"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.
"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
needn't drag _you_ to the station."
Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.
In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know
indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with
the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
woman was great.
"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
last little screen?"
"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"
Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"
"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
else?--especially as I remembered how you like it."
Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
must be ready to drop."
"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
couldn't do it again."
"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"
"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very
nearly don't care."
"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
bench."
"No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will
have mattered if _she's_ not there."
There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?"
Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes
as well as from lips barely moved--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
_have_ lost--"
"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.
"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"
"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
whatever you need, that I will always do."
"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a
surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."
"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
gone.