"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!"