I was soon called back to Folkestone; but Mrs. Meldrum and her young
friend had already left England, finding to that end every convenience
on the spot and not having had to come up to town. My thoughts however
were so painfully engaged there that I should in any case have had
little attention for them: the event occurred that was to bring my
series of visits to a close. When this high tide had ebbed I returned to
America and to my interrupted work, which had opened out on such a scale
that, with a deep plunge into a great chance, I was three good years in
rising again to the surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the
American depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of
my dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanour--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
written to me from Florence after my mother’s death and had mentioned
in a postscript that in our young lady’s calculations the lowest numbers
were now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and if in subsequent
letters there was no news of a sequel I was content to accept small
things and to believe that grave tidings, should there be any, would
come to me in due course. The gravity of what might happen to a
featherweight became indeed with time and distance less appreciable,
and I was not without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of
proportion was not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the
world with the ups and downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky
and dim, a small fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable
consciousness of how kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was
professionally more preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms
of pretty faces in my eyes and a chorus of high voices in my ears.
Geoffrey Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three
letters: his last information had been that he was going into the
figures of rural illiteracy. I was delighted to receive it and had no
doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are said to
be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice was sound and
that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on my part another hope,
a hope suggested by some roundabout rumour--I forget how it reached
me--that he was engaged to a girl down in Hampshire. He turned out not
to be, but I felt sure that if only he went into figures deep enough
he would become, among the girls down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of
those numerous prizes of battle whose defences are practically not on
the scale of their provocations. I nursed in short the thought that it
was probably open to him to become one of the types as to which, as the
years go on, frivolous and superficial spectators lose themselves in the
wonder that they ever succeeded in winning even the least winsome mates.
He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about
her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum’s, an element of instinctive tact, a brief
implication that if you didn’t happen to have been in love with her she
was not an inevitable topic.
Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which I
had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for the first act
of “Lohengrin,” but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself
up to it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over I
treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general
survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections,
pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored
to London. There was a certain proportion of pretty women, but I
suddenly became aware that one of these was far prettier than the
others. This lady, alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand
tier and already the aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained
with admirable serenity--this single exquisite figure, placed in the
quarter furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately
felt, to cause one’s curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with
diamonds in her hair and pearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance
of beauty which even at that distance made her a distinguished presence
and, with the air that easily attaches to lonely loveliness in public
places, an agreeable mystery. A mystery however she remained to me only
for a minute after I had levelled my glass at her: I feel to this moment
the startled thrill, the shock almost of joy with which I suddenly
encountered in her vague brightness a rich revival of Flora Saunt. I say
a revival because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left
poor Flora for dead. At present perfectly alive again, she was altered
only, as it were, by resurrection. A little older, a little quieter,
a little finer and a good deal fairer, she was simply transfigured by
recovery. Sustained by the reflection that even recovery wouldn’t enable
her to distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then
it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great goggles
had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of her, that
machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her
in the interval I had thought of her as buried in the tomb her stern
specialist had built. With the sense that she had escaped from it came a
lively wish to return to her; and if I didn’t straightway leave my place
and rush round the theatre and up to her box it was because I was fixed
to the spot some moments longer by the simple inability to cease looking
at her.
She had been from the first of my seeing her practically motionless,
leaning back in her chair with a kind of thoughtful grace and with her
eyes vaguely directed, as it seemed to me, to one of the boxes on my
side of the house and consequently over my head and out of my sight. The
only movement she made for some time was to finger with an ungloved
hand and as if with the habit of fondness the row of pearls on her neck,
which my glass showed me to be large and splendid. Her diamonds and
pearls, in her solitude, mystified me, making me, as she had had no such
brave jewels in the days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-of
improvement had taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a question
hovered there a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened as
that on her tested and proved amendment Lord Iffield had taken her back?
This could not have occurred without my hearing of it; and moreover if
she had become a person of such fashion where was the little court one
would naturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling, though it
could easily suggest that she was but momentarily alone. If she had come
with Mrs. Meldrum that lady would have taken advantage of the interval
to pay a visit to some other box--doubtless the box at which Flora had
just been looking. Mrs. Meldrum didn’t account for the jewels, but the
refreshment of Flora’s beauty accounted for anything. She presently
moved her eyes over the house, and I felt them brush me again like the
wings of a dove. I don’t know what quick pleasure flickered into the
hope that she would at last see me. She did see me: she suddenly bent
forward to take up the little double-barrelled ivory glass that rested
on the edge of the box and, to all appearance, fix me with it. I smiled
from my place straight up at the searching lenses, and after an instant
she dropped them and smiled as straight back at me. Oh, her smile: it
was her old smile, her young smile, her peculiar smile made perfect! I
instantly left my stall and hurried off for a nearer view of it; quite
flushed, I remember, as I went, with the annoyance of having happened to
think of the idiotic way I had tried to paint her. Poor Iffield with his
sample of that error, and still poorer Dawling in particular with his!
I hadn’t touched her, I was professionally humiliated, and as the
attendant in the lobby opened her box for me I felt that the very first
thing I should have to say to her would be that she must absolutely sit
to me again.