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.