She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder, from her chair,
she turned her face to me. “Here you are again!” she exclaimed with her
disgloved hand put up a little backward for me to take. I dropped into
a chair just behind her and, having taken it and noted that one of the
curtains of the box would make the demonstration sufficiently private,
bent my lips over it and impressed them on its finger-tips. It was given
me however, to my astonishment, to feel next that all the privacy in
the world couldn’t have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she
greeted this free application of my moustache: the blood had jumped
to her face, she quickly recovered her hand and jerked at me, twisting
herself round, a vacant, challenging stare. During the next few instants
several extraordinary things happened, the first of which was that now
I was close to them the eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into
didn’t show at all the conscious light I had just been pleased to
see them flash across the house: they showed on the contrary, to my
confusion, a strange, sweet blankness, an expression I failed to give a
meaning to until, without delay, I felt on my arm, directed to it as if
instantly to efface the effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she
had impulsively snatched from me. It was the irrepressible question
in this grasp that stopped on my lips all sound of salutation. She had
mistaken my entrance for that of another person, a pair of lips without
a moustache. She was feeling me to see who I was! With the perception of
this and of her not seeing me I sat gaping at her and at the wild
word that didn’t come, the right word to express or to disguise my
stupefaction. What was the right word to commemorate one’s sudden
discovery, at the very moment too at which one had been most encouraged
to count on better things, that one’s dear old friend had gone blind?
Before the answer to this question dropped upon me--and the moving
moments, though few, seemed many--I heard, with the sound of voices, the
click of the attendant’s key on the other side of the door. Poor Flora
heard also, and with the hearing, still with her hand on my arm, she
brightened again as I had a minute since seen her brighten across the
house: she had the sense of the return of the person she had taken me
for--the person with the right pair of lips, as to whom I was for that
matter much more in the dark than she. I gasped, but my word had come:
if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had found
again her beauty. I managed to speak while we were still alone, before
her companion had appeared. “You’re lovelier at this day than you
have ever been in your life!” At the sound of my voice and that of the
opening of the door her excitement broke into audible joy. She sprang
up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a
gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: “He has
come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he says of
me!” The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to
let him hear on the spot. “How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how
extraordinarily beautiful! More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever
before!”
It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush up to his
eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment,
a blessed snap of the strain that I had been under for some moments. I
wanted to embrace them both, and while the opening bars of another
scene rose from the orchestra I almost did embrace Dawling, whose
first emotion on beholding me had visibly and ever so oddly been a
consciousness of guilt. I had caught him somehow in the act, though that
was as yet all I knew; but by the time we had sunk noiselessly into
our chairs again (for the music was supreme, Wagner passed first) my
demonstration ought pretty well to have given him the limit of the
criticism he had to fear. I myself indeed, while the opera blazed, was
only too afraid he might divine in our silent closeness the very moral
of my optimism, which was simply the comfort I had gathered from seeing
that if our companion’s beauty lived again her vanity partook of its
life. I had hit on the right note--that was what eased me off: it drew
all pain for the next half-hour from the sense of the deep darkness
in which the stricken woman sat there. If the music, in that darkness,
happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison with
those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went between us
without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of
twenty minutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have
to tell me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls,
had misled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by appearing to
recognise me and smile. She leaned back in her chair in luxurious ease:
I had from the first become aware that the way she fingered her pearls
was a sharp image of the wedded state. Nothing of old had seemed wanting
to her assurance; but I hadn’t then dreamed of the art with which she
would wear that assurance as a married woman. She had taken him when
everything had failed; he had taken her when she herself had done so.
His embarrassed eyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he found
in it. They only didn’t tell me why he had not written to me, nor clear
up as yet a minor obscurity. Flora after a while again lifted the glass
from the ledge of the box and elegantly swept the house with it. Then,
by the mere instinct of her grace, a motion but half conscious, she
inclined her head into the void with the sketch of a salute, producing,
I could see, a perfect imitation of a response to some homage. Dawling
and I looked at each other again: the tears came into his eyes. She
was playing at perfection still, and her misfortune only simplified the
process.
I recognised that this was as near as I should ever come, certainly as
I should come that night, to pressing on her misfortune. Neither of us
would name it more than we were doing then, and Flora would never name
it at all. Little by little I perceived that what had occurred was,
strange as it might appear, the best thing for her happiness. The
question was now only of her beauty and her being seen and marvelled at:
with Dawling to do for her everything in life her activity was limited
to that. Such an activity was all within her scope: it asked nothing
of her that she couldn’t splendidly give. As from time to time in our
delicate communion she turned her face to me with the parody of a look
I lost none of the signs of its strange new glory. The expression of
the eyes was a bit of pastel put in by a master’s thumb; the whole head,
stamped with a sort of showy suffering, had gained a fineness from what
she had passed through. Yes, Flora was settled for life--nothing could
hurt her further. I foresaw the particular praise she would mostly
incur--she would be incomparably “interesting.” She would charm with
her pathos more even than she had charmed with her pleasure. For herself
above all she was fixed for ever, rescued from all change and ransomed
from all doubt. Her old certainties, her old vanities were justified
and sanctified, and in the darkness that had closed upon her one
object remained clear. That object, as unfading as a mosaic mask, was
fortunately the loveliest she could possibly look upon. The greatest
blessing of all was of course that Dawling thought so. Her future was
ruled with the straightest line, and so for that matter was his. There
were two facts to which before I left my friends I gave time to sink
into my spirit. One of them was that he had changed by some process as
effective as Flora’s change; had been simplified somehow into service as
she had been simplified into success. He was such a picture of inspired
intervention as I had never yet encountered: he would exist henceforth
for the sole purpose of rendering unnecessary, or rather impossible,
any reference even on her own part to his wife’s infirmity. Oh yes, how
little desire he would ever give _me_ to refer to it! He principally
after a while made me feel--and this was my second lesson--that,
good-natured as he was, my being there to see it all oppressed him; so
that by the time the act ended I recognised that I too had filled out my
hour. Dawling remembered things; I think he caught in my very face the
irony of old judgments: they made him thresh about in his chair. I said
to Flora as I took leave of her that I would come to see her; but I may
mention that I never went. I’ll go to-morrow if I hear she wants me; but
what in the world can she ever want? As I quitted them I laid my hand on
Dawling’s arm and drew him for a moment into the lobby.
“Why did you never write to me of your marriage?”
He smiled uncomfortably, showing his long yellow teeth and something
more. “I don’t know--the whole thing gave me such a tremendous lot to
do.”
This was the first dishonest speech I had heard him make: he really
hadn’t written to me because he had an idea I would think him a still
bigger fool than before. I didn’t insist, but I tried there, in the
lobby, so far as a pressure of his hand could serve me, to give him a
notion of what I thought him. “I can’t at any rate make out,” I said,
“why I didn’t hear from Mrs. Meldrum.”
“She didn’t write to you?”
“Never a word. What has become of her?”
“I think she’s at Folkestone,” Dawling returned; “but I’m sorry to say
that practically she has ceased to see us.”
“You haven’t quarrelled with her?”
“How _could_ we? Think of all we owe her. At the time of our marriage,
and for months before, she did everything for us: I don’t know how we
should have managed without her. But since then she has never been near
us and has given us rather markedly little encouragement to try and keep
up our relations with her.”
I was struck with this though of course I admit I am struck with all
sorts of things. “Well,” I said after a moment, “even if I could imagine
a reason for that attitude it wouldn’t explain why she shouldn’t have
taken account of _my_ natural interest.”
“Just so.” Dawling’s face was a windowless wall. He could contribute
nothing to the mystery, and, quitting him, I carried it away. It was not
till I went down to see Mrs. Meldrum that it was really dispelled. She
didn’t want to hear of them or to talk of them, not a bit, and it was
just in the same spirit that she hadn’t wanted to write of them. She had
done everything in the world for them, but now, thank heaven, the hard
business was over. After I had taken this in, which I was quick to do,
we quite avoided the subject. She simply couldn’t bear it.