"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!"