“They’re so awfully ugly and they increase so the dear woman’s
ugliness.” This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added
“She sees herself, she sees her own fate!” my response was so immediate
that I had almost taken the words out of his mouth. While I tried to
fix this sudden image of Flora’s face glazed in and cross-barred even as
Mrs. Meldrum’s was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only the
horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her
avoiding such a monitress. The fact he had encountered made everything
hideously vivid and more vivid than anything else that just such another
pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to Flora.
“I see--I see,” I presently rejoined. “What would become of Lord Iffield
if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become of
every one, what would become of _everything?_” This was an inquiry that
Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying
at last: “My dear fellow, for that matter, what would become of _you?_”
Once more he turned on me his good green eyes. “Oh, I shouldn’t mind!”
The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I felt
that there dated from this moment in my heart a confirmed affection for
him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I became
aware of a certain drollery in our discussion of such alternatives. It
made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed: “You’d take her even
with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s?”
He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my
rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and
conscientiously replied: “Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s.”
I begged him not to think my laughter in bad taste: it was only a
practical recognition of the fact that we had built a monstrous castle
in the air. Didn’t he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested?
The evidence was preposterously small. He believed the worst, but we
were utterly ignorant.
“I shall find out the truth,” he promptly replied.
“How can you? If you question her you’ll simply drive her to perjure
herself. Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth? It’s
the girl’s own affair.”
“Then why did you tell me your story?”
I was a trifle embarrassed. “To warn you off,” I returned smiling. He
took no more notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord
Iffield had no serious intentions. “Very possibly,” I said. “But you
mustn’t speak as if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives.”
Dawling thought a moment. “Wouldn’t the people she has consulted give
some information? She must have been to people. How else can she have
been condemned?”
“Condemned to what? Condemned to perpetual nippers? Of course she has
consulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may be
sure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable
that they would tell you anything--which I altogether doubt--you would
have great difficulty in finding out which men they are. Therefore leave
it alone; never show her what you suspect.”
I even, before he quitted me, asked him to promise me this. “All right,
I promise,” he said gloomily enough. He was a lover who could tacitly
grant the proposition that there was no limit to the deceit his loved
one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I
could see that from this moment he would be filled with a passionate
pity ever so little qualified by a sense of the girl’s fatuity and
folly. She was always accessible to him--that I knew; for if she had
told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have
resented the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she
would always be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her
friends--what were all of them--but repudiated idiots? I was perfectly
aware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance
had a niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often he
still called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the
wing of the Floyd-Taylors that her intimacy with Lord Iffield most
flourished. At all events when a week after the visit I have just
summarised Flora’s name was one morning brought up to me I jumped at
the conclusion that Dawling had been with her and even I fear briefly
entertained the thought that he had broken his word.