“I had no idea you were down here!” I said and I wondered whether she didn’t know me at all or knew me only by my voice.
“You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum,” she 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 just returned to England after a long absence and I’m on my way to see her. Won’t you come with me?” It struck me that her old reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed of now.
“I’ve just left her. I’m staying with her.” She stood solemnly fixing me with her goggles. “Would you like to paint me now?” she asked. She seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.
There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high spirits. “It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!”
That something was wrong it wasn’t difficult to see, but a good deal more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under Mrs. Meldrum’s roof. I hadn’t for a year had much time to think of her, but my imagination had had ground for lodging her in more gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before leaving England was that in commemoration of the new relationship she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn’t as yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own doings. My companion was finely silent, and I felt both as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony and as if I were talking to some different and strange person. Flora plain and obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum’s door she turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me. I looked at her again—I had been keeping my eyes away from her—but only to meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl’s trouble that I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn’t express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble than there actually might have been. I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected to give her. It rolled over me there for the first time—it has come back to me since—that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even in very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveterate habit of being all right. I couldn’t have to her the manner of treating it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to think of some manner that I COULD have she said quite colourlessly, though somehow as if she might never see me again: “Good-bye. I’m going to take my walk.”
“All alone?”
She looked round the great bleak cliff-top. “With whom should I go? Besides I like to be alone—for the present.”
This gave me the glimmer of a vision that she regarded her disfigurement as temporary, and the confidence came to me that she would never, for her happiness, cease to be a creature of illusions. It enabled me to exclaim, smiling brightly and feeling indeed idiotic: “Oh I shall see you again! But I hope you’ll have a very pleasant walk.”
“All my walks are pleasant, thank you—they do me such a lot of good.” She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me stupendous in their wisdom. “I take several a day,” she continued.
She might have been an ancient woman responding with humility at the church door to the patronage of the parson. “The more I take the better I feel. I’m ordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in for plenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if that goes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be all right. All that was the matter with me before—and always; it was too reckless!—was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly on the state of the particular organ. So I’m going three miles.”
I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum’s maid stood there to admit me. “Oh I’m so glad,” I said, looking at her as she paced away with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her air of 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 anything in it? IS her general health—?”
Mrs. Meldrum checked me with her great amused blare. “You’ve already seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What’s ‘in it’ is what has been in everything she has ever done—the most comical, tragical belief in herself. She thinks she’s doing a ‘cure.’”
“And what does her husband think?”
“Her husband? What husband?”
“Hasn’t she then married Lord Iffield?”
“Vous-en-etes le?” cried my hostess. “Why he behaved like a regular beast.”
“How should I know? You never wrote me.” Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the particular organ. “No, I didn’t write you—I abstained on purpose. If I kept quiet I thought you mightn’t hear over there what had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr. Dawling.”
“Stir him up?”
“Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another chance for him.”
“I wouldn’t have done it,” I said.
“Well,” Mrs. Meldrum replied, “it was not my business to give you an opportunity.”
“In short you were afraid of it.”
Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out.
Then “I was afraid 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 to get 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 awkwardly enquired.
“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.
“Then what has become of him?”
“He’s at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe by 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 the rest of your life?”
Once more Mrs. Meldrum genially glared. “Did she tell you how much the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty pounds a year.”
“That’s a good deal, but it won’t pay the oculist. What was it that at last induced her to submit to him?”
“Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield’s rupture.
She cried her eyes out—she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic church.”
“In spite of which you don’t think she’ll be saved?”