"Thank God, no!"
Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took
no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched
journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?"
"We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless
as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock,
old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked
out the bareness of the room.
To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly
what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their
past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there
was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth
couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small
differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's
a rare greatness in your generosity."
"We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated.
"That's all we _are_ now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda
a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might
also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch
clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness:
she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours
in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only
added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of
everything.
Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed
of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the
same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he
couldn't _not_ do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her
attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she
added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he
was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."
Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an
obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour
between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."
"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.
"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.
"I'm trying not to think of myself."
"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?"
Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she
broke out.
"_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her
as he did, back to her."
"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
recognized one?"
"He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had
no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her
sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was
too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it
was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
other day, the situation changed."