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.