"Upon my honour it _shan"t_ be trifled with!" he roundly declared; and he adjusted himself to his position again as if we had quite settled the business. After a considerable interval, while I botched away, he suddenly said: "Did they make a great difference?"
"A great difference?"
"Those things she had put on."
"Oh, the gla.s.ses--in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it was partly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look charming in nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer? She must be mad not to accept that alternative."
"She _is_ mad," said Geoffrey Dawling.
"Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides," I went on, "the pince-nez, which was a large and peculiar one, was all awry: she had half pulled it off, but it continued to stick, and she was crimson, she was angry."
"It must have been horrible!" my companion murmured.
"It _was_ horrible. But it"s still more horrible to defy all warnings; it"s still more horrible to be landed in--" Without saying in what I disgustedly shrugged my shoulders.
After a glance at me Dawling jerked round. "Then you do believe that she may be?"
I hesitated. "The thing would be to make _her_ believe it. She only needs a good scare."
"But if that fellow is shocked at the precautions she does take?"
"Oh, who knows?" I rejoined with small sincerity. "I don"t suppose Iffield is absolutely a brute."
"I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!" cried Geoffrey Dawling.
I had an impression that Iffield wouldn"t, but I didn"t communicate it, for I wanted to pacify my friend, whom I had discomposed too much for the purposes of my sitting. I recollect that I did some good work that morning, but it also comes back to me that before we separated he had practically revealed to me that my anecdote, connecting itself in his mind with a series of observations at the time unconscious and unregistered, had covered with light the subject of our colloquy. He had had a formless perception of some secret that drove Miss Saunt to subterfuges, and the more he thought of it the more he guessed this secret to be the practice of making believe she saw when she didn"t and of cleverly keeping people from finding out how little she saw. When one patched things together it was astonishing what ground they covered.
Just as he was going away he asked me from what source, at Folkestone, the horrid tale had proceeded. When I had given him, as I saw no reason not to do, the name of Mrs. Meldrum, he exclaimed: "Oh, I know all about her; she"s a friend of some friends of mine!" At this I remembered wilful Betty and said to myself that I knew some one who would probably prove more wilful still.
VIII
A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he pa.s.sed my threshold I knew he had something to tell me.
"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 interpret.
"You mean that you"ve been with Mrs. Mel-drum?"
"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 rea.s.sured. 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 p.r.o.nouns required some arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that I knew perfectly Miss Saunt had a trick of turning her back on the good lady of Folkestone. But 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, intellectually speaking, 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 increase so 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 a.s.sert that only the horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her avoiding such a monitress. 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 rejoined. "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 inquiry 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 felt that there dated from this moment in my heart a confirmed affection for him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I became aware of a certain drollery in 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 think my laughter in bad taste: it was only a practical recognition of 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 utterly ignorant.
"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 embarra.s.sed. "To warn you off," I returned smiling. 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. "Wouldn"t the people she has consulted give some information? 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," he said gloomily enough. He was a lover who could tacitly grant the proposition that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I could see that from this moment he would be filled with a pa.s.sionate pity ever so little qualified by a sense of 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 resented 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.
IX
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 took there in half an hour the most extraordinary fancy to him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him, I find him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven"t come up to declare my pa.s.sion--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 merriment.
"Precisely: she telegraphed 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 pa.s.sed an hour with the creature you see before you."
"She has just pa.s.sed an hour with every one in the place!" Mrs. Meldrum cried. "They"ve vital reasons, she wired, for it"s not coming out for a month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her happiness is delirious. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows, and he may, as it"s nearly seven o"clock, 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, as it were, on the horrid cert.i.tude which I could see he carried away with him. I had added somehow to that cert.i.tude. 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 circ.u.mstance 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."