He had had in his hand an evening newspaper; he tossed it down on the
table. “It’s in that.”
“Published--already?” I was still more surprised.
“Oh, Flora can’t keep a secret!” Mrs. Meldrum humorously declared. She
went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him. “It’s all
right--it’s just as it ought to be: don’t think about her ever any
more.” Then as he met this adjuration with a dismal stare in which the
thought of her was as abnormally vivid as the colour of the pupil, the
excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the
cheek.
X
I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads, and
I confess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am rather
proud of the comparison. The beads are all there, as I said--they slip
along the string in their small, smooth roundness. Geoffrey Daw-ling
accepted like a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed;
in view of which I snatched a moment to murmur him a hint to offer Mrs.
Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that
marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the
street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital.
Circumstances arising at this time promptly led to my making an absence
from England, and circumstances already existing offered him a solid
basis for similar action. He had after all the usual resource of a
Briton--he could take to his boats.
He started on a journey round the globe, and I was left with nothing but
my inference as to what might have happened. Later observation however
only confirmed my belief that if at any time during the couple of months
that followed Flora Saunt’s brilliant engagement he had made up, as
they say, to the good lady of Folkestone, that good lady would not have
pushed him over the cliff. Strange as she was to behold I knew of cases
in which she had been obliged to administer that shove. I went to New
York to paint a couple of portraits; but I found, once on the spot,
that I had counted without Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this
harsh discrimination by the production of no less than ten. I spent a
year in America and should probably have spent a second had I not been
summoned back to England by alarming news from my mother. Her
strength had failed, and as soon as I reached London I hurried down
to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer a welcome to some
slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse, but she was now a
little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in having
come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, where arrears
of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatever might
next occur. Before returning to town however I had every reason to sally
forth in search of Mrs. Meldrum, from whom, in so many months, I had
not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had
left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.
Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me
across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her
great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade
was a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper
on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for it had
taken me but a few seconds to perceive that the person thus assaulted
had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much
greater than any I should have thought possible as on this person’s
drawing near I identified her as poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment
Flora had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it
quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: I could intensely
reflect that once we were face to face it chiefly mattered that I should
succeed in looking still more intensely unastonished. All I saw at first
was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which something
convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that
now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice
of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it
looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so
far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to
this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she made no
motion to take my offered hand.
“I had no idea you were down here!” I exclaimed; and I wondered whether
she didn’t know me at all or knew me only by my voice.
“You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum,” she very quietly remarked.
It was the quietness itself that made me feel the necessity of an answer
almost violently gay. “Oh yes,” I laughed, “you have a tremendous deal
in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I’ve just returned to England after a long
absence and I’m on my way to see her. Won’t you come with me?” It struck
me that her old reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed
of now.
“I’ve just left her; I’m staying with her.” She stood solemnly fixing
me with her goggles. “Would you like to paint me _now?_” she asked. She
seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.
There was nothing to do but to treat the question with the same
exuberance. “It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!” That
something was wrong it was not difficult to perceive; but a good deal
more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under
Mrs. Meldrum’s roof. I had not for a year had much time to think of her,
but my imagination had had sufficient warrant for lodging her in more
gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before leaving England
was that in commemoration of the new relationship she had gone to stay
with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for
granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my ears to possible
contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction;
they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old
one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked
beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn’t as
yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off
this danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without
waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own doings. My
companion was completely silent, and I felt both as if she were watching
my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony and as if I were talking
to some different, strange person. Flora plain and obscure and soundless
was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum’s door she turned off with the
observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to
say to our friend she had better not go in with me. I looked at her
again--I had been keeping my eyes away from her--but only to meet her
magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone,
but there was something so pitiful in the girl’s predicament that I
hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn’t
express a compassion without seeming to take too much wretchedness for
granted. I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which
was an entertainment I had never expected to give her. It rolled over me
there for the first time--it has come back to me since--that there is,
strangely, in very deep misfortune a dignity finer even than in the most
inveterate habit of being all right. I couldn’t have to her the manner
of treating it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of
what, at our last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I
was trying to think of some manner that I _could_ have she said quite
colourlessly, yet somehow as if she might never see me again: “Goodbye.
I’m going to take my walk.”
“All alone?”
She looked round the great bleak cliff-top. “With whom should I go?
Besides, I like to be alone--for the present.”
This gave me the glimmer of a vision that she regarded her disfigurement
as temporary, and the confidence came to me that she would never, for
her happiness, cease to be a creature of illusions. It enabled me to
exclaim, smiling brightly and feeling indeed idiotic: “Oh, I shall see
you again! But I hope you’ll have a very pleasant walk.”
“All my walks are very pleasant, thank you--they do me such a lot
of good.” She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me
stupendous in their wisdom. “I take several a day,” she continued. She
might have been an ancient woman responding with humility at the church
door to the patronage of the parson. “The more I take the better I feel.
I’m ordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in
for plenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if
that goes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be all
right. All that was the matter with me before--and always; it was too
reckless!--was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly on
the state of the particular organ. So I’m going three miles.”
I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum’s maid stood there
to admit me. “Oh, I’m so glad,” I said, looking at her as she paced away
with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while
she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her
air of assurance was on this occasion not less than it had been on that;
but I recalled that she had then struck me as marching off to her doom.
Was she really now marching away from it?