"It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore _that_ together:"
these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs.
Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which
she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for
a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one
who may _like_ it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but
there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for
you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand
quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least
stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me,
forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally
silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for
your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts.
Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a
bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken
you--quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th."
The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could
conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place
in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its
acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time.
That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.
Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that
of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the
other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and
delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented
the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room
to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out
of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it
wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly
bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the
few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and
then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke
sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the
sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the
least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly
became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a
magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what
contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on
earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?"
"Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn,
bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things
that were here--that stupid, starved old woman's."
"The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I
thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt."
"She was stored in an empty barn--stuck away for a sale; a matter that,
fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've
simply, in my extremity, fished her out again."
"You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took
the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her
cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the
place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was
conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had
done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of
recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly
jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little
melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they _not_ speak to you
and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but
you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by
nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a
faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"
"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
Gereth.
"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something
dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and
triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
be in the inventory!"
"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
the feet of her pupil.
"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"
"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"
"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for
what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."
Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."
"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.
"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.
"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."
Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
_she_ won't see them."
"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very
taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--"
She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
had?"