She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her
present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten
me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably
panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in
the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest,
saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made
me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she
had struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her
folly it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don’t know how much she
meant to tell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaborate
misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes
the simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When
she had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet:
the relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word
her long secret; she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess,
tears to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless
poverty. Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in
some of its consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went
that afternoon to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms
in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to
warrant the supposition that he might have come in. He had not come
in, but he was expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him:
a lady, I was informed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a
little at a loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the
lady was perhaps Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and
remarkably pretty I received so significant a “No, sir!” that I risked
an advance and after a minute in this manner found myself, to my
astonishment, face to face with Mrs. Meldrum. “Oh, you dear thing,” she
exclaimed, “I’m delighted to see you: you spare me another compromising
_démarche!_ But for this I should have called on you also. Know the
worst at once: if you see me here it’s at least deliberate--it’s
planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to see him; upon my
word, I’m in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace of mind, did
you let him, the other day at Folkestone, dawn upon my delighted eyes?
I took there in half an hour the most extraordinary fancy to him. With
a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him, I find
him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven’t come up to
declare my passion--I’ve come to bring him news that will interest him
much more. Above all I’ve come to urge upon him to be careful.”
“About Flora Saunt?”
“About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse! She’s at
last really engaged.”
“But it’s a tremendous secret?” I was moved to merriment.
“Precisely: she telegraphed me this noon, and spent another shilling to
tell me that not a creature in the world is yet to know it.”
“She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an
hour with the creature you see before you.”
“She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!” Mrs. Meldrum
cried. “They’ve vital reasons, she wired, for it’s not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her happiness
is delirious. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows, and he may, as it’s
nearly seven o’clock, have jumped off London Bridge; but an effect of
the talk I had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my
telegram, feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking
action, as it were, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried
away with him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what
you had told him you had seen in your shop.”
Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand
identical with my own--a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity,
inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing
from what Flora’s wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her
that what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that
I had seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. “In short,” I
said, “I’ve seen everything.”
She was mystified. “Everything?”
“The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh, she came to
triumph, but she remained to talk something approaching to sense! She
put herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to intimate
that of all her friends I’m the most disinterested. After she had
announced to me that Lord Iffield was bound hands and feet and that for
the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she arrived
at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since the day,
at Folkestone, I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is
what you and I both guessed. She has no end of a danger hanging over
her.”
“But from what cause? I, who by God’s mercy have kept mine, know
everything that can be known about eyes,” said Mrs. Meldrum.
“She might have kept hers if she had profited by God’s mercy, if she had
done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if
she hadn’t in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make
her behaviour a thing of fable. She may keep them still if she’ll
sacrifice--and after all so little--that purely superficial charm. She
must do as you’ve done; she must wear, dear lady, what you wear!”
What my companion wore glittered for the moment like a melon-frame in
August. “Heaven forgive her--now I understand!” She turned pale.
But I wasn’t afraid of the effect on her good nature of her thus seeing,
through her great goggles, why it had always been that Flora held her
at such a distance. “I can’t tell you,” I said, “from what special
affection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: that’s the
one thing she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows it
herself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. ‘It’s a thing
that’s awful, simply awful’--that was the only account she would give
me. Year before last, while she was at Boulogne, she went for three days
with Mrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted
the greatest man--even Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesn’t know. Last autumn, in
Germany, she did the same. ‘First put on certain special spectacles
with a straight bar in the middle: then we’ll talk’--that’s practically
what they say. What _she_ says is that she’ll put on anything in nature
when she’s married, but that she must get married first. She has always
meant to do everything as soon as she’s married. Then and then only
she’ll be safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself
a fright? How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself
a fright from the first? It’s no use to insist that with her beauty she
can never _be_ a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the
most characteristic, the most harrowing things. ‘My face is all I
have--and _such_ a face! I knew from the first I could do anything with
it. But I needed it all--I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It
isn’t as if I had a figure or anything else. Oh, if God had only given
me a figure too, I don’t say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one,
like Fanny Floyd-Taylor’s, who’s hideous, I’d have risked plain glasses.
_Que voulez-vous?_ No one is perfect.’ She says she still has money
left, but I don’t believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her
impunity, on the idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally
been running a race with it. Her theory has been, as you from the first
so clearly saw, that she’d get in ahead. She swears to me that though
the ‘bar’ is too cruel she wears when she’s alone what she has been
ordered to wear. But when the deuce is she alone? It’s herself of course
that she has swindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely
that even her vanity but half accounts for it, with little inadequate
concessions, little false measures and preposterous evasions and
childish hopes. Her great terror is now that Iffield, who already has
suspicions, who has found out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled
with some unblushing hocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and
the essence of what she wanted this morning was in that interest to
square me, to get me to deny indignantly and authoritatively (for isn’t
she my ‘favourite sitter’?) that she has anything whatever the matter
with any part of her. She sobbed, she ‘went on,’ she entreated; after we
got talking her extraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she
has been through--showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do
her. ‘Wait till I’m married! wait till I’m married!’ She took hold of
me, she almost sank on her knees. It seems to me highly immoral, one’s
participation in her fraud; but there’s no doubt that she _must_ be
married: I don’t know what I don’t see behind it! Therefore,” I wound
up, “Dawling must keep his hands off.”
Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she exhaled a long moan. “Well, that’s
exactly what I came here to tell him.”
“Then here he is.” Our unconscious host had just opened the door.
Immensely startled at finding us he turned a frightened look from one
to the other, as if to guess what disaster we were there to announce or
avert.
Mrs. Meldrum, on the spot, was all gaiety. “I’ve come to return your
sweet visit. Ah,” she laughed, “I mean to keep up the acquaintance!”
“Do--do,” he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look at
us. Then abruptly he broke out: “He’s going to marry her.”