A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he
passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell.
"I've been down to Folkestone--it was necessary I should see her!" I
forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any rate
out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to apply.
"You mean that you've been with Mrs. Meldrum?"
"Yes, to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It worked
upon me awfully--I mean what you told me." He made a visible effort to
seem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had not
been reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, a
friendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them an
instant, a strange distended look which might have expressed the cold
clearness of all that was to come. "I _know--_now!" he said with an
emphasis he rarely used.
"What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?"
"Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But that
one thing was everything."
"What is it then?"
"Why, that she can't bear the sight of her." His pronouns required some
arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that I
was quite aware of Miss Saunt's trick of turning her back on the good
lady of Folkestone. Only what did that prove? "Have you never guessed?
I guessed as soon as she spoke!" Dawling towered over me in dismal
triumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, on any ground
of understanding this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incident
still left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: "Why, the
effect of those spectacles!"
I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. "Mrs. Meldrum's?"
"They're so awfully ugly and they add so to 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 the person who so forced it home. 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 returned. "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 enquiry 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
discovered at this moment how much I really liked him. None the less, at
the same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of 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 resent my laughter, which but exposed 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 really uninformed.
"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 smiled. 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. "Couldn't something be got out of the people
she has consulted? 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"--but he was gloomy enough. He was a lover facing the fact that
there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it
made so remarkably little difference. I could see by what a stretch his
passionate pity would from this moment overlook 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
rebuked 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.