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 demarche! 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 found myself there in half an hour simply infatuated
with him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against
him I hold 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 mirth.
"Precisely: she wired 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 says, for it's not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicing
is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as it's nearly seven
o'clock, may 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, so to
call it, 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 in the nature of 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 utterly committed to her 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
that day at Folkestone when I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The
truth is what you and I both guessed. She's in very bad danger."
"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 still keep her sight, or what
remains of it, 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 flushed for dismay.
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
conceit 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 in life 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 gave out a long moan. "Well,
that's exactly what I came here to tell him."
"Then here he is." Our host, all unprepared, his latchkey still in his
hand, had just pushed open the door and, startled at finding us, turned a
frightened look from one to the other, wondering what disaster we were
there to announce or avert.
Mrs. Meldrum was on the spot 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 he broke out: "He's going to marry her."
I was surprised. "You already know?"
He produced an evening paper, which he tossed down on the table. "It's
in that."
"Published--already?" I was still more surprised.
"Oh Flora can't keep a secret!"--Mrs. Meldrum made it light. 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 stare from which
thought, and of the most defiant and dismal, fairly protruded, the
excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the
cheek.