The Old Things

XVII.

TEN days after Owen’s visit Fleda received a communication from Mrs. Gereth, — a telegram of eight words exclusive of signature and date : “ Come up immediately and stay with me here.” It was characteristically sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also characteristically kind. “ Here ” was an hotel in London, and Maggie had embraced a condition which already began to produce in her some yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant, and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda’s hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady’s own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend’s summons she should n’t know what she should be “ in for.舡 Her friend’s summons, however, was but another name for her friend’s appeal; and Mrs. Gereth’s bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance. In the event — that is, at the end of the hour — she testified to her gratitude by taking the train, and to her mistrust by leaving her luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train, however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was mainly her mistrust that deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered. Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth, it had been so exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen’s prevision of Mrs. Brigstock’s action upon her daughter, this action was at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness all round had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now ; she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from Owen,— poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of all reasons, — the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the letter had not been written, he would simply have had to introduce some large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able, on the contrary, to extend that picture ; and his present submission was all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had prescribed.

It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large; Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive maiden at Waterbath was successful from the moment she could entertain her resentments as if they had been poor relations who need n’t put her to expense. She was a magnificent dead - weight; there was something positive and portentous in her quietude. “ What game are they all playing ? ” poor Fleda could only ask ; for she had an intimate conviction that Owen was now under the roof of the Brigstocks. That was stupefying. if he really hated Mona ; and if he did n’t really hate her, what had brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie’s ? Fleda had no real light, but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath, it had been simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect faith, — faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing Mona’s supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up, if there were nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the impenetrable air that Mona’s thick outline never wavered an inch. She wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As The Morning Tost still held its peace, she would be, of course, more confident ; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs. Gereth’s awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite, indeed, but much good had that brought forth ! To have sent for her now, Fleda felt, was from this point of view wholly natural ; she had sent for her to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at Waterbatli, the refutation of Mrs. Gereth was easy.

Fleda found her in modest apartments, and with an air of fatigue in her distinguished face, — a sign, as she privately remarked, of the strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she could n’t simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda felt on her shoulders the return of the load, and her spirit frankly quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth’s free manner always made a joke of weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.

Fleda thought best to show bravery, too, and to show it from the first.

舠What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain, without making preparations.”

舠 Then you ’ll be so good as to make them on the spot! ” Mrs. Gereth was most emphatic. “ You ’re going abroad with me.”

Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. “ To-night — to-morrow ? ”

“ In as few days as possible. That’s all that’s left for me now.” At this Fleda’s heart gave a bound ; she wondered to what particular difference in Mrs. Gereth’s situation as last known to her it was an allusion. “ I’ve made my plan,” her friend continued: “I go for at least a year. We shall go straight to Florence ; we can manage there. I don’t look to you, however,” she added, “ to stay with me all that time. That will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as possible ; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I’m convinced it ’s quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change ; it will put in a decent interval.”

Fleda listened : she was deeply mystified. “ How kind you are to me ! ” she presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. “You really have it from Mr. Gereth that he ’ll give us his company ? ”

If Mr. Gereth’s mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son. Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her present vigilance to seem to have relinquished that right. Mrs. Gereth’s manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had met her visitor’s first startled stare at the clustered spoils of Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she wished. “ Oh, if you ’ll answer for him, it will do quite as well! ” she said. Then she put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and held them at arm’s length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. “ You bad, false thing, why did n’t you tell me ? ” Her tone softened her harshness, and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs. Gereth could show patience ; it was a part of the general bribe, but it was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could only fumble in a penniless pocket. “ You must perfectly have known at Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That’s why I call you bad and false ! ” It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.

“ I think that before I answer you I had better know what you ’re talking about,” Fleda said.

Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. “ You’ve done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he’s sick with love of you, you have n’t had to wait for me to inform you.”

Fleda hesitated. “ Has he informed you, dear Mrs. Gereth ? ”

Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. “ How could he, when our situation is such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so tortuous you conceal everything ? ”

“ Did n’t he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town ?” Fleda asked.

“ He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you.”

Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda’s own sense of responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance ; she could only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce, after a moment, a question : “ How then do you come to know that your son has ever thought”—

“That he would give his ears to get you ? ” Mrs. Gereth broke in. “ I had a visit from Mrs. Brigstoek.”

Fleda opened her eyes. “ She went down to Ricks ? ”

“The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything.”

Fleda shook her head sadly ; she was more startled than she cared to show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock’s, which, with a simplicity equal for once to Owen’s, she had not divined, now struck her as having produced the hush of the last ten days. “ There are things she does n’t know ! ” she presently exclaimed.

“ She knows he would do anything to marry you.”

“ He has n’t told her so,” Fleda said.

“ No, but he has told you. That’s better still ! ” laughed Mrs. Gereth.

“ My dear child,” she went on, with an air that affected the girl as a sort of blind profanity, “ don’t try to make yourself out better than you are. I know what you are. I have n’t lived with you so much for nothing. You ’re not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you ’d have thought me in my good time ! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot. You ’re pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That’s exactly what I wanted to see. I can t for the life of me think where the shame comes in.” Then, with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda strange, she added, “ It’s all right.”

“ I ’ve seen him but twice,” said Fleda.

“ But twice?” Mrs. Gereth still smiled.

“ On the occasion, at papa’s, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one day, since then, down at Maggie’s.”

“ Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor creatures at best.” Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped with light for an instant a real conviction. “ I don’t know what you’ve got in your veins ; you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together ” — She checked herself as if from excess of meaning ; what might happen when she should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she slowly rubbed her bands.

The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet, for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth’s certitude; the visit of the lady of Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. “ Is it permitted to be surprised,” Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brig-stock’s thinking it would help her to see you?’”

“It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools,” said Mrs. Gereth. “ If a cow should try to calculate, that’s the kind of happy thought she ’d have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me.”

Fleda mused a moment. “That’s what she came to do with me.” she then honestly returned. “ But what did she expect to get of you, with your opposition so marked from the first?”

“ She did n’t know I want you, my dear. It’s a wonder, with all my violence,— the gross publicity I ’ve given my desires. But she’s as stupid as an owl,— she does n’t feel your charm.”

Fleda felt herself flush slightly. but she tried to smile. “ Did you tell her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me ? ”

“ For what do you take me ? I was n’t such a donkey.”

“So as not to aggravate Mona?” Fleda suggested.

“ So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We’ve had a narrow course to steer, but, thank God, we ’re at last in the open ! ”

“ What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth ? ” Fleda demanded. Then, as the other faltered, “ Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day ? ”

Mrs. Gereth stared. “ Do you mean he ’s at Waterbath ? Well, that s your own affair. I can bear it if you can.”

“ Wherever he is, I can hear it, Fleda said. “But I haven’t the least idea where he is.”

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself ! ” Mrs. Gereth broke out, with a change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she had said. The poor woman, catching her companion’s hand, however, the next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more patiently:

“ Don’t you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly, I’ve trusted you ? ” Her tone was indeed a supplication.

Fleda was infinitely shaken ; she was silent a little. “ Yes, I understand. Did she go to you to complain of me ? ”

“ She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the day before, by what had taken place at your father’s, and she had posted down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She had n’t meant it on leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your two faces : she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was with this idea she had bearded me in my den. ‘ What won’t a mother do, you know?’— that was one of the things she said. What would n’t a mother do, indeed ? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from the moment she opened on you, from the moment she denounced Owen’s falsity, I was as good natured as she could wish. I understood that it was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest;

I did n’t pretend to anything I couldn’t feel. I asked her why the marriage had n’t taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona’s part cleared his responsibility. It was she who had killed him; it was she who had destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance, too, but she admitted that she had n’t come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully bedeviled,— she did n’t, call it that, she called it ‘ misled,’ — but it was simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would see that you were out of the way. She asked me pointblank if it was possible I could want him to marry you.”

Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in cold dread, for her doom. “ What did you say to that ? ” she inquired.

“ I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger, — the danger of her going home and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy did n’t put me off my guard.

I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue.”

“ Your issue ? “ Fleda murmured.

“ I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen.”

Fleda wondered. “And did you remember the little letter that, with your hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him ? ”

“ Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an angel of delicacy. I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me to have done all that, and then figure to such a woman as having done the opposite. Besides, it was none of her business.”

“ Is that what you said to her ? ” Fleda asked.

“ I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you, I would at least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me.”

“ And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer ? ”

“ She was visibly relieved.”

“ It was fortunate for you,” said Fleda, “ that she’s apparently not aware of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him at Poynton.”

Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to invidious allusions to it. “ How should she be aware of it ? ”

“ She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona.”

“Yes, but he did n’t describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from Mona. He was n’t conscious, but he was already in love with you! ” Mrs. Gereth declared.

Fleda shook her head wearily. “No ;

I was only in love with him ! ”

Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled her fire. “ You dear old wretch!” she exclaimed ; and she again, with ferocity, embraced her young friend.

Fleda submitted like a sick animal : she would submit to everything now. “ Then what further passed ? ”

“ Only that she left me, thinking she had got something.”

“ And what had she got ? ”

“ Nothing but her luncheon. But I got everything ! ”

“ Everything ? ” Fleda quavered.

Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her from a tremendous height. “ Don’t fail me now! ”

It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the poor girl fell weakly into a chair. “ What on earth have you done ? ”

Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. “ I’ve settled you.” She filled the room, to Fleda’s scared vision, with the glare of her magnificence. “ I’ve sent everything back.” “ Everything ? ” Fleda gasped.

“To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty.” Then as if, for a crowning splendor, to check all deprecation, “ They ’re yours, you goose! ” Mrs. Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes.

XVIII.

Fleda was slow to take in Mrs. Gereth’s announcement, but when she had done so she felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend ? The treachery increased with the view of the friend’s motive, a motive magnificent as a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her, and had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard used by young men with whom she danced : the only word to fit Mrs. Gereth’s intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to “ fetch ” her. It was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and said simply, “ That’s what I do for you ! ” What Fleda was to do in return required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had done made her almost cry aloud with pain ; but her first endeavor, in the face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion. How little she had done Mrs. Gereth did n’t yet know, and possibly there would he still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her own side, too, Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted, but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been treated by her friend’s act as a conscious prize, but what made her a conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary ; it transformed at a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken ; she had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds of Poynton. Now, however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea. Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim ; poor little Ricks had been laid bare in a night. If Fleda’s feeling about the old things had taken precipitate form, the form would have been a frantic command. It was indeed for mere want of breath that she did n’t shout, “ Oh, stop them — it’s no use ! Bring them back — it’s too late ! ” And what most kept her breathless was her companion’s very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as never before the purity of such a passion ; it made Mrs. Gereth august and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish, — she cared nothing for mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself, and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was, in truth, that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was, also, that she measured as if for the first time Mrs. Gereth’s view of the natural influence of a fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution would be made ; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs. Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won, — oh, had been made sure of!

She could n’t, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her exposure. “Why didn’t you wait, dearest ? Ah, why didn’t you wait?” If that inconsequent appeal kept vising to her lips to be cut short before it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion’s hands, she did homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth’s glimpse of lids despair suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the false courage of endearments.

“ Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as this that you ’ve really lost him ? ”

The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had nothing from this moment but terror. “I don’t know, Mrs. Gereth; how can I say ?” she asked. “ I’ve not seen him for so long; as I told you just now, I don’t even know where he is. That’s by no fault of his,” she hurried on ; “ he would have been with me every day, if I had consented. But I made him understand, the last time, that I ’ll receive him again only when he’s able to show me that his release has been complete and definite. Oh, he can’t yet, don’t you see, and that’s why he has n’t been back. It’s far better than his coming only that we should both be miserable. When he does come he ’ll be in a better position. He ‘ll be tremendously moved by the splendid thing you’ve done. I know you wish me to feel that you’ve done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it,” said Fleda, in desperate optimism, “ when he hears of it ” — There, indeed, regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don’t know what he won’t make of you and how he won’t hug you ! ” she had to content herself with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa, with a vague instinct of pacifying her, and still, after all, gaining time : but it was a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a “ hug.” Fleda found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, — trying to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her companion’s arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in happier days had been her “secret:” “You mustn’t think I don’t adore him, when I ’ve told him so to his face. I love him so that I ’d die for him. I love him so that it’s horrible. Don’t look at me. therefore, as if I had not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as if you feel what I’ve been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss the ground he walks on. I have n’t a rag of pride ; I used to have, but it ’s gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any one who looks at me can say, I think, what’s the matter with me. It’s not so very fine, my secret, and the loss one really says about it. the better, but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I want you to see for yourself that I’ve been brought as low as a girl can very well be. It serves me right,” Fleda laughed, “it I was ever proud and horrid to you ! I don t know what you wanted me, in those days at Ricks, to do, but I don’t think you can have wanted much more than what I’ve done. The other day, at Maggie’s, I did things that made me, afterwards, think of you. I don’t know what girls may do; but If he does n’t know that there isn’t an inch of me that is n’t his ” — Fleda sighed as if she could n’t express it; she piled it up, as she would have said ; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for the effect of these words. “It’s idiotic,” she wearily smiled ; “ it’s so strange that I’m almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is that it is n’t even happiness. It’s anguish, — it was from the first; from the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you every word of the truth. You don’t do him justice, either: he’s a dear, I assure you, he ’s a dear. I’d trust him to the last breath; I don’t think you really know him. He’s ever so much cleverer than he makes a show of; he ’s remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that you wanted me to let myself go, and I’ve ‘ gone ’ quite far enough to discover that, as well as all sorts of other delightful things about him. You’ll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,” said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion’s attitude a quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole, and even perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out “ bad,” — it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry to the young man. 舠 I don’t care for anything you think,” she declared, 舠 because Owen, don’t you know, sees me as I am. He’s so kind that it makes up for everything! ”

This attempt at gayety was futile ; the silence with which, for a minute, her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought borne to her afresh that she was on the bare defensive. 舠 Is it a part of his kindness never to come near you ? ” Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. 舠 Is it a part of his kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is ? ” She rose again from where Fleda had kept her down ; she seemed to tower there in the majesty of her gathered wrong. 舠 Is it a part of his kindness that, after I’ve toiled as I ’ve done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which I have n’t spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that I’ve nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back, — is it a part of his kindness that you ’re not even able to produce him for me ? ”

There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an instant; it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She herself could bear his mother’s scorn ; but to avert it from his sweet, innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an arm : 舠 Don’t blame him, — don’t blame him : he’d do anything on earth for me ! It was I,” said Fleda eagerly, 舠 who sent him back to her. I made him go ; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to say to him except on another footing.”

Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. “ Another footing ? What other footing ? ”

舠 The one I’ve already made so clear to you : my having it in black and white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up.”

舠 Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his liberty? ”

Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed, with a certain hard pride, “ He’s enough in love with me for anything! ”

舠 For anything, apparently, except to act like a man, and impose his reason and his will on your incredible folly; for anything except to put an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples ? ” Her resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face, and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse of lost alternatives. “ I don’t know what to think of him,” Mrs. Gereth went on,

舠 I don’t know what to call him : I ’m so ashamed of him that I can scarcely speak of him even to you. But indeed I ’m so ashamed of you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look.” She paused, to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement; then she exclaimed, “Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under his arm and marched you off to the Registrar! ”

Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while her cheek stung from a slap. “ To the Registrar ? ”

“ That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a grain of gumption you ’d both instantly have felt it. I should have found a way to take you, you know, if I’d been what Owen’s supposed to be. I should have got the business over first; the rest could come when you liked ! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a woman honestly married. One doesn’t know what one has hold of in touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you ’re literally unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked, and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped his fingers at your refinements.”

This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to go round, and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion, however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard herself presently say, I ’ll go to the Registrar now.”

“ Now ? Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this monosyllable. “ And pray who ’s to take you ? ” Fleda gave a colorless smile, and her companion continued : “ Do you literally mean that you can’t put your hand upon him ? ” Fleda’s wan grimace appeared to irritate her ; she made a short, imperious gesture. “ Find him for me, you fool, —find him for me ! ”

“ What do you want of him,” Fleda sadly asked, “ feeling as you do to both of us ? ”

“Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I’m furious ! ” Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. “ Of course I cling to you, you wretches, or I should n’t suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see that he takes you ; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the place.” She looked round the room in feverish haste, as if for a mantle to catch up ; she bustled to the window as if to spy a cab : she would allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came back. “ Find him, find him,” she repeated ; “come straight out with me, to try, at least, to get at him ! ”

“ How can I get at him ? He ’ll come when he’s ready,” Fleda replied.

Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. “ Ready for what ? Ready to see me ruined without a reason or a reward ? ”

Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the influence of it was in the girl’s tone when she returned at last, with great gentleness, “Don’t be harsh to me, — I ’m very unhappy.” The words produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the avenue of Poynton, — Fleda participated, indeed, fully in the vision; so that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add, “ I don’t see why in the world you take so for granted that he ’s, as you say, ‘lost.’”

Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness denoted some success in controlling herself. “ If he’s not lost, why are you unhappy ? ”

“ I ’m unhappy because I torment you, and you don’t understand me. 舡

“ No, Fleda, I don’t understand you,” said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing her again. “ I don’t understand you at all, and it’s as if you and Owen were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since you take so much else with me ! ” She spoke now with the drop of her resentment, with a dry and weary Calm. “ It would have been better for me if I had never known you,” she pursued, “ and certainly better if I had n’t taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was inevitable : everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own doing, — you did n’t run after me : I pounced on you and caught you up. You ’re a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners : yes, you ’re hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever sympathy that did it, — your extraordinary feeling for those accursed vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and that was a thing I simply could n’t resist. Well,”the poor lady concluded, after a pause, “ you see where it has landed us !”

“ If you ’ll go for him yourself, I ’ll wait here,” said Fleda.

Mrs, Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared to consider for a while.

“ To his club, do you mean ? ”

“ Is n’t it there, when he ’s in town, that he has a room ? He has at present no other London address,” Fleda said :

“ it’s there one writes to him.”

“ How do I know, with my wretched relations with him ? ” Mrs. Gereth asked.

“ Mine have not been quite so bad as that,” Fleda desperately smiled. Then she added, “ His silence, her silence, our hearing nothing at all, — what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between them ? ”

Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void.

“ Yes, but I had n’t heard from you then that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him back to her.”

“ All, but, on the other hand, you’ve learned from them what you did n’t know, — you’ve learned by Mrs. Brigstock’s visit that he cares for me.” Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic arguments that she formerly had repudiated ; her refutation of her companion had completely changed its ground. She was in a fever of ingenuity, and she was painfully conscious, on behalf of her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth’s sombre eyes.

“You plunge me in stupefaction,” that lady answered, “ and at the same time you terrify me : your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I don’t know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that he’s spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I’m so dull as not to see my way in such darkness. If he ’s at Waterbath, he does n’t care for you. If he cares for you, he’s not at Waterbath.”

“Then where is he?” poor Fleda wailed helplessly. She caught herself up, however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say : “ You simplify far too much : you always did, and you always will. The tangle of life is much more intricate than you’ve ever, I think, felt it to be : you slash into it,” cried Fleda finely, 舠 with a great pair of shears you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates ! If Owen ’s at Waterbath, he’s there to wind everything up.”

Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. “You don’t believe a word you ’re saying. I’ve frightened you, as you’ve frightened me : you ’re whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless, if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you ’re beyond me. Your perversity’s a thing to howl over. However.” the poor woman continued, with a break in her voice, a long hesitation, and then the dry triumph of her will, “I ’ll never mention it to you again ! Owen I can just make out; for Owen is a blockhead. Owen’s a blockhead,” she repeated, with a quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda’s eyes. “ I don’t know why you dress up so the fact that he’s disgustingly weak.”

Fleda hesitated ; at last, before her companion’s, she lowered her look. “ Because I love him. It’s because he ’s weak that he needs me,” she added.

“ That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed me. And I did n’t fail his father,” said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to appreciate the remark ; after which she pursued,

“ Mona Brigstock is n’t weak ; she’s stronger than you ! ”

“ I never thought she was weak,” Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round the room with a new purpose : she had lost sight of her umbrella.

“ I did tell you to let yourself go, but it’s clear enough that you really have n’t,” Mrs. Gereth declared. “If Mona has got him ” —

Fleda had accomplished her search ; her interlocutress paused. “ If Mona has got him ? ” the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella.

“ Well,” said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, “it will be clear enough that Mona has.'”

“ Has let herself go ? ”

“ Has let herself go.” Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every detail.

Fleda felt the tone, and finished her preparation ; then she went and opened the door. “We’ll look for him together,” she said to her friend, who stood a moment taking in her face. “ They may know something about him at the colonel’s.”

“ We ’ll go there.” Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse. “ But the first thing,” she went on, “ will be to wire to Poynton.”

“ Why not to Waterbath at once ? ” Fleda asked.

Her companion hesitated. “In your name ? ”

“In my name. I noticed a place at the corner.”

While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. “ Forgive me,” she presently said. “ Kiss me,” she added.

Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out.

XIX.

In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda wrote her telegram, — wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth’s eye, and then in silence handed it to her. “ I send this to Waterbath, on the possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me.”

Mrs. Gereth held it a moment, read it more than once ; then keeping it, and with her eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a kindness in her look ; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor.

“ Would n’t it,” she asked, 舠 after all, perhaps be better, before doing this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain ? ”

“ Why so ? It will be always so much done,” said Fleda. “ Though I ’m poor,” she added, with a smile, “ I don’t mind the shilling.”

“The shilling’s my shilling,” said Mrs. Gereth.

Fleda stayed her hand. “ No, no, — I’m superstitious.”

“ Superstitious ? ”

“ To succeed, it must be all me ! ”

“ Well, if that will make it succeed ! ” Mrs. Gereth took back her shilling, but she still kept the telegram. “As he’s most probably not there ” —

“If he shouldn’t be there,” Fleda interrupted, “ there will be no harm done.”

“ ‘ If he should n’t be there ’ ! ” Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. “ Heaven help us, how you assume it! ”

“ I’m only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any telegram on.”

“ Where will they send it? ”

“ Presumably to Poynton.”

“ They ’ll read it first,” said Mrs. Gereth.

“ Read it ? ”

“ Yes, Mona will. She ’ll open it under the pretext of having it repeated ; and then she ’ll probably do nothing. She ’ll keep it as a proof of your immodesty.”

“ What of that ? ” asked Fleda.

“ You don’t mind her seeing it ? ”

Rather musingly and absently, Fleda shook her head. “ I don’t mind anything.”

“ Well, then, that’s all right,” said Mrs. Gereth, as if she had only wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. “ Why have you given, for a reply, your sister’s address? ”

“ Because, if he does come to me, he must come to me there. If that telegram goes,” said Fleda, “ I return to Maggie’s to-night.”

Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. “ You won’t receive him here with me ? ”

“ No, I won’t receive him here with you. Only where I received him last, — only there again.” She showed her companion that as to that she was firm.

But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate ; then she brought out, “You couldn’t, then, if I release you, make your message a little stronger ? ”

Fleda gave her a faint smile. “ He ’ll come if he can.”

Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed ; with decision she pushed in the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form, and with still greater decision wrote another message. “ From me, this,” she said to Fleda when she had finished : “ to catch him possibly at Poynton. Will you read it ? ”

Fleda turned away. “ Thank you.”

“ It’s stronger than yours.”

“ I don’t care,” said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen’s club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom, watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the hall porter, and then met in silence her return with the news that he had not seen Owen for a fortnight, and was keeping his letters till called for. These had been the last orders ; there were a dozen letters lying there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they could find at Colonel Gereth’s. To any connection with this inquiry, however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed to recognize that, on second thoughts, it could n’t be quite to the taste of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and that was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda’s eyes rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them through the hole in the top : “ Anywhere in particular, ladies ? ”

Fleda decided. “ Drive to Euston, please.”

“ You won’t wait for what we may hear?” Mrs. Gereth asked.

“ Whatever we hear, I must go.” As the cab went on, she added, “ But I need n’t drag you to the station.”

Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then, “ Nonsense ! ” she sharply replied.

In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost tremulously mild, though their mildness took mainly the form of an inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied them, — the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda’s train, they encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no further allusion to Mrs. Gereth’s leaving her; their dumbness, with the elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl’s arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking, — to know, indeed, that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the one that was fixed ; the other filled at times the whole space, and then was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face, on the platform, they counted them in each other’s eyes. Fleda had come back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of tins second one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth replied with pale lucidity, — was naturally the person most familiar with the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it was to do it, — she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda, going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a woman was great.

“ You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the last little screen ? ”

“ I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue ! 舒

Fleda went over them while they walked again ; she had no need of the catalogue. At last she spoke once more : “ Even the Maltese cross ? ”

舠 Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything else ? — especially as I remembered how you like it.”

Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed, “ But the mere fatigue of it, the exhaustion of such a feat ! I drag you to and fro here while you must be ready to drop.”

“ I’m very, very tired.” Mrs. Gereth’s slow head-shake was tragic. “ I could n’t do it again.”

“ I doubt if they ’d bear it again !舡

“ That’s another matter : they ’d bear it if I could. There won’t have been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I ’m too tired, — I very nearly don’t care.”

“ You must sit down, then, till I go,” said Fleda. “ We must find a bench.”

“ No. I ’m tired of them ; I ’m not tired of you. This is the way for you to feel most how much I rest on you.” Fleda had a compunction, wondering as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her. She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low, it was far from dying out, —an impression presently confirmed by the way Mrs. Gereth went on : “ But one’s fatigue is nothing. The idea under which one worked kept one up. For you I could, — I can still. Nothing will have mattered if she’s not there.”

There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was able to breathe : “ And if she is there — if she’s there already ? ” Mrs. Gereth’s rejoinder too hung back; then when it came — from sad eyes as well as from barely moved lips — it was unexpectedly merciful: “ It will be very hard.” That was all, now ; and it was poignantly simple. The train Fleda was to take had drawn up ; the girl kissed her as if in farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted ; then after a little brought out, “ If we have lost ” —

“ If we have lost ? ” Fleda repeated, as she paused again.

“You ’ll all the same come abroad with me ? ”

“ It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask, whatever you need, that I will always do.”

“ I shall need your company,” said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant if this were not practically a demand for penal submission, — for a surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs. Gereth pursued : “ We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together.”

“Of the old things? ” Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she stood a moment looking into it, and at a fat woman with a basket who had already taken possession. “ Always ? ” Fleda said, turning again to her companion. “ Never ! ” she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had gone.

Henry James.