"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
about."
"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.
Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.
"It certainly isn't worth it!"
Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything
painful."
"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"
"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.
"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."
"You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.
Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"
The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."
That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown
submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her
daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of
calculated insolence--a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it
might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly
indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been
a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth
proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was
clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light
in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own
room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.
"I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of
mine--something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and
what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I
what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't
some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and
for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose
for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and
precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it
happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of
it--carry it right away with you--so much the better. You're to have it
on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and
see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every
possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing
mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say
is very wonderful. Is _that_ the gem of the collection? Perhaps you
would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you
awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can
trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it
must be that makes me ask."
Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she
was baffled--she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was
indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the
present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself
the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form
that was possible--the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She
would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to
this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before
any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for
her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to
what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind
it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She
said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to
deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes,
would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so
much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to
take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude
for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she
could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what
determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The
passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion
that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an
issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief
to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his
offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something
splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed
desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be
left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had
even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was
an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the
sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the
triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head.
She moved there in thought--in the great rooms she knew; she should be
able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as
complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with
bitterness. And a thousand times yes--her choice should know no scruple:
the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her
privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her
private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of
the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to
her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he
saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she
was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason
that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
of a mistake.
Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.
Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the
sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station
before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.
But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while
he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that
something was "a good bit off--a mile from the town." That was just what
Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the
station-master's face.
"You've come down to it, miss, already?"