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 dismay. 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 on hearing, still with her hand
on my arm, 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 impatience 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 to his eyes;
while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment, a blest
snap of the strain I had been struggling with. 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 sank 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. 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 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 saw 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 rub of
pastel from 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
invariably "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 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
conceived: 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'd 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 because an idea that 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 keep up
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 ace Mrs. Meldrum that 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.