There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The
detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon
big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.
It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to
see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might
tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending
for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her
husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited
alone the subject of so many manoeuvres--a period that was slightly
prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open.
Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell
from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had
immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and
who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant
silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a
sudden stare.
"He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not
unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion
upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence,
observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions
before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had
nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with
hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be
nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what
the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met
Fleda's. "It's the end."
"They're married?"
"They're married."
Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her;
then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A
tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard
nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came."
"That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw;
for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He
wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and
kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are
here--what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of
voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her
hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited;
they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs.
Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went."
All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim--that of
taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having
happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself.
Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said:
"Yesterday morning?"
"Yesterday morning. I saw him."