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 misdemeanor--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 figures
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 loud tones 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 develop
as one of the types about whom, as the years go on, superficial critics
wonder without relief how they ever succeeded in dragging a bride to the
altar. 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
there was nothing to be said.
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 the common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly
noted 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 translated her vague brightness into a
resurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection, because, to put it crudely,
I had on that last occasion left our young woman for dead. At present
perfectly alive again, she was altered only, as it were, by this fact of
life. A little older, a little quieter, a little finer and a good deal
fairer, she was simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained by
the reflection that even her 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 on 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 scarce have 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 revival 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 very own 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.