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 Dawling accepted as
a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which
I snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might 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 led to my making an absence from England, and
circumstances already existing offered him a firm basis for similar
action. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton--he could take
to his boats, always drawn up in our background. 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 after 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 some dozen. 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
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. Yet before returning to town I called on Mrs. Meldrum,
from whom 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
a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on the
grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for I had seen in a
few more seconds 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 when on this person's drawing near I knew
her for poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised me
belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me,
one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so chiefly
mattered that I should succeed in looking entirely unastonished. All I
at first saw 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 said 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 ever so quietly answered.
It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. "Oh yes,
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 treat the question still with high spirits.
"It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!" That something was
wrong it wasn't difficult to see, but a good deal more than met the eye
might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum's roof. I
hadn't for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination had
had ground 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 care 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 finely 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 and strange person. Flora
plain and obscure and dumb 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 grim in the girl's trouble that
I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn't
express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble
than there actually might have been. 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, wondrously, in very deep and even in
very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer 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,
though somehow as if she might never see me again: "Good-bye. 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 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?