GLASSES

CHAPTER I

Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the threadand let it lead me back to the first impression. The little story is allthere, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None of the beads are missing--atleast I think they're not: that's exactly what I shall amuse myself withfinding out. 

I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down toFolkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; mymother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit when I could. Iremember how on this occasion, after weeks in my stuffy studio with mynose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyeswith the purple sea. The place was full of lodgings, and the lodgingswere at that season full of people, people who had nothing to do but tostare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands oflittle chairs and almost as many little Jews; and there was music in anopen rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We allstrolled to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top, edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck of ahuge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there wasone dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which Ialways walked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look at, and there were the usual things to say about it; there was also in everystate of the atmosphere our friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject of remark notless inveterate. The widow of an officer in the Engineers, she hadsettled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well within sightof the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure to form inspite of the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the leastapologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it highaloft with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breezeas if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a bigred face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at youthrough gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter and sofrequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her asflattering her nose against the glass of her spectacles. She wasextraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects theymagnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blest conveniences theywere, in their hideous, honest strength--they showed the good ladyeverything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhancedby wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubbornresistances of cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toiletseemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and thevoice of an angel. 

In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myselfgrabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck bythe beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affectedwhen I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a windowthrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it an brightly as a draperydropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young ladyflanked by two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace. Myimmediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend I made morediscoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the statureinsignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as the airof infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This was alittle person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance topaint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval andradiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable, I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike graceevery object they encountered. Their possessor was just back fromBoulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs. Floyd-Taylor: thisaccounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs. Meldrum. Herblack garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral. She confounded us for three minuteswith her presence; she was a beauty of the great conscious publicresponsible order. The young men, her companions, gazed at her andgrinned: I could see there were very few moments of the day at whichyoung men, these or others, would not be so occupied. The people whoapproached took leave of their manners; every one seemed to linger andgape. When she brought her face close to Mrs. Meldrum's--and sheappeared to be always bringing it close to somebody's--it was a marvelthat objects so dissimilar should express the same general identity, theunmistakable character of the English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrumsustained the comparison with her usual courage, but I wondered why shedidn't introduce me: I should have had no objection to the bringing ofsuch a face close to mine. However, by the time the young lady moved onwith her escort she herself bequeathed me a sense that some such_rapprochement_ might still occur. Was this by reason of the generalfrequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of a subtleacknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights, on the part ofothers, that such beauty as hers created? I was in a position to answerthat question after Mrs. Meldrum had answered a few of mine. 

CHAPTER II

Flora Saunt, the only daughter of an old soldier, had lost both herparents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, wasextraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no naturalchaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. HammondSynge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. Shehad lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking upimpossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been atBoulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not sovulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her. 

"She knows what I think of them, " said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed sheknows what I think of most things. "

"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I repliedlaughing. 

"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a littledifference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of all whatI think of Flora Saunt. "

"And what may your opinion be?"

"Why, that she's not worth troubling about--an idiot too abysmal. "

"Doesn't she care for that?"

"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too pleasedwith herself for anything else to matter. "

"Surely, my dear friend, " I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be pleasedwith!"

"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had givenyou the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for her vanity isbeyond all making or mending. She believes in herself, and she'swelcome, after all, poor dear, having only herself to look to. I'veseldom met a young woman more completely free to be silly. She has aclear course--she'll make a showy finish. "

"Well, " I replied, "as she probably will reduce many persons to the samedegraded state, her partaking of it won't stand out so much. "

"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!"cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel. 

I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother'sson, but I didn't let it prevent me from insisting on her making meacquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urgingthat she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity nowdemanded of her to put into relation with a character really fine. Sucha frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on my parthad at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was quite theground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady after I hadbegun to know her. I couldn't have said what I felt about her exceptthat she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with her thereafter dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone of balmynights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware both thatprotection was wholly absent from her life and that she was whollyindifferent to its absence. The odd thing was that she was notappealing: she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantasticallypleased. Her beauty was as yet all the world to her, a world she hadplenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and therewas nothing that, as the centre of a group of giggling, nudgingspectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about herself. She held herlittle court in the crowd, upon the grass, playing her light over Jewsand Gentiles, completely at ease in all promiscuities. It was an effectof these things that from the very first, with every one listening, Icould mention that my main business with her would be just to have a goat her head and to arrange in that view for an early sitting. It wouldhave been as impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it wouldhave been to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that wentforward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing in theworld and immediately became the most general and sociable. It was whenI saw all this that I judged how, though it was the last thing she askedfor, what one would ever most have at her service was a curiouscompassion. That sentiment was coloured by the vision of the direexposure of a being whom vanity had put so off her guard. Hers was theonly vanity I have ever known that made its possessor superlatively soft. Mrs. Meldrum's further information contributed moreover to theseindulgences--her account of the girl's neglected childhood and queercontinental relegations, with straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-hauntingparents; the more invidious picture, above all, of her pecuniaryarrangement, still in force, with the Hammond Synges, who really, thoughthey never took her out--practically she went out alone--had their handshalf the time in her pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to hershare of the wine-bills and the horses' fodder, down to Bertie HammondSynge's fare in the "underground" when he went to the City for her. Shehad been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't evenbeen put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. Shecould spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive, extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn'tlast very long. 

"Couldn't _you_ perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?"I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception, thesanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously fleeceher. "

"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded. "Ofcourse I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night. But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me. You know whatshe does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me andfeels that I've one about her. And then she dislikes me for anotherreason that I'm not quite clear about, but that I'm well aware of andthat I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes itwould be impossible moreover here; she wants naturally enough a muchwider field. She must live in London--her game is there. So she takesthe line of adoring me, of saying she can never forget that I was devotedto her mother--which I wouldn't for the world have been--and of giving mea wide berth. I think she positively dislikes to look at me. It's allright; there's no obligation; though people in general can't take theireyes off me. "

"I see that at this moment, " I replied. "But what does it matter whereor how, for the present, she lives? She'll marry infallibly, marryearly, and everything then will change. "

"Whom will she marry?" my companion gloomily asked. 

"Any one she likes. She's so abnormally pretty that she can do anything. She'll fascinate some nabob or some prince. "

"She'll fascinate him first and bore him afterwards. Moreover she's notso pretty as you make her out; she hasn't a scrap of a figure. "

"No doubt, but one doesn't in the least miss it. "

"Not now, " said Mrs. Meldrum, "but one will when she's older and wheneverything will have to count. "

"When she's older she'll count as a princess, so it won't matter. "

"She has other drawbacks, " my companion went on. "Those wonderful eyesare good for nothing but to roll about like sugar-balls--which theygreatly resemble--in a child's mouth. She can't use them. "

"Use them? Why, she does nothing else. "

"To make fools of young men, but not to read or write, not to do any sortof work. She never opens a book, and her maid writes her notes. You'llsay that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Ofcourse I know that if I didn't wear my goggles I shouldn't be good formuch. "

"Do you mean that Miss Saunt ought to sport such things?" I exclaimedwith more horror than I meant to show. 

"I don't prescribe for her; I don't know that they're what she requires. "

"What's the matter with her eyes?" I asked after a moment. 

"I don't exactly know; but I heard from her mother years ago that even asa child they had had for a while to put her into spectacles and thatthough she hated them and had been in a fury of disgust, she would alwayshave to be extremely careful. I'm sure I hope she is!"

I echoed the hope, but I remember well the impression this made uponme--my immediate pang of resentment, a disgust almost equal to Flora'sown. I felt as if a great rare sapphire had split in my hand. 

CHAPTER III

This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town. Isettled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still mymorning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it I wasout with my mother. Every one in the place was as usual out with someone else, and even had I been free to go and take leave of her I shouldhave been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at home. Just where she wasI presently discovered: she was at the far end of the cliff, the point atwhich it overhangs the pretty view of Sandgate and Hythe. Her back, however, was turned to this attraction; it rested with the aid of herelbows, thrust slightly behind her so that her scanty little shoulderswere raised toward her ears, on the high rail that inclosed the down. Twogentlemen stood before her whose faces we couldn't see but who even asobserved from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming figure-piecesubmitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact that this meagreand defective little person, with the cock of her hat and the flutter ofher crape, with her eternal idleness, her eternal happiness, her absenceof moods and mysteries and the pretty presentation of her feet, whichespecially now in the supported slope of her posture occupied with theirimperceptibility so much of the foreground--I was reminded anew, I say, how our young lady dazzled by some art that the enumeration of her meritsdidn't explain and that the mention of her lapses didn't affect. Whereshe was amiss nothing counted, and where she was right everything did. Isay she was wanting in mystery, but that after all was her secret. Thishappened to be my first chance of introducing her to my mother, who hadnot much left in life but the quiet look from under the hood of her chairat the things which, when she should have quitted those she loved, shecould still trust to make the world good for them. I wondered an instanthow much she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while thechair stood still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to comeand speak to her. In this way I saw that if one of Flora's attendantswas the inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of ceremonies of herregular court, always offering the use of a telescope and accepting thatof a cigar, the other was a personage I had not yet encountered, a smallpale youth in showy knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the gluedpoints of whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted andsustained. I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and forsomething of a pretender: I scarce know why unless because of the motiveI felt in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to come away. He struck me a little as a young man practising the social art ofimpertinence; but it didn't matter, for Flora came away with alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding over the grass inthat rustle of delicate mourning which made the endless variety of hergarments, as a painter could take heed, strike one always as the sameobscure elegance. She seated herself on the floor of my mother's chair, a little too much on her right instep as I afterwards gathered, caressingher still hand, smiling up into her cold face, commending and approvingher without a reserve and without a doubt. She told her immediately, asif it were something for her to hold on by, that she was soon to sit tome for a "likeness, " and these words gave me a chance to enquire if itwould be the fate of the picture, should I finish it, to be presented tothe young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at this, parted in astare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the shadow-patches onthe sea. She showed for the passing instant the face of some splendidtragic mask, and I remembered for the inconsequence of it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this lady aworrying impulse to catechise her, but that didn't seem exactly kind; soI substituted another question, inquiring who the pretty young man inknickerbockers might happen to be. 

"Oh a gentleman I met at Boulogne. He has come over to see me. " After amoment she added: "Lord Iffield. "

I had never heard of Lord Iffield, but her mention of his having been atBoulogne helped me to give him a niche. Mrs. Meldrum had incidentallythrown a certain light on the manners of Mrs. Floyd-Taylor, Flora'srecent hostess in that charming town, a lady who, it appeared, had aspecial vocation for helping rich young men to find a use for theirleisure. She had always one or other in hand and had apparently on thisoccasion pointed her lesson at the rare creature on the opposite coast. Ihad a vague idea that Boulogne was not a resort of the world's envied; atthe same time there might very well have been a strong attraction thereeven for one of the darlings of fortune. I could perfectly understand inany case that such a darling should be drawn to Folkestone by FloraSaunt. But it was not in truth of these things I was thinking; what wasuppermost in my mind was a matter which, though it had no sort ofkeeping, insisted just then on coming out. 

"Is it true, Miss Saunt, " I suddenly demanded, "that you're sounfortunate as to have had some warning about your beautiful eyes?"

I was startled by the effect of my words; the girl threw back her head, changing colour from brow to chin. "True? Who in the world says so?" Irepented of my question in a flash; the way she met it made it seemcruel, and I felt my mother look at me in some surprise. I took care, inanswer to Flora's challenge, not to incriminate Mrs. Meldrum. I answeredthat the rumour had reached me only in the vaguest form and that if I hadbeen moved to put it to the test my very real interest in her must beheld responsible. Her blush died away, but a pair of still prettiertears glistened in its track. "If you ever hear such a thing said againyou can say it's a horrid lie!" I had brought on a commotion deeper thanany I was prepared for; but it was explained in some degree by the nextwords she uttered: "I'm happy to say there's nothing the matter with anypart of me whatever, not the least little thing!" She spoke with herhabitual complacency, with triumphant assurance; she smiled again, and Icould see how she wished that she hadn't so taken me up. She turned itoff with a laugh. "I've good eyes, good teeth, a good digestion and agood temper. I'm sound of wind and limb!" Nothing could have been morecharacteristic than her blush and her tears, nothing less acceptable toher than to be thought not perfect in every particular. She couldn'tsubmit to the imputation of a flaw. I expressed my delight in what shetold me, assuring her I should always do battle for her; and as if torejoin her companions she got up from her place on my mother's toes. Theyoung men presented their backs to us; they were leaning on the rail ofthe cliff. Our incident had produced a certain awkwardness, and while Iwas thinking of what next to say she exclaimed irrelevantly: "Don't youknow? He'll be Lord Considine. " At that moment the youth marked forthis high destiny turned round, and she spoke to my mother. "I'llintroduce him to you--he's awfully nice. " She beckoned and invited himwith her parasol; the movement struck me as taking everything forgranted. I had heard of Lord Considine and if I had not been able toplace Lord Iffield it was because I didn't know the name of his eldestson. The young man took no notice of Miss Saunt's appeal; he only stareda moment and then on her repeating it quietly turned his back. She wasan odd creature: she didn't blush at this; she only said to my motherapologetically, but with the frankest sweetest amusement, "You don'tmind, do you? He's a monster of shyness!" It was as if she were sorryfor every one--for Lord Iffield, the victim of a complaint so painful, and for my mother, the subject of a certain slight. "I'm sure I don'twant him!" said my mother, but Flora added some promise of how she wouldhandle him for his rudeness. She would clearly never explain anything byany failure of her own appeal. There rolled over me while she took leaveof us and floated back to her friends a wave of superstitious dread. Iseemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate, and yet what should fillout this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and such joy? I had adim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor, and though theremingled with it a faint impression that I shouldn't like his son theresult of the two images was a whimsical prayer that the girl mightn'tmiss her possible fortune. 

CHAPTER IV

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into mystudio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been verybriefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me somedays before his regret on learning that my "splendid portrait" of MissFlora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in thecatalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser beforethe close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whetherI might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head, some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied thatI had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he wereinterested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my roomwith awkward movements and equivocal sounds--a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large protrusive teeth. Hebore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to aremarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the queer communicationmatched the registered envelope. He was full of refinements and angles, of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery hisdress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his rednecktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform with ahigh sense of modernness to the fashion before the last. There weremoments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers andinterrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him tobe a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and the expressionof his good green eyes. 

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed explaining, especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendousfancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by thesimplicity of his judgment of them, a judgment for which the renderingwas lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He waslike the innocent reader for whom the story is "really true" and theauthor a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wantedto purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I hadnever seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why, for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the point todeal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this; the ideaclearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--personally so modestthat I could see it had never occurred to him. He had fallen in lovewith a painted sign and seemed content just to dream of what it stoodfor. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses hisheart to the miniature of the princess beyond seas. Until I knew himbetter this puzzled me much--the link was so missing between hissensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; butfor one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving apreference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at theothers, he expressed his wish to possess it and fell into the extremityof confusion over the question of price. I helped him over that stile, and he went off without having asked me a direct question about MissSaunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was suchthat he evidently considered his rights to be limited; he had acquirednone at all in regard to the original of the picture. There wereothers--for I was curious about him--that I wanted him to feel Iconceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a sense of groundacquired for coming back. To ensure this I had probably only to invitehim, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me forbear. Itoperated suddenly from within while he hung about the door and in spiteof the diffident appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he wassmitten with Flora's ghost what mightn't be the direct force of theluminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance, flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the nexttime he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there wererelations and complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. Ifthey were to develop they should develop in their very own sense. 

Let me say at once that they did develop and that I perhaps after all hadsomething to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a freshappointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no lesspowerful than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedlyfor months: she had grown to regard my studio as the temple of herbeauty. This miracle was recorded and celebrated there as nowhere else;in other places there was occasional reference to other subjects ofremark. The degree of her presumption continued to be stupefying; therewas nothing so extraordinary save the degree in which she never paid forit. She was kept innocent, that is she was kept safe, by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put off her mourning, by theattitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law unto herself. It was asa lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone orphan that she was thecentre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond Synges gave relief to thischaracter, and she made it worth their while to be, as every one said, too shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot tigers, but hereturned in time for the punctual private view: it was he who had snappedup, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition. My hope for thegirl's future had slipped ignominiously off his back, but after hispurchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith. The girl'sown faith was wonderful. It couldn't however be contagious: too greatwas the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her colourswere laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a personspeak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was after allvulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and couldalmost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly tired ofits "purity, " which affected me at last as inane. One moved with her, moreover, among phenomena mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talkever matched anything out of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading him a life. His mother, horrid woman, hadtold some one that she would rather he should be swallowed by a tigerthan marry a girl not absolutely one of themselves. He had given hisyoung friend unmistakable signs, but was lying low, gaining time: it wasin his father's power to be, both in personal and in pecuniary ways, excessively nasty to him. His father wouldn't last for ever--quite thecontrary; and he knew how thoroughly, in spite of her youth, her beautyand the swarm of her admirers, some of them positively threatening intheir passion, he could trust her to hold out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages too, but she liked her"little viscount" just as he was, and liked to think that, bullied andpersecuted, he had her there so gratefully to rest upon. She came backto me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn't. I never metmy pretty model in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exaltedcircles--and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, thegrandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand. 

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and shehad listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience, asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then shehad capped my anecdote with others much more striking, the disclosure ofeffects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who hadfollowed her into railway carriages; guards and porters even who hadliterally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hungabout her house door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gazetheir fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction throughthe very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in thesereminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only oneof a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into mystudio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to makeclear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn't because she had runafter him. Dawling explained with a hundred grins that when one wishedvery much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a propositionwhich led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that shehadn't in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn't have wishedto get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if shecould treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. Truethere always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much atany rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She hadspent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in Germancities, in the French capital, many accidents might have happened. 

CHAPTER V

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam ofFrance had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes. Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she calledthem, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would soon beon the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices thatthere was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her breezycliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light: she knewso much more about everything and everybody than I could ever squeeze outof my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system andabsolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning wasthat her money would last as long as she should need it, that amagnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be reallypinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the properuse of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keepher afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet hermatch. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia;but it was Mrs. Meldrum's conviction that nothing was to be expected ofhim but the most futile flirtation. The girl had a certain hold of him, but with a great deal of swagger he hadn't the spirit of a sheep: he wasin fear of his father and would never commit himself in Lord Considine'slifetime. The most Flora might achieve was that he wouldn't marry someone else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum's knowledge (I had told herof the young man's visit) had attached himself on the way back from Italyto the Hammond Synge group. My informant was in a position to bedefinite about this dangler; she knew about his people; she had heard ofhim before. Hadn't he been a friend of one of her nephews at Oxford?Hadn't he spent the Christmas holidays precisely three years before ather brother-in-law's in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himselfrefused with derision by wilful Betty, the second daughter of the house?Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her tocomplain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as anappendage of Flora's was one of those oft-cited proofs that the world issmall and that there are not enough people to go round. His father hadbeen something or other in the Treasury; his grandfather on the mother'sside had been something or other in the Church. He had come into thepaternal estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he hadlet the place advantageously and was generous to four plain sisters wholived at Bournemouth and adored him. The family was hideous all round, but the very salt of the earth. He was supposed to be unspeakablyclever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society andof the idea of a political career. That such a man should be at the sametime fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume ofGibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations. I was soon to learn thathe was fonder of her than of all the other things together. Betty, oneof five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home tohave dished herself by her perversity. Of course no one had looked ather since and no one would ever look at her again. It would be eminentlydesirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty's fate. 

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptom onour young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The one moral she sawin anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr. Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealinggods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to Londonagain. I afterwards learned that her version of this episode wasprofusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determinedby an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what hadgone before--a coincidence at all events superficially striking. AtMunich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, hehad found himself at the table d'hote of his inn opposite to the fullpresentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dreamand desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as toinvolve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with aresounding thud at the very feet of his apparition. On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from afate of which he had already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before it--drove him one Sundayafternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He marched inother words close up to the cannon that was to blow him to pieces. Butthree weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (tovary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days wasfirmly lashed to his back. I don't mean by this that Flora had beenpersuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to theunconditional snub which, as the event was to show, couldn't have beenbettered as a means of securing him. She hadn't calculated, but she hadsaid "Never!" and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-leggedpatience. He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figurein the piece. 

Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, andhaving on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at mydoor. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity sohuge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear itbumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in thelight of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have brokenhis leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanentlylame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of himleft in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, theliterary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters allseemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. Ihadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great manat whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who hadaddressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myselfhow effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for thecareer on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember toomaking up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I supposein impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction ofmere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract arevealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and hischill, and the only thing he touched with judgment was this convenienceof my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the mattercomes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of myhaving had to put it together for him. He took it from me in this formwithout a groan, and I gave it him quite as it came; he took it again andagain, spending his odd half-hours with me as if for the very purpose oflearning how idiotically he was in love. He told me I made him seethings: to begin with, hadn't I first made him see Flora Saunt? I wantedhim to give her up and lucidly informed him why; on which he neverprotested nor contradicted, never was even so alembicated as to declarejust for the sake of the point that he wouldn't. He simply andpointlessly didn't, and when at the end of three months I asked him whatwas the use of talking with such a fellow his nearest approach to ajustification was to say that what made him want to help her was just thedeficiencies I dwelt on. I could only reply without gross developments:"Oh if you're as sorry for her as that!" I too was nearly as sorry forher as that, but it only led me to be sorrier still for other victims ofthis compassion. With Dawling as with me the compassion was at first inexcess of any visible motive; so that when eventually the motive wassupplied each could to a certain extent compliment the other on thefineness of his foresight. 

After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and Ifinally learned that she accused me of conspiring with him to putpressure on her to marry him. She didn't know I would take it that way, else she would never have brought him to see me. It was in her view apart of the conspiracy that to show him a kindness I asked him at last tosit to me. I dare say moreover she was disgusted to hear that I hadended by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I hadattempted of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a handthat could so abase itself? My relation to poor Dawling's want ofmodelling was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desertfor the buried treasure of his soul. 

CHAPTER VI

It befell at this period, just before Christmas, that on my having goneunder pressure of the season into a great shop to buy a toy or two, myeyes fleeing from superfluity, lighted at a distance on the brightconcretion of Flora Saunt, an exhibitability that held its own evenagainst the most plausible pinkness of the most developed dolls. A hugequarter of the place, the biggest bazaar "on earth, " was peopled withthese and other effigies and fantasies, as well as with purchasers andvendors haggard alike, in the blaze of the gas, with hesitations. I wasjust about to appeal to Flora to avert that stage of my errand when I sawthat she was accompanied by a gentleman whose identity, though more thana year had elapsed, came back to me from the Folkestone cliff. It hadbeen associated on that scene with showy knickerbockers; at present itoverflowed more splendidly into a fur-trimmed overcoat. Lord Iffield'spresence made me waver an instant before crossing over, and during thatinstant Flora, blank and undistinguishing, as if she too were after allweary of alternatives, looked straight across at me. I was on the pointof raising my hat to her when I observed that her face gave no sign. Iwas exactly in the line of her vision, but she either didn't see me ordidn't recognise me, or else had a reason to pretend she didn't. Was herreason that I had displeased her and that she wished to punish me? I hadalways thought it one of her merits that she wasn't vindictive. She atany rate simply looked away; and at this moment one of the shop-girls, who had apparently gone off in search of it, bustled up to her with asmall mechanical toy. It so happened that I followed closely what thentook place, afterwards recognising that I had been led to do so, led eventhrough the crowd to press nearer for the purpose, by an impression ofwhich in the act I was not fully conscious. 

Flora with the toy in her hand looked round at her companion; then seeinghis attention had been solicited in another quarter she moved away withthe shop-girl, who had evidently offered to conduct her into the presenceof more objects of the same sort. When she reached the indicated spot Iwas in a position still to observe her. She had asked some questionabout the working of the toy, and the girl, taking it herself, began toexplain the little secret. Flora bent her head over it, but she clearlydidn't understand. I saw her, in a manner that quickened my curiosity, give a glance back at the place from which she had come. Lord Iffieldwas talking with another young person; she satisfied herself of this bythe aid of a question addressed to her own attendant. She then drewcloser to the table near which she stood and, turning her back to me, bent her head lower over the collection of toys and more particularlyover the small object the girl had attempted to explain. She took itagain and, after a moment, with her face well averted, made an odd motionof her arms and a significant little duck of her head. These slightsigns, singular as it may appear, produced in my bosom an agitation sogreat that I failed to notice Lord Iffield's whereabouts. He hadrejoined her; he was close upon her before I knew it or before she knewit herself. I felt at that instant the strangest of all promptings: ifit could have operated more rapidly it would have caused me to dashbetween them in some such manner as to give Flora a caution. In fact asit was I think I could have done this in time had I not been checked by acuriosity stronger still than my impulse. There were three secondsduring which I saw the young man and yet let him come on. Didn't I makethe quick calculation that if he didn't catch what Flora was doing I toomight perhaps not catch it? She at any rate herself took the alarm. Onperceiving her companion's nearness she made, still averted, another duckof her head and a shuffle of her hands so precipitate that a little tinsteamboat she had been holding escaped from them and rattled down to thefloor with a sharpness that I hear at this hour. Lord Iffield hadalready seized her arm; with a violent jerk he brought her round towardhim. Then it was that there met my eyes a quite distressing sight: thisexquisite creature, blushing, glaring, exposed, with a pair of big black-rimmed eye-glasses, defacing her by their position, crookedly astride ofher beautiful nose. She made a grab at them with her free hand while Iturned confusedly away. 

CHAPTER VII

I don't remember how soon it was I spoke to Geoffrey Dawling; hissittings were irregular, but it was certainly the very next time he gaveme one. 

"Has any rumour ever reached you of Miss Saunt's having anything thematter with her eyes?" He stared with a candour that was a sufficientanswer to my question, backing it up with a shocked and mystified"Never!" Then I asked him if he had observed in her any symptom, howeverdisguised, of embarrassed sight; on which, after a moment's thought, heexclaimed "Disguised?" as if my use of that word had vaguely awakened atrain. "She's not a bit myopic, " he said; "she doesn't blink or contracther lids. " I fully recognised this and I mentioned that she altogetherdenied the impeachment; owing it to him moreover to explain the ground ofmy inquiry, I gave him a sketch of the incident that had taken placebefore me at the shop. He knew all about Lord Iffield; that nobleman hadfigured freely in our conversation as his preferred, his injurious rival. Poor Dawling's contention was that if there had been a definiteengagement between his lordship and the young lady, the sort of thingthat was announced in the Morning Post, renunciation and retirement wouldbe comparatively easy to him; but that having waited in vain for any suchassurance he was entitled to act as if the door were not really closed orwere at any rate not cruelly locked. He was naturally much struck withmy anecdote and still more with my interpretation of it. 

"There _is_ something, there _is_ something--possibly something verygrave, certainly something that requires she should make use ofartificial aids. She won't admit it publicly, because with her idolatryof her beauty, the feeling she is all made up of, she sees in such aidsnothing but the humiliation and the disfigurement. She has used them insecret, but that is evidently not enough, for the affection she suffersfrom, apparently some definite menace, has lately grown much worse. Shelooked straight at me in the shop, which was violently lighted, withoutseeing it was I. At the same distance, at Folkestone, where as you knowI first met her, where I heard this mystery hinted at and where sheindignantly denied the thing, she appeared easily enough to recognisepeople. At present she couldn't really make out anything the shop-girlshowed her. She has successfully concealed from the man I saw her withthat she resorts in private to a pince-nez and that she does so not onlyunder the strictest orders from her oculist, but because literally thepoor thing can't accomplish without such help half the business of life. Iffield however has suspected something, and his suspicions, whetherexpressed or kept to himself, have put him on the watch. I happened tohave a glimpse of the movement at which he pounced on her and caught herin the act. "

I had thought it all out; my idea explained many things, and Dawlingturned pale as he listened to me. 

"Was he rough with her?" he anxiously asked. 

"How can I tell what passed between them? I fled from the place. "

My companion stared. "Do you mean to say her eyesight's going?"

"Heaven forbid! In that case how could she take life as she does?"

"How _does_ she take life? That's the question!" He sat therebewilderedly brooding; the tears rose to his lids; they reminded me ofthose I had seen in Flora's the day I risked my enquiry. The question hehad asked was one that to my own satisfaction I was ready to answer, butI hesitated to let him hear as yet all that my reflections had suggested. I was indeed privately astonished at their ingenuity. For the present Ionly rejoined that it struck me she was playing a particular game; atwhich he went on as if he hadn't heard me, suddenly haunted with a fear, lost in the dark possibility. "Do you mean there's a danger of anythingvery bad?"

"My dear fellow, you must ask her special adviser. "

"Who in the world is her special adviser?"

"I haven't a conception. But we mustn't get too excited. My impressionwould be that she has only to observe a few ordinary rules, to exercise alittle common sense. "

Dawling jumped at this. "I see--to stick to the pince-nez. "

"To follow to the letter her oculist's prescription, whatever it is andat whatever cost to her prettiness. It's not a thing to be trifledwith. "

"Upon my honour it _shan't_ be!" he roundly declared; and he adjustedhimself 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 glasses--in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it waspartly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look charmingin nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer? She must be madnot to accept that alternative. "

"She _is_ mad, " said Geoffrey Dawling. 

"Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides, " I went on, "the pince-nez, whichwas 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 groaned. 

"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 Idisgustedly shrugged my shoulders. 

After a glance at me Dawling jerked round. "Then you do believe that shemay be?"

I hesitated. "The thing would be to make _her_ believe it. She onlyneeds 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 supposeIffield is absolutely a brute. "

"I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!" criedGeoffrey 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 thepurposes of my sitting. I recollect that I did some good work thatmorning, but it also comes back to me that before we separated he hadpractically revealed to me that my anecdote, connecting itself in hismind with a series of observations at the time unconscious andunregistered, had covered with light the subject of our colloquy. He hadhad a formless perception of some secret that drove Miss Saunt tosubterfuges, and the more he thought of it the more he guessed thissecret to be the practice of making believe she saw when she didn't andof cleverly keeping people from finding out how little she saw. When onepieced things together it was astonishing what ground they covered. Justas he was going away he asked me from what source at Folkestone thehorrid tale had proceeded. When I had given him, as I saw no reason notto 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 wilfulBetty and said to myself that I knew some one who would probably provemore wilful still. 

CHAPTER VIII

A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before hepassed my threshold I knew he had something to tell. 

"I've been down to Folkestone--it was necessary I should see her!" Iforget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any rateout of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to apply. 

"You mean that you've been with Mrs. Meldrum?"

"Yes, to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It workedupon me awfully--I mean what you told me. " He made a visible effort toseem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had notbeen reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, afriendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them aninstant, a strange distended look which might have expressed the coldclearness of all that was to come. "I _know--_now!" he said with anemphasis he rarely used. 

"What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?"

"Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But thatone thing was everything. "

"What is it then?"

"Why, that she can't bear the sight of her. " His pronouns required somearranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that Iwas quite aware of Miss Saunt's trick of turning her back on the goodlady of Folkestone. Only what did that prove? "Have you never guessed?I guessed as soon as she spoke!" Dawling towered over me in dismaltriumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, on any groundof understanding this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incidentstill left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: "Why, theeffect of those spectacles!"

I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. "Mrs. Meldrum's?"

"They're so awfully ugly and they add so to the dear woman's ugliness. "This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added "She seesherself, she sees her own fate!" my response was so immediate that I hadalmost taken the words out of his mouth. While I tried to fix thissudden image of Flora's face glazed in and cross-barred even as Mrs. Meldrum's was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only thehorror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of heravoiding the person who so forced it home. The fact he had encounteredmade everything hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else thatjust such another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed toFlora. 

"I see--I see, " I presently returned. "What would become of Lord Iffieldif she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become ofevery one, what would become of everything?" This was an enquiry thatDawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying atlast: "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 Idiscovered at this moment how much I really liked him. None the less, atthe same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of ourdiscussion of such alternatives. It made me laugh out and say to himwhile 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 myrude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone andconscientiously replied: "Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum's. " Ibegged him not to resent my laughter, which but exposed the fact that wehad built a monstrous castle in the air. Didn't he see on what flimsyground the structure rested? The evidence was preposterously small. Hebelieved the worst, but we were really uninformed. 

"I shall find out the truth, " he promptly replied. 

"How can you? If you question her you'll simply drive her to perjureherself. Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth? It'sthe girl's own affair. "

"Then why did you tell me your story?"

I was a trifle embarrassed. "To warn you off, " I smiled. He took nomore notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord Iffield hadno serious intentions. "Very possibly, " I said. "But you mustn't speakas if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives. "

Dawling thought a moment. "Couldn't something be got out of the peopleshe has consulted? She must have been to people. How else can she havebeen condemned?"

"Condemned to what? Condemned to perpetual nippers? Of course she hasconsulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may besure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable thatthey would tell you anything--which I altogether doubt--you would havegreat difficulty in finding out which men they are. Therefore leave italone; never show her what you suspect. "

I even before he quitted me asked him to promise me this. "All right, Ipromise"--but he was gloomy enough. He was a lover facing the fact thatthere was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: itmade so remarkably little difference. I could see by what a stretch hispassionate pity would from this moment overlook the girl's fatuity andfolly. She was always accessible to him--that I knew; for if she hadtold him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would haverebuked the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she wouldalways be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of herfriends--what were all of them--but repudiated idiots? I was perfectlyaware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance hada niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often hestill called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the wingof 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'sname was one morning brought up to me, I jumped at the conclusion thatDawling had been with her, and even I fear briefly entertained thethought that he had broken his word. 

CHAPTER IX

She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about herpresent motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlightenme; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiablypanted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in theworld, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangestsaddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least mademe at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she hadstruck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her follyit lifted the curtain of her misery. I don't know how much she meant totell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaboratemisrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes thesimplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When shehad once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet; therelief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word herlong secret, she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess, tearsto 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 itsconsequences, the most immediate of which was that I went that afternoonto see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to warrant thesupposition that he might have come in. He had not come in, but he wasexpected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him: a lady, I wasinformed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a little at aloss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the lady was perhapsFlora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and remarkably pretty Ireceived so significant a "No sir!" that I risked an advance and after aminute in this manner found myself, to my astonishment, face to face withMrs. Meldrum. 

"Oh you dear thing, " she exclaimed, "I'm delighted to see you: you spareme another compromising demarche! But for this I should have called onyou also. Know the worst at once: if you see me here it's at leastdeliberate--it's planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose tosee him, upon my word I'm in love with him. Why, if you valued my peaceof mind, did you let him the other day at Folkestone dawn upon mydelighted eyes? I found myself there in half an hour simply infatuatedwith him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged againsthim I hold him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven'tcome up to declare my passion--I've come to bring him news that willinterest him much more. Above all I've come to urge upon him to becareful. "

"About Flora Saunt?"

"About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse! She's atlast really engaged. "

"But it's a tremendous secret?" I was moved to mirth. 

"Precisely: she wired me this noon, and spent another shilling to tell methat not a creature in the world is yet to know it. "

"She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed anhour with the creature you see before you. "

"She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!" Mrs. Meldrumcried. "They've vital reasons, she says, for it's not coming out for amonth. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicingis wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as it's nearly seveno'clock, may have jumped off London Bridge. But an effect of the talk Ihad 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, so tocall it, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried away withhim. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what you hadtold him you had seen in your shop. "

Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errandidentical with my own--a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity, inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing fromwhat Flora's wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her thatwhat I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that I hadseen a great deal more that morning in my studio. "In short, " I said, "I've seen everything. "

She was mystified. "Everything?"

"The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh she came totriumph, but she remained to talk something in the nature of sense! Sheput herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to intimatethat of all her friends I'm the most disinterested. After she hadannounced to me that Lord Iffield was utterly committed to her and thatfor the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, shearrived at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever sincethat day at Folkestone when I asked her for the truth about her eyes. Thetruth is what you and I both guessed. She's in very bad danger. "

"But from what cause? I, who by God's mercy have kept mine, knoweverything that can be known about eyes, " said Mrs. Meldrum. 

"She might have kept hers if she had profited by God's mercy, if she haddone in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if shehadn't in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make herbehaviour a thing of fable. She may still keep her sight, or whatremains of it, if she'll sacrifice--and after all so little--that purelysuperficial 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 inAugust. "Heaven forgive her--now I understand!" She flushed for dismay. 

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 atsuch a distance. "I can't tell you, " I said, "from what specialaffection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: that's the onething she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows itherself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. 'It's a thingthat'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 withMrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted thegreatest man--even Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesn't know. Last autumn inGermany she did the same. 'First put on certain special spectacles witha straight bar in the middle: then we'll talk'--that's practically whatthey say. What _she_ says is that she'll put on anything in nature whenshe's married, but that she must get married first. She has always meantto do everything as soon as she's married. Then and then only she'll besafe. 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 fromthe 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 mostcharacteristic, 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 Ineeded it all--I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It isn't asif I had a figure or anything else. Oh if God had only given me a figuretoo, I don't say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one, like FannyFloyd-Taylor's, who's hideous, I'd have risked plain glasses. Que voulez-vous? No one is perfect. ' She says she still has money left, but Idon't believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her impunity, onthe idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally been running arace 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 toocruel she wears when she's alone what she has been ordered to wear. Butwhen the deuce is she alone? It's herself of course that she hasswindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely that even herconceit but half accounts for it, with little inadequate concessions, little false measures and preposterous evasions and childish hopes. Hergreat terror is now that Iffield, who already has suspicions, who hasfound out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled with some unblushinghocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and the essence of what shewanted this morning was in that interest to square me, to get me to denyindignantly and authoritatively (for isn't she my 'favourite sitter?')that she has anything in life the matter with any part of her. Shesobbed, she 'went on, ' she entreated; after we got talking herextraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she has beenthrough--showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do her. 'Waittill I'm married! wait till I'm married!' She took hold of me, shealmost sank on her knees. It seems to me highly immoral, one'sparticipation in her fraud; but there's no doubt that she must bemarried: I don't know what I don't see behind it! Therefore, " I woundup, "Dawling must keep his hands off. "

Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she gave out a long moan. "Well, that's exactly what I came here to tell him. "

"Then here he is. " Our host, all unprepared, his latchkey still in hishand, had just pushed open the door and, startled at finding us, turned afrightened look from one to the other, wondering what disaster we werethere to announce or avert. 

Mrs. Meldrum was on the spot all gaiety. "I've come to return your sweetvisit. Ah, " she laughed, "I mean to keep up the acquaintance!"

"Do--do, " he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look atus. Then he broke out: "He's going to marry her. "

I was surprised. "You already know?"

He produced an evening paper, which he tossed down on the table. "It'sin that. "

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

"Oh Flora can't keep a secret!"--Mrs. Meldrum made it light. She went upto 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 everany more. " Then as he met this adjuration with a stare from whichthought, and of the most defiant and dismal, fairly protruded, theexcellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on thecheek. 

CHAPTER X

I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads, and Iconfess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am rather proudof the comparison. The beads are all there, as I said--they slip alongthe string in their small smooth roundness. Geoffrey Dawling accepted asa gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of whichI snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrumhis hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriagewould henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the street maystrike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital. Circumstancesarising at this time led to my making an absence from England, andcircumstances already existing offered him a firm basis for similaraction. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton--he could taketo his boats, always drawn up in our background. He started on a journeyround the globe, and I was left with nothing but my inference as to whatmight have happened. Later observation however only confirmed my beliefthat if at any time during the couple of months after Flora Saunt'sbrilliant engagement he had made up, as they say, to the good lady ofFolkestone, 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 beenobliged to administer that shove. I went to New York to paint a coupleof portraits; but I found, once on the spot, that I had counted withoutChicago, where I was invited to blot out this harsh discrimination by theproduction of some dozen. I spent a year in America and should probablyhave spent a second had I not been summoned back to England by alarmingnews from my mother. Her strength had failed, and as soon as I reachedLondon I hurried down to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offera welcome to some slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse butwas now a little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction inhaving come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, wherearrears of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatevermight next occur. Yet before returning to town I called on Mrs. Meldrum, from whom I had not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacentobjects, as I had left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriantforeground. 

Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward meacross the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of hergreat vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanadea blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on thegrass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for I had seen in afew more seconds that the person thus assaulted had by no means thefigure of my military friend. I felt a shock much greater than any Ishould have thought possible when on this person's drawing near I knewher for poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised mebelonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so chieflymattered that I should succeed in looking entirely unastonished. All Iat first saw was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over whichsomething convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out ofthe orifice of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face hadshrunk away: it looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was atall events, so far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, whollysacrificed 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 said and I wondered whether shedidn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice. 

"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum, " she ever so quietly answered. 

It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. "Oh yes, you have a tremendous deal in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I've justreturned 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 keepingclear of our friend was well disposed of now. 

"I've just left her. I'm staying with her. " She stood solemnly fixingme with her goggles. "Would you like to paint me now?" she asked. Sheseemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage. 

There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high spirits. "It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!" That something waswrong it wasn't difficult to see, but a good deal more than met the eyemight be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum's roof. Ihadn't for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination hadhad ground for lodging her in more gilded halls. One of the last thingsI had heard before leaving England was that in commemoration of the newrelationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made metake everything else for granted, and the noisy American world haddeafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were atpresent a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of newrelationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless thatwhen after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myselfnervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything verydreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questionsabout Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse onthe subject of my own doings. My companion was finely silent, and I feltboth as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister ironyand as if I were talking to some different and strange person. Floraplain and obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum's doorshe turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a greatdeal 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 onlyto meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl's trouble thatI hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn'texpress a compassion without seeming to take for granted more troublethan there actually might have been. I reflected that I must reallyfigure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expectedto give her. It rolled over me there for the first time--it has comeback to me since--that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even invery foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveteratehabit of being all right. I couldn't have to her the manner of treatingit as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at ourlast meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying tothink of some manner that I _could_ have she said quite colourlessly, though somehow as if she might never see me again: "Good-bye. I'm goingto 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 disfigurementas temporary, and the confidence came to me that she would never, for herhappiness, cease to be a creature of illusions. It enabled me toexclaim, smiling brightly and feeling indeed idiotic: "Oh I shall see youagain! But I hope you'll have a very pleasant walk. "

"All my walks are 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 intheir wisdom. "I take several a day, " she continued. She might havebeen an ancient woman responding with humility at the church door to thepatronage of the parson. "The more I take the better I feel. I'mordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in forplenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if thatgoes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be allright. All that was the matter with me before--and always; it was tooreckless!--was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly onthe state of the particular organ. So I'm going three miles. "

I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum's maid stood thereto admit me. "Oh I'm so glad, " I said, looking at her as she paced awaywith the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, whileshe rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Herair of assurance 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?

CHAPTER XI

As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I of course broke out. "Is there anythingin it? _Is_ her general health--?"

Mrs. Meldrum checked me with her great amused blare. "You've alreadyseen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What's 'in it' is whathas been in everything she has ever done--the most comical, tragicalbelief 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. "Why he behaved like a regularbeast. "

"How should I know? You never wrote me. " Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the particular organ. "No, Ididn't write you--I abstained on purpose. If I kept quiet I thought youmightn't hear over there what had happened. If you should hear I wasafraid you would stir up Mr. Dawling. "

"Stir him up?"

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

"I wouldn't have done it, " I said. 

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

"In short you were afraid of it. "

Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thoughtshe considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out. Then "I wasafraid of it!" she very honestly answered. 

"But doesn't he know? Has he given no sign?"

"Every sign in life--he came straight back to her. He did everything toget her to listen to him, but she hasn't the smallest idea of it. "

"Has he seen her as she is now?" I presently and just a trifle awkwardlyenquired. 

"Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it. "

"How much you've all been through!" I found occasion to remark. "Thenwhat has become of him?"

"He's at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believeby this time his old sisters. It's not half a bad little place. "

"Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?"

"Oh Flora's by no means on her back!" my fried declared. 

"She's not on her back because she's on yours. Have you got her for therest of your life?"

Once more Mrs. Meldrum genially glared. "Did she tell you how much theHammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty poundsa year. "

"That's a good deal, but it won't pay the oculist. What was it that atlast induced her to submit to him?"

"Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield's rupture. Shecried her eyes out--she passed through a horror of black darkness. Thencame a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She wentinto goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic church. "

"In spite of which you don't think she'll be saved?"

"_She_ thinks she will--that's all I can tell you. There's no doubt thatwhen once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known. That feeling, verynew and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has given hersomething to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind a beliefthat, as she says, she's on the mend and that in the course of time, ifshe leads a tremendously healthy life, she'll be able to take off hermuzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her going. "

"And what keeps you? You're good until the parties begin again. "

"Oh she doesn't object to me now!" smiled Mrs. Meldrum. "I'm going totake her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair. " I was struck with thisenergy and after a moment I enquired the reason of it. "It's to diverther mind, " my friend replied, reddening again a little, I thought. "Weshall go next week: I've only waited to see how your mother would bebefore starting. " I expressed to her hereupon my sense of herextraordinary merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora'sfancying herself still in a situation not to jump at the chance ofmarrying a man like Dawling. "She says he's too ugly; she says he's toodreary; she says in fact he's 'nobody, '" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She saysabove all that he's not 'her own sort. ' She doesn't deny that he's good, but she finds him impossibly ridiculous. He's quite the last person shewould ever dream of. " I was almost disposed on hearing this to protestthat if the girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor hadperhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just howher noble suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and Iasked a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him theinvidious term I have already quoted. What had happened was simply thatFlora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to put him offwith an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his lordship'sinterest in her had not been proof against the discovery of the way shehad practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to perceive, hadbeen infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new complexion forhim when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride who, as he hadsaid to some one, couldn't really, when you came to find out, see herhand before her face. He had conducted himself like any other jockeyedcustomer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had backed out inhis own way, giving the business, by some sharp shuffle, such a turn asto make the rupture ostensibly Flora's, but he had none the lessremorselessly and basely backed out. He had cared for her lovely face, cared for it in the amused and haunted way it had been her poor littledelusive gift to make men care; and her lovely face, damn it, with themonstrous gear she had begun to rig upon it, was just what had let himin. He had in the judgment of his family done everything that could beexpected of him; he had made--Mrs. Meldrum had herself seen the letter--a"handsome" offer of pecuniary compensation. Oh if Flora, with herincredible buoyancy, was in a manner on her feet again now it was notthat she had not for weeks and weeks been prone in the dust. Strangewere the humiliations, the forms of anguish, it was given some natures tosurvive. That Flora had survived was perhaps after all a proof she wasreserved for some final mercy. "But she has been in the abysses at anyrate, " said Mrs. Meldrum, "and I really don't think I can tell you whatpulled her through. "

"I think I can tell _you_, " I returned. "What in the world but Mrs. Meldrum?"

At the end of an hour Flora had not come in, and I was obliged toannounce that I should have but time to reach the station, where I was tofind my luggage in charge of my mother's servant. Mrs. Meldrum putbefore me the question of waiting till a later train, so as not to loseour young lady, but I confess I gave this alternative a considerationless acute than I pretended. Somehow I didn't care if I did lose ouryoung lady. Now that I knew the worst that had befallen her it struck mestill less as possible to meet her on the ground of condolence; and withthe sad appearance she wore to me what other ground was left? I losther, but I caught my train. In truth she was so changed that one hatedto see it; and now that she was in charitable hands one didn't feelcompelled to make great efforts. I had studied her face for a particularbeauty; I had lived with that beauty and reproduced it; but I knew whatbelonged to my trade well enough to be sure it was gone for ever. 

CHAPTER XII

I was soon called back to Folkestone; but Mrs. Meldrum and her youngfriend had already left England, finding to that end every convenience onthe spot and not having had to come up to town. My thoughts however wereso painfully engaged there that I should in any case have had littleattention for them: the event occurred that was to bring my series ofvisits to a close. When this high tide had ebbed I returned to Americaand 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 risingagain to the surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in theAmerican depths: they may have had something to do with the duration ofmy dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanor--the factthat after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She hadwritten to me from Florence after my mother's death and had mentioned ina postscript that in our young lady's calculations the lowest figureswere now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and if in subsequentletters there was no news of a sequel I was content to accept smallthings and to believe that grave tidings, should there be any, would cometo me in due course. The gravity of what might happen to a featherweightbecame indeed with time and distance less appreciable, and I was notwithout an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of proportion wasnot the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the world with the upsand downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky and dim, a smallfitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable consciousness of howkind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was professionally morepreoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms of pretty faces in myeyes and a chorus of loud tones in my ears. Geoffrey Dawling had on hisreturn to England written me two or three letters: his last informationhad been that he was going into the figures of rural illiteracy. I wasdelighted to receive it and had no doubt that if he should go intofigures they would, as they are said to be able to prove anything, proveat least that my advice was sound and that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on my part another hope, a hope suggested by someroundabout rumour--I forget how it reached me--that he was engaged to agirl down in Hampshire. He turned out not to be, but I felt sure that ifonly he went into figures deep enough he would become, among the girlsdown in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of those numerous prizes of battlewhose defences are practically not on the scale of their provocations. Inursed in short the thought that it was probably open to him to developas one of the types about whom, as the years go on, superficial criticswonder without relief how they ever succeeded in dragging a bride to thealtar. He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silenceabout her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum's, an element of instinctive tact, abrief implication that if you didn't happen to have been in love with herthere was nothing to be said. 

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which Ihad always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for the first actof "Lohengrin, " but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself upto it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over Itreated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a generalsurvey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections, pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored toLondon. There was the common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenlynoted 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 theaim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirableserenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter furthestremoved from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt, to cause one'scuriosity to linger. Dressed in white, with diamonds in her hair andpearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance of beauty which even at thatdistance made her a distinguished presence and, with the air that easilyattaches to lonely loveliness in public places, an agreeable mystery. Amystery however she remained to me only for a minute after I had levelledmy glass at her: I feel to this moment the startled thrill, the shockalmost of joy, with which I translated her vague brightness into aresurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection, because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left our young woman for dead. At presentperfectly alive again, she was altered only, as it were, by this fact oflife. A little older, a little quieter, a little finer and a good dealfairer, she was simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained bythe reflection that even her recovery wouldn't enable her to distinguishme in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then it was it camehome to me that my vision of her in her great goggles had been cruellyfinal. As her beauty was all there was of her, that machinery hadextinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her in the interval Ihad 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 returnto her; and if I didn't straightway leave my place and rush round thetheatre and up to her box it was because I was fixed to the spot somemoments 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 hereyes vaguely directed, as it seemed on me, to one of the boxes on my sideof the house and consequently over my head and out of my sight. The onlymovement she made for some time was to finger with an ungloved hand andas if with the habit of fondness the row of pearls on her neck, which myglass showed me to be large and splendid. Her diamonds and pearls, inher solitude, mystified me, making me, as she had had no such bravejewels in the days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-ofimprovement had taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a questionhovered there a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened asthat 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 hadbecome a person of such fashion where was the little court one wouldnaturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling, though it couldeasily suggest that she was but momentarily alone. If she had come withMrs. Meldrum that lady would have taken advantage of the interval to paya visit to some other box--doubtless the box at which Flora had just beenlooking. Mrs. Meldrum didn't account for the jewels, but the revival ofFlora's beauty accounted for anything. She presently moved her eyes overthe house, and I felt them brush me again like the wings of a dove. Idon't know what quick pleasure flickered into the hope that she would atlast see me. She did see me: she suddenly bent forward to take up thelittle double-barrelled ivory glass that rested on the edge of the boxand to all appearance fix me with it. I smiled from my place straight upat the searching lenses, and after an instant she dropped them and smiledas straight back at me. Oh her smile--it was her old smile, her youngsmile, her very own smile made perfect! I instantly left my stall andhurried off for a nearer view of it; quite flushed, I remember, as I wentwith the annoyance of having happened to think of the idiotic way I hadtried to paint her. Poor Iffield with his sample of that error, andstill poorer Dawling in particular with _his_! I hadn't touched her, Iwas professionally humiliated, and as the attendant in the lobby openedher box for me I felt that the very first thing I should have to say toher would be that she must absolutely sit to me again. 

CHAPTER XIII

She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder, from her chair, sheturned her face to me. "Here you are again!" she exclaimed with herdisgloved hand put up a little backward for me to take. I dropped into achair just behind her and, having taken it and noted that one of thecurtains of the box would make the demonstration sufficiently private, bent my lips over it and impressed them on its finger-tips. It was givenme however, to my astonishment, to feel next that all the privacy in theworld couldn't have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she greetedthis 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 severalextraordinary things happened, the first of which was that now I wasclose to them the eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into didn'tshow at all the conscious light I had just been pleased to see them flashacross the house: they showed on the contrary, to my confusion, a strangesweet 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 effacethe effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsivelysnatched from me. It was the irrepressible question in this grasp thatstopped on my lips all sound of salutation. She had mistaken my entrancefor that of another person, a pair of lips without a moustache. She wasfeeling me to see who I was! With the perception of this and of her notseeing me I sat gaping at her and at the wild word that didn't come, theright word to express or to disguise my dismay. What was the right wordto commemorate one's sudden discovery, at the very moment too at whichone had been most encouraged to count on better things, that one's dearold friend had gone blind? Before the answer to this question droppedupon me--and the moving moments, though few, seemed many--I heard, withthe sound of voices, the click of the attendant's key on the other sideof the door. Poor Flora heard also and on hearing, still with her handon my arm, brightened again as I had a minute since seen her brightenacross the house: she had the sense of the return of the person she hadtaken me for--the person with the right pair of lips, as to whom I wasfor that matter much more in the dark than she. I gasped, but my wordhad come: if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she hadfound again her beauty. I managed to speak while we were still alone, before her companion had appeared. "You're lovelier at this day than youhave ever been in your life!" At the sound of my voice and that of theopening of the door her impatience broke into audible joy. She sprangup, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a gentlemanwho was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He has come back, hehas come back, and you should have heard what he says of me!" Thegentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to let him hear onthe spot. "How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how extraordinarilybeautiful! 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 blestsnap of the strain I had been struggling with. I wanted to embrace themboth, and while the opening bars of another scene rose from the orchestraI almost did embrace Dawling, whose first emotion on beholding me hadvisibly and ever so oddly been a consciousness of guilt. I had caughthim somehow in the act, though that was as yet all I knew; but by thetime we sank noiselessly into our chairs again--for the music wassupreme, Wagner passed first--my demonstration ought pretty well to havegiven 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 silentcloseness the very moral of my optimism, which was simply the comfort Ihad gathered from seeing that if our companion's beauty lived again hervanity partook of its life. I had hit on the right note--that was whateased me off: it drew all pain for the next half-hour from the sense ofthe deep darkness in which the stricken woman sat. If the music, in thatdarkness, happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unisonwith those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went between uswithout profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of twentyminutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have to tellme; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls, hadmisled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by appearing to recogniseme and smile. She leaned back in her chair in luxurious ease: I had fromthe first become aware that the way she fingered her pearls was a sharpimage of the wedded state. Nothing of old had seemed wanting to herassurance, but I hadn't then dreamed of the art with which she would wearthat assurance as a married woman. She had taken him when everything hadfailed; he had taken her when she herself had done so. His embarrassedeyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he found in it. Theyonly didn't tell me why he had not written to me, nor clear up as yet aminor obscurity. Flora after a while again lifted the glass from theledge of the box and elegantly swept the house with it. Then, by themere instinct of her grace, a motion but half conscious, she inclined herhead into the void with the sketch of a salute, producing, I could see, aperfect imitation of response to some homage. Dawling and I looked ateach other again; the tears came into his eyes. She was playing atperfection still, and her misfortune only simplified the process. 

I recognised that this was as near as I should ever come, certainly as Ishould come that night, to pressing on her misfortune. Neither of uswould name it more than we were doing then, and Flora would never name itat all. Little by little I saw that what had occurred was, strange as itmight appear, the best thing for her happiness. The question was nowonly of her beauty and her being seen and marvelled at; with Dawling todo for her everything in life her activity was limited to that. Such anactivity was all within her scope; it asked nothing of her that shecouldn't splendidly give. As from time to time in our delicate communionshe turned her face to me with the parody of a look I lost none of thesigns of its strange new glory. The expression of the eyes was a rub ofpastel from a master's thumb; the whole head, stamped with a sort ofshowy suffering, had gained a fineness from what she had passed through. Yes, Flora was settled for life--nothing could hurt her further. Iforesaw the particular praise she would mostly incur--she would beinvariably "interesting. " She would charm with her pathos more even thanshe had charmed with her pleasure. For herself above all she was fixedfor ever, rescued from all change and ransomed from all doubt. Her oldcertainties, her old vanities were justified and sanctified, and in thedarkness that had closed upon her one object remained clear. Thatobject, as unfading as a mosaic mask, was fortunately the loveliest shecould possibly look upon. The greatest blessing of all was of coursethat 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 Ileft my friends I gave time to sink into my spirit. One was that he hadchanged by some process as effective as Flora's change, had beensimplified somehow into service as she had been simplified into success. He was such a picture of inspired intervention as I had never yetconceived: he would exist henceforth for the sole purpose of renderingunnecessary, or rather impossible, any reference even on her own part tohis 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 wasmy second lesson--that, good-natured as he was, my being there to see itall oppressed him; so that by the time the act ended I recognised that Itoo had filled out my hour. Dawling remembered things; I think he caughtin my very face the irony of old judgments: they made him thresh about inhis chair. I said to Flora as I took leave of her that I would come tosee her, but I may mention that I never went. I'd go to-morrow if I hearshe wants me; but what in the world can she ever want? As I quitted themI laid my hand on Dawling's arm, and drew him for a moment into thelobby. 

"Why did you never write to me of your marriage?"

He smiled uncomfortably, showing his long yellow teeth and somethingmore. "I don't know--the whole thing gave me such a tremendous lot todo. "

This was the first dishonest speech I had heard him make: he reallyhadn't written because an idea that I would think him a still bigger foolthan before. I didn't insist, but I tried there in the lobby, so far asa pressure of his hand could serve me, to give him a notion of what Ithought him. "I can't at any rate make out, " I said, "why I didn't hearfrom 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 saythat 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 weshould have managed without her. But since then she has never been nearus and has given us rather markedly little encouragement to keep uprelations with her. "

I was struck with this, though of course I admit I am struck with allsorts of things. "Well, " I said after a moment, "even if I could imaginea reason for that attitude it wouldn't explain why she shouldn't havetaken account of my natural interest. "

"Just so. " Dawling's face was a windowless wall. He could contributenothing to the mystery and, quitting him, I carried it away. It was nottill I went down to ace Mrs. Meldrum that was really dispelled. Shedidn't want to hear of them or to talk of them, not a bit, and it wasjust in the same spirit that she hadn't wanted to write of them. She haddone everything in the world for them, but now, thank heaven, the hardbusiness 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.