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and
white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up."
"Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his
liberty?"
Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard
pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!"
"For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his
reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put
an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your
systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my
dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen
offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such
extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her
resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face
and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to
her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse
of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth
went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I
can scarcely speak of him even to _you_. But indeed I'm so ashamed of
you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look."
She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement;
then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under
his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!"
Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while
her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?"
"That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a
grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. _I_ should have
found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to
be. _I_ should have got the business over first; the rest could come
when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a
woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in
touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally
unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked,
and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped
his fingers at your refinements."
This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake
of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to
go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion,
however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard
herself presently say: "I'll go to the Registrar now."
"Now?" Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this
monosyllable. "And pray who's to take you?" Fleda gave a colorless
smile, and her companion continued: "Do you literally mean that you
can't put your hand upon him?" Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate
her; she made a short, imperious gesture. "Find him for me, you
fool--_find_ him for me!"
"What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both
of us?"
"Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!"
Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. "Of course I cling to you, you
wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see
that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the
place." She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle
to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would
allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched
from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came
back. "Find him, find him," she repeated; "come straight out with me, to
try, at least, to get at him!"
"How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready," Fleda replied.
Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me
ruined without a reason or a reward?"
Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something
unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the
influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with
great gentleness: "Don't be harsh to me--I'm very unhappy." The words
produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted
and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long
caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the
avenue of Poynton--Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so
that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: "I
don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you
say, 'lost.'"
Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness
denoted some success in controlling herself. "If he's not lost, why are
you unhappy?"
"I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me."
"No, Fleda, I don't understand you," said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing
her again. "I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen
were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very
old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since
you take so much else _with_ me!" She spoke now with the drop of her
resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me
if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I
hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was
inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own
doing--you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up.
You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes,
you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to
recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever
sympathy that did it--your extraordinary feeling for those accursed
vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and
that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady
concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!"
"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda.
Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to
consider.
"To his club, do you mean?"
"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at
present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to
him."
"How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth
asked.
"Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled.
Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at
all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at
Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between
them?"
Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then
that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him
back to her."
"Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't
know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me."
Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic
arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her
companion had completely changed its ground.
She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of
her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the
reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.
"You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same
time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I
don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet
in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that
he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not
to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for
you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath."
"Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up,
however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth
could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not
to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You
simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of
life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be.
You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears,
you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath
he's there to wind everything up."
Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a
word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're
whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless,
if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that
bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and
monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your
perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued
with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of
her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out;
for Owen _is_ a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a
quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't
know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak."
Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look.
"Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me," she
added.
"That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed _me_. And I
didn't fail his father," said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to
appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: "Mona Brigstock isn't
weak; she's stronger than you!"
"I never thought she was weak," Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round
the room with a new purpose: she had lost sight of her umbrella.
"I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you
really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him--"
Fleda had accomplished her search; her interlocutress paused. "If Mona
has got him?" the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella.
"Well," said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, "it will be clear enough that Mona
_has_."
"Has let herself go?"
"Has let herself go." Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every
detail.
Fleda felt the tone and finished her preparation; then she went and
opened the door. "We'll look for him together," she said to her friend,
who stood a moment taking in her face. "They may know something about
him at the Colonel's."
"We'll go there." Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse.
"But the first thing," she went on, "will be to wire to Poynton."
"Why not to Waterbath at once?" Fleda asked.
Her companion hesitated. "In _your_ name?"
"In my name. I noticed a place at the corner."
While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. "Forgive
me," she presently said. "Kiss me," she added.
Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out.
XIX
In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda
wrote her telegram--wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth's eye and then
in silence handed it to her. "I send this to Waterbath, on the
possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me." Mrs. Gereth
held it a moment, read it more than once; then keeping it, and with her
eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a
kindness in her look; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of
complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor.
"Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing
this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?"
"Why so? It will be always so much done," said Fleda. "Though I'm poor,"
she added with a smile, "I don't mind the shilling."
"The shilling's _my_ shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.
Fleda stayed her hand. "No, no--I'm superstitious."
"Superstitious?"
"To succeed, it must be all me!"
"Well, if that will make it succeed!" Mrs. Gereth took back her
shilling, but she still kept the telegram. "As he's most probably not
there--"
"If he shouldn't be there," Fleda interrupted, "there will be no harm
done."
"If he 'shouldn't be' there!" Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. "Heaven help us,
how you assume it!"
"I'm only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any
telegram on."
"Where will they send it?"
"Presumably to Poynton."
"They'll read it first," said Mrs. Gereth.
"Read it?"
"Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated;
and then she'll probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your
immodesty."
"What of that?" asked Fleda.
"You don't mind her seeing it?"
Rather musingly and absently Fleda shook her head. "I don't mind
anything."
"Well, then, that's all right," said Mrs. Gereth as if she had only
wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this
she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. "Why have
you given, for a reply, your sister's address?"
"Because if he _does_ come to me he must come to me there. If that
telegram goes," said Fleda, "I return to Maggie's to-night."
Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. "You won't receive him here with
me?"
"No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him
last--only there again." She showed her companion that as to that she
was firm.
But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer
movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she
fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate; then she
brought out: "You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a
little stronger?"
Fleda gave her a faint smile. "He'll come if he can."
Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed; with decision she pushed in
the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form and with
still greater decision wrote another message. "From _me_, this," she
said to Fleda when she had finished: "to catch him possibly at Poynton.
Will you read it?"
Fleda turned away. "Thank you."
"It's stronger than yours."
"I don't care," said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid
for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's
club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom,
watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the
hall-porter and then met in silence her return with the news that he had
not seen Owen for a fortnight and was keeping his letters till called
for. These had been the last orders; there were a dozen letters lying
there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they
could find at Colonel Gereth's. To any connection with this inquiry,
however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed
to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste
of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that
they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters
lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this
was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern
them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to
arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of
the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes
rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as
puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them
through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?"
Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please."
"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.
"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
needn't drag _you_ to the station."
Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.
In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know
indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with
the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
woman was great.
"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
last little screen?"
"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"
Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"
"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
else?--especially as I remembered how you like it."
Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
must be ready to drop."
"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
couldn't do it again."
"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"
"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very
nearly don't care."
"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
bench."
"No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will
have mattered if _she's_ not there."
There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?"
Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes
as well as from lips barely moved--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
_have_ lost--"
"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.
"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"
"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
whatever you need, that I will always do."
"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a
surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."
"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
gone.
XX
There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The
detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon
big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.
It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to
see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might
tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending
for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her
husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited
alone the subject of so many manoeuvres--a period that was slightly
prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open.
Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell
from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had
immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and
who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant
silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a
sudden stare.
"He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not
unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion
upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence,
observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions
before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had
nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with
hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be
nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what
the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met
Fleda's. "It's the end."
"They're married?"
"They're married."
Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her;
then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A
tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard
nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came."
"That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw;
for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He
wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and
kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are
here--what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of
voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her
hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited;
they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs.
Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went."
All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim--that of
taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having
happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself.
Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said:
"Yesterday morning?"
"Yesterday morning. I saw him."
Fleda hesitated. "Did you see _her_?"
"Thank God, no!"
Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took
no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched
journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?"
"We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless
as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock,
old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked
out the bareness of the room.
To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly
what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their
past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there
was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth
couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small
differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's
a rare greatness in your generosity."
"We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated.
"That's all we _are_ now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda
a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might
also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch
clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness:
she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours
in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only
added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of
everything.
Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed
of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the
same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he
couldn't _not_ do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her
attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she
added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he
was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."
Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an
obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour
between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."
"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.
"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.
"I'm trying not to think of myself."
"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?"
Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she
broke out.
"_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her
as he did, back to her."
"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
recognized one?"
"He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had
no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her
sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was
too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it
was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
other day, the situation changed."
Fleda wondered. "The other day?"
"It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that
the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."
"Determined her to what?"
"To act, to take means."
"To take means?" Fleda repeated.
"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
said Mrs. Gereth.
Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
simple interrogation: "Mona?"
"Why not? She's a brute."
"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"
"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't
make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she
succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool
than he. And what _else_ had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged
her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark
with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the
pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the
misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he
was married."
Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a
listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"
"At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists."
The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.'"
"Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at
Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little
prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the
game, some outwitting of _me_. It's known there has been a row with me."
Fleda was mystified. "People surely knew at Poynton," she objected, "if,
as you say, she's there."
"She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him
in London and went down to see the things."
Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. "Did _you_ see them?"
she then ventured to ask.
"Everything."
"Are they right?"
"Quite right. There's nothing like them," said Mrs. Gereth. At this her
companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done
in London. "Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen
stayed on," she added.
Fleda stared. "Then she's not to live there?"
"Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to
muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone."
"Alone?"
"She'll have it to herself."
"He won't live with her?"
"Never! But she's none the less his wife, and you're not," said Mrs.
Gereth, getting up. "Our only chance is the chance she may die."
Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor's magnanimous
use of the plural. "Mona won't die," she replied.
"Well, _I_ shall, thank God! Till then"--and with this, for the first
time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand--"don't desert me."
Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise
already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as
responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to
her. "I mustn't put myself in your son's way."
Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall
you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I--" She didn't finish her
sentence.
"That's your great feeling about _him_," Fleda said; "but how, after
what has happened, can it be his about you?"
Mrs. Gereth hesitated. "How do you know what has happened? You don't
know what I said to him."
"Yesterday?"
"Yesterday."
They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth
seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture
of strong prohibition. "Don't tell me!"
"Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned.
It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a
pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an
accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into
tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a
moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing
and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth
soundlessly, wearily wept.
XXI
"It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore _that_ together:"
these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs.
Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which
she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for
a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one
who may _like_ it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but
there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for
you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand
quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least
stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me,
forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally
silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for
your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts.
Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a
bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken
you--quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th."
The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could
conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place
in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its
acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time.
That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.
Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that
of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the
other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and
delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented
the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room
to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out
of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it
wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly
bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the
few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and
then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke
sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the
sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the
least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly
became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a
magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what
contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on
earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?"
"Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn,
bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things
that were here--that stupid, starved old woman's."
"The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I
thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt."
"She was stored in an empty barn--stuck away for a sale; a matter that,
fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've
simply, in my extremity, fished her out again."
"You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took
the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her
cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the
place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was
conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had
done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of
recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly
jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little
melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they _not_ speak to you
and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but
you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by
nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a
faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"
"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
Gereth.
"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something
dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and
triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
be in the inventory!"
"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
the feet of her pupil.
"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"
"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"
"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for
what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."
Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."
"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.
"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.
"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."
Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
_she_ won't see them."
"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very
taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--"
She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
had?"
Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours."
Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The
question is if it was worse than yours."
"Mine?" Fleda looked vague.
"Precisely. Yours."
At this our young lady smiled. "Yes, because it was a disappointment.
She had been so sure."
"I see. And you were never sure."
"Never. Besides, I'm happy," said Fleda.
Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. "Goose!" she quietly remarked as she
turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a
considerable part of the basis of their new life.
On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief
account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride's mother, of
Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath.
There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth
subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from
town: the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations
had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having
taken their departure for Mr. Gereth's own seat, famous for its unique
collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the
fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of
Ricks in the garden; and she lingered there alone a long time after
receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have
happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her
eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters
untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and
the rest of that day she remained in her room: it recalled to Fleda, who
had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had
come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house
was at least the same, and the girl's own waiting, her soft wandering,
through the hours: there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of
which her companion's absence might in some degree have represented a
considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda,
devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth's
sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has
already been mentioned: it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona's
quiet pace had really never slackened.
Fleda fully assented. "I said of our disembodied friend here that she
had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that's not always a
source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure!"
"She was sure of _you_!" Mrs. Gereth returned. But this didn't diminish
the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she
could talk.
XXII
Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new
one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions.
Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them,
which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers
or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in
a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how
Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her: there were hours when it seemed that
such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents.
The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in
her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for
the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no
connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet
emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend's visit to her
at her sister's, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should
suddenly meet them in straggling procession on the road it would be time
enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes
with dislikes and memories with fears; and she had for not thinking of
them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The
actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had
pointed it out; it was that his mother's bare spaces demanded all the
tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were
moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as
still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused.
At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news:
"Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this
morning to Paris." They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and
none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth
irrelevantly broken out: "I dare say you wonder why I declared the other
day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently
_is_ living with her."
"Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do."
"They're beyond me--I give it up," said Mrs. Gereth.
"I don't give it up--I never did," Fleda returned.
"Then what do you make of his aversion to her?"
"Oh, she has dispelled it."
Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice
of terms!" she then simply ejaculated.
But Fleda went luminously on; she once more enjoyed her great command of
her subject: "I think that when you came to see me at Maggie's you saw
too many things, you had too many ideas."
"You had none," said Mrs. Gereth: "you were completely bewildered."
"Yes, I didn't quite understand--but I think I understand now. The case
is simple and logical enough. She's a person who's upset by failure and
who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her
heart upon, set her teeth about--the house exactly as she had seen it."
"She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth.
"She doesn't look with her eyes; she looks with her ears. In her own way
she had taken it in; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That
probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But
the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted."
"Go on--I can bear it now," said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just
perceptibly paused.
"I know you can, or I shouldn't dream of speaking. When the pressure was
removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what
it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself."
"Her natural charm!" Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate.
"It's very great; everybody thinks so; there must be something in it. It
operated as it had operated before. There's no need of imagining
anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty,
and Mr. Owen's impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the
ground. His great bright sun came out!"
"And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your
explanation would doubtless be perfection if he didn't love you."
Fleda was silent a little. "What do you know about his 'loving' me?"
"I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me."
"You never in your life took her word for any other matter."
"Then won't yours do?" Mrs. Gereth demanded. "Haven't I had it from your
own mouth that he cares for you?"
Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. "You
confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own
mouth that I care for _him_!"
It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time
had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that
Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda: "Don't think I shall be
a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to
you."
"He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if
he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to
be disgusted."
"I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs.
Gereth.
"Of its opposite?"
"Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an
exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you
like; but what conceivable good will it do?"
Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?"
"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
about."
"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.
Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.
"It certainly isn't worth it!"
Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything
painful."
"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"
"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.
"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."
"You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.
Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"
The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."
That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown
submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her
daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of
calculated insolence--a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it
might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly
indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been
a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth
proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was
clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light
in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own
room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.
"I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of
mine--something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and
what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I
what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't
some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and
for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose
for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and
precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it
happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of
it--carry it right away with you--so much the better. You're to have it
on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and
see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every
possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing
mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say
is very wonderful. Is _that_ the gem of the collection? Perhaps you
would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you
awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can
trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it
must be that makes me ask."
Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she
was baffled--she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was
indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the
present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself
the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form
that was possible--the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She
would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to
this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before
any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for
her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to
what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind
it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She
said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to
deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes,
would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so
much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to
take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude
for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she
could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what
determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The
passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion
that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an
issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief
to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his
offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something
splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed
desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be
left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had
even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was
an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the
sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the
triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head.
She moved there in thought--in the great rooms she knew; she should be
able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as
complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with
bitterness. And a thousand times yes--her choice should know no scruple:
the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her
privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her
private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of
the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to
her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he
saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she
was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason
that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
of a mistake.
Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.
Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the
sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station
before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.
But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while
he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that
something was "a good bit off--a mile from the town." That was just what
Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the
station-master's face.
"You've come down to it, miss, already?"
At this she knew. "Poynton's on fire?"
"Gone, miss--with this awful gale. You weren't wired? Look out!" he
cried in the next breath, seizing her; the train was going on, and she
had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it
had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which
the wind seemed to hurl in her face.
"_Gone?_" She was in the man's hands; she clung to him.
"Burning still, miss. Ain't it quite too dreadful? Took early this
morning--the whole place is up there."
In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?"
"Back? They'll be there all day!"
"Not Mr. Gereth, I mean--nor his wife?"
"Nor his mother, miss--not a soul of _them_ back. A pack o' servants in
charge--not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some
rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong
place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great
wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little
waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss--I see!"
She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean
that great house is _lost_?"
"It was near it, I was told, an hour ago--the fury of the flames had got
such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it.
They were fighting it then, but you couldn't quite say they had got it
down."
Fleda jerked herself up. "Were they saving the things?"
"That's just where it was, miss--to get _at_ the blessed things. And the
want of right help--it maddened me to stand and see 'em muff it. This
ain't a place, like, for anything organized. They don't come up to a
_reel_ emergency."
She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a
great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay,
she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant,
acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had
scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling
check.
Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her; he clearly suffered from
the nature of the control he had to exercise. "Don't do that, miss--you
won't care for it at all." Then as she waveringly stood her ground,
"It's not a place for a young lady, nor, if you'll believe me, a sight
for them as are in any way affected."
Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp
and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the
horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of
cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she
might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice.
She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first
time: "Poynton's _gone_?"
The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really
saved?"
A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in
the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock.
"Is there an up-train?" she asked.
"In seven minutes."
She came out on the platform: everywhere she met the smoke. She covered
her face with her hands. "I'll go back."
Henry James's Books.
A PASSIONATE PILGRIM, AND OTHER TALES.
TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES.
RODERICK HUDSON. A Novel.
THE AMERICAN. A Novel.
THE EUROPEANS. A Novel.
CONFIDENCE. A Novel.
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.
THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO. Including also Pandora; Georgina's Reasons;
The Path of Duty; Four Meetings.
THE SIEGE OF LONDON. Including also The Pension Beaurepas; The Point of
View.
TALES OF THREE CITIES. Including The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady
Barberina; A New England Winter.
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE.
PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
DAISY MILLER. A Comedy.
THE TRAGIC MUSE. 2 vols.
WATCH AND WARD. A Novel.
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A Novel.
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