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.