Embarrassments

She was mystified. "Everything?"

"The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh, she came to triumph, but she remained to talk something approaching to 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 bound hands and feet 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 the day, at Folkestone, I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is what you and I both guessed. She has no end of a danger hanging over her."

"But from what cause? I, who by G.o.d"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 G.o.d"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 keep them still 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 turned pale.

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 surrept.i.tiously 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 G.o.d had only given me a figure too, I don"t say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one, like f.a.n.n.y Floyd-Taylor"s, who"s hideous, I"d have risked plain gla.s.ses.

_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 vanity 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 whatever 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 exhaled a long moan. "Well, that"s exactly what I came here to tell him."

"Then here he is." Our unconscious host had just opened the door.

Immensely startled at finding us he turned a frightened look from one to the other, as if to guess what disaster we were there to announce or avert.

Mrs. Meldrum, on the spot, was 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 abruptly he broke out: "He"s going to marry her."

I was surprised. "You already know?"

He had had in his hand an evening newspaper; he tossed it down on the table. "It"s in that."

"Published--already?" I was still more surprised.

"Oh, Flora can"t keep a secret!" Mrs. Meldrum humorously declared. 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 dismal stare in which the thought of her was as abnormally vivid as the colour of the pupil, the excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the cheek.

X

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 Daw-ling accepted like a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which I s.n.a.t.c.hed a moment to murmur him a hint to 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.

Circ.u.mstances arising at this time promptly led to my making an absence from England, and circ.u.mstances already existing offered him a solid basis for similar action. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton--he could take to his boats.

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 that followed 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 no less than ten. 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 she 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. Before returning to town however I had every reason to sally forth in search of Mrs. Meldrum, from whom, in so many months, 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 was a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on the gra.s.s. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for it had taken me but a few seconds to perceive that the person thus a.s.saulted had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much greater than any I should have thought possible as on this person"s drawing near I identified her as poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment Flora had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: I could intensely reflect that once we were face to face it chiefly mattered that I should succeed in looking still more intensely unastonished. All I saw at first 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 exclaimed; 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 very quietly remarked.

It was the quietness itself that made me feel the necessity of an answer almost violently gay. "Oh yes," I laughed, "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 to treat the question with the same exuberance. "It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!" That something was wrong it was not difficult to perceive; but a good deal more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum"s roof. I had not for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination had had sufficient warrant 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 ears 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 gra.s.s 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 completely 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, strange person. Flora plain and obscure and soundless 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 pitiful in the girl"s predicament that I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn"t express a compa.s.sion without seeming to take too much wretchedness for granted. 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, strangely, in very deep misfortune a dignity finer even 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, yet somehow as if she might never see me again: "Goodbye.

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 very 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 a.s.surance 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?

XI

As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I broke out to her. "Is there anything in it? _Is_ her general health--?"

Mrs. Meldrum interrupted me with her great amused blare. "You"ve already seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What"s "in it" is what has been in everything she has ever done--the most comical, tragical belief in herself. She thinks she"s doing a "cure.""

"And what does her husband think?"

"Her husband? What husband?"

"Hasn"t she then married Lord Iffield?"

"_Vous-en-etes la?_" cried my hostess. "He behaved like a regular beast."

"How should I know? You never wrote to me."

Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the particular organ. "No, I didn"t write to you; and I abstained on purpose. If I didn"t I thought you mightn"t, over there, hear what had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr.

Dawling."

"Stir him up?"

"Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another chance for him."

"I wouldn"t have done it," I said.

"Well," Mrs. Meldrum replied, "it was not my business to give you an opportunity."

"In short you were afraid of it."