"Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will
finish her!" Owen declared.
This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in
her being 'finished'--a poor girl you've once loved?"
Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity
startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have
_really_ loved her, you know," he replied.
Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the
emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really'
love--anybody else?"
"Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen.
"I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't
give you up?" she added.
Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why,
that's just where you come in."
"To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His
blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic;
but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost
most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr.
Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"
Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you _will_ talk of
them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You
_will_ listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear--when, when?"
"Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a
sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her
pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from
him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round
her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might
have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself--she poured out her
tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed;
something deep and sweet surged up--something that came from far within
and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference
and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the
relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten
with his full divination. What she did, what she _had_ done, she
scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what
had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that,
with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a
bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a
secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the
great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest
thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.
"Ah, all the while you _cared_?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so
great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his
sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all
perhaps elsewhere.
"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were
confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must
never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't
speak of it, don't speak!"
It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words.
He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an
altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and
while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real
and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a
touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into
a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with
closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
"I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your
word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.
She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense
of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"
Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
why is it hideous for _me_?"
"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.
"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to
the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the
effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what
mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do;
and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I
said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said
she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to
trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so
tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she
trusts me, if possible, still less."
Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to
that, naturally, she has reason."
"Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away,
simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call
looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know
what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!"
"You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You
mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You
make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them."
But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the
world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?"
"I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you
ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem
to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't
break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so
that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me."
The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in
self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't
know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've
been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go.
Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said
entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever."
"Forever?" Owen gasped.
"I mean unless everything is different."
"Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!"
Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to
whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace.
"You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at
this point."
He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of
frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford
to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her
with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so
awfully happy!" he exclaimed.
She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have
to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked.
He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness,
he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just
because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend
to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!"
"So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the
most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she
lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for
not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his
hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He
wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage
he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for
beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other
things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear
out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner
come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution,
on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you
say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?"
Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town,
don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself
that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get
home."
"Where did you separate?" Fleda asked.
"At the West Kensington station--she was going to Victoria. I had walked
with her there, and our talk was all on the way."
Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have
heard from Waterbath by this time."
"I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning."
"She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on
the spot."
"Oh yes, she _will_ have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded.
Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having
got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest
to-day. You see she has had plenty of time."
Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady
showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your
extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."
"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
that one time," Fleda observed.
"By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you."
Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."
Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he
began. He began, but there he left it.
"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you."
"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
whispered, "that she loathes me."
Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted
stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't
she prove it in the only clear way?"
"She _has_ proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?"
"I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train."
Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he
sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the
banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must
marry a woman I hate?"
From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's
not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not
true--it's not true!"
He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and
repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a
woman?"