"She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not honest."
"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I see."
"She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you--"
She checked him with a gesture. "Don"t tell me what she did!" She had colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face, she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was ent.i.tled to.
While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object of her magnanimity had been p.r.o.nouncing her "not honest." She took it all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile.
She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled about you. It"s much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about _me_."
Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is, don"t you know, that Mona, if you don"t mind my saying so, has taken it into her head to be jealous."
"I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very odd."
"They"ve looked very beautiful, and they"ve been very beautiful. Oh, I"ve told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued.
"That of course hasn"t made her love me better."
"No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves me."
"And do you say you love her?"
"I say nothing else--I say it all the while. I said it the other day a dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "_Am_ I to tell my solicitor to act?"
She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut in Mrs. Gereth"s face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and fight, flying the flag of a pa.s.sionate, an heroic defense. The case would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer than Mona"s patience or Owen"s propriety. With a formal rupture he would be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you "say" you love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You wouldn"t say so, would you, if it"s not true? What in the world has become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your engagement?"
"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I couldn"t help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the world. But it wasn"t you who made the difference," he eagerly continued, "and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She wanted to know all the while what was pa.s.sing between us, between you and me; and she wouldn"t take my solemn a.s.surance that nothing was pa.s.sing but what might have directly pa.s.sed between me and old Mummy.
She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if you"ll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I"ll be hanged if I haven"t been good, haven"t I? I haven"t breathed a breath of any sort to you, have I? You"d have been down on me hard if I had, wouldn"t you? You"re down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren"t you? But I don"t care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about it. The way I feel about it, don"t you know, is that it had all better come to an end. You ask me if I don"t love her, and I suppose it"s natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I"m half mad to say to you that there"s only one person on the whole earth I _really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness: it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen"s pause was the matter of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their eyes holding each other"s eyes and their ears catching the suggestion, still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a grasp of her arm. "You"re surely able to guess," he said, with his voice dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a pressure--"you"re surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"
The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him: "Your mother!"
The door opened, and the s.m.u.tty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
Brigstock!"
XV
Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled by Fleda"s relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a longer s.p.a.ce by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as const.i.tuting a bond.
She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the a.s.sociate of Mrs. Gereth"s misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who could think ten thoughts at once--a circ.u.mstance which, even putting her present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock"s spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected with friendly aid an embarra.s.sed transit to the sofa. Owen would be useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said, and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona"s mother; but she couldn"t entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock"s daughter. Mona"s mother declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the hint.
"I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday, somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister"s marriage that you sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn"t be present--it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to myself that I might find you here."
"I"m very glad to be at home," Fleda responded.
"Yes, that doesn"t happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked round afresh at Fleda"s home.
"Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don"t know when."
"We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course of your having been at Ricks. If I didn"t find you I thought I might perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.
"I"m sorry he"s out. He"s always out--all day long."
Mrs. Brigstock"s round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"
"All day long," Fleda smiled.
"Leaving you quite to yourself?"
"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose for which you would like my father to call on you?"
Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance: "I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch"s being in town; but of course the letter hadn"t arrived when you left home."
"No, it hadn"t arrived. I came up for the night--I"ve several matters to attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her companions to the other, "I"m afraid I"ve interrupted your conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point, had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was; she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the kindness of compa.s.sion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel."
Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?"
"About the contents of the house. Aren"t you looking after them for him?"
"She knows how awfully kind you"ve been to me," Owen said. He showed such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her to bring to pa.s.s for him.
She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day, asked me particularly to see him for her."
"And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs.
Brigstock"s hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated truth; and it was on Fleda"s lips to reply that such had indeed been Mrs. Gereth"s request. But she checked herself, and before she could say anything else Owen had addressed their companion.
"I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don"t you see? That"s exactly what I wrote her this morning."
"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance,"
Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly wouldn"t have come."
"I"m glad, then, it didn"t arrive. Shouldn"t you like him to go?" Fleda asked.
Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with _me_."
There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted.
As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to a.s.sent; then, for fear that he wouldn"t, and would thereby make his case worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I"ve not seen him for a long time--I"ve particular things to say to him."
"So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure.
The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going to do?"
"Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded.
"That and several other things."