The Old Things

XX.

THERE came to Fleda at her sister’s no telegram in answer to her own ; the rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top : she supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she could n’t even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she could n’t have given a name : indifference, resignation, despair were the terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth’s surrender. The detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had now before her eyes. The part of her loss that, she could think of was the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most touched by that, in tons, she had lost, — the beauty that, charged upon big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain to memory and love ; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with which solitude was warm, and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid poor Maggie’s scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth’s early judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been strong enough; her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted, indeed, no catalogue to count them over ; the array of them, miles away, was complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they might have been, that they might still he hers, that they were perhaps already another’s, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They were nobody’s at all, — too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.

It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. “ Shall be with you at 11.30— don’t meet me at station.” Fleda turned this over, but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came, Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement. Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She was not, like poor Fleda, at every one’s beck, and the visitor was to see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited alone the subject of so many manœuvres, — a period that was slightly prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open. Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind, and who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a sudden stare.

“ He has done it,” said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not unperceivingly about her, and in spite of herself dropping an opinion upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence, observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie’s possessions before looking at Maggie’s sister. The girl understood, and at first had nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be nearest. On the sofa, near the window, the poor woman finally showed what the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met Fleda’s. “ It’s the end.”

“ They ’re married ? ”

“ They ’re married.”

Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her ; then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. “ I’ve heard nothing,” said Fleda. “ No answer came.”

“ That’s the only answer. It’s the answer to everything.” So Fleda saw; for a minute she looked over her companion’s head and far away. “ He was n’t at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. ‘ We are here — what do yon want ? ’ ” Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her hand. It met no response ; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited ; they sat facing each other like strangers. “ I wanted to go down,” Mrs. Gereth presently continued. “ Well, I went.”

All the girl’s effort tended for the time to a single aim, — that of taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself. Something, at least, of this was in the encouraging way she said, “Yesterday morning?”

“Yesterday morning. I saw him.”

Fleda hesitated. “ Did you see her ? ”

“ Thank God, no ! ”

Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took no notice. “You’ve been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched journey, of this consideration that I don’t deserve ? ”

“ We ’re together, we ’re together,” said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock, old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked out the bareness of the room.

To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly what they were not; the last inch of common ground, the ground of their past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there was the grand style of her companion’s treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth couldn’t stand upon small questions, could n’t, in conduct, make small differences. “ You ’re magnificent ! ” her young friend exclaimed. “ There’s a rare greatness in your generosity.”

“ We’re together, we’re together,” Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated. “ That’s all we are now ; it’s all we have.” The words brought to Fleda a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness : she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything.

Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed of having anything to say for herself ; but there was one thing, all the same, that not to say was impossible. “ That he has done it, that he could n’t not do it, shows how right I was.” It settled forever her attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind ; then after a little she added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth’s: “ That’s to say, it shows that he was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted to, he couldn’t in any sort of honor break.”

Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. “ What sort of an obligation do you call that ? No such obligation exists for an hour between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever.”

“ Did he tell you so ? ” Fleda asked.

“ No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for three minutes.” She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid image of this interview, sat without speaking. “ Do you wish to appear as if you don’t care ?” Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.

“ I’m trying not to think of myself.”

“ Then if you ’re thinking of Owen, how can you bear to think ? ”

Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head ; the slow tears had come into her eyes. “I can’t. I don’t understand. I don’t understand ! ” she broke out.

“ I do, then.” Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. “ There was no obligation at the time you saw him last — when you sent him, hating her as he did, back to her.”

“ If he went,” Fleda asked, “ does n’t that exactly prove that he recognized one ? ”

“ He recognized rot! You know what I think of him.” Fleda knew; she had no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one — it was her sole, faint flicker of passion — to the extent of declaring that he was too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared ! — it was his weakness she loved in him. “ He took strange ways of pleasing you! ” her friend went on. “ There was no obligation till suddenly, the other day, the situation changed.”

Fleda wondered. “ The other day ? ”

“It came to Mona’s knowledge—I can’t tell you how, but it came — that the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent them for you, but it was her I touched.” Mrs. Gereth paused ; Fleda was too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the full, cold breath of this. “ They were there, and that determined her.”

“ Determined her to what ? ”

“ To act, to take means.”

“ To take means ? ” Fleda repeated.

“ I can’t tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,” said Mrs. Gereth.

Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the simple interrogation, “ Mona ? ”

“ Why not ? She ’s a brute.”

“ But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her ? ”

“ How can I tell you ? How can I talk of such horrors ? I can only give you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she could n’t make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she succeeded : that’s what she did. She’s after all so much less of a fool than he. And what else had he originally liked? ” Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. “ She did what you would n’t! ” Fleda’s face had grown dark with her wonder, but her friend’s empty hands offered no balm to the pain in it. “ It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he was married.”

Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. “ At that place you spoke of in town ? ”

“ At the Registrar’s, like a pair of low atheists.”

The girl hesitated. “ What do people say of that ? I mean the ‘ world.’ ”

“ Nothing, because nobody knows. They’re to be married on the 17th, at Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the game, some outwitting of me. It’s known there has been a row with me.”

Fleda was mystified. “ People surely knew at Poynton,” she objected, “ if, as you say, she’s there.”

“ She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him in London, and went down to see the things.”

Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. “ Did you see them ? ” she then ventured to ask.

“ Everything.”

“ Are they right ? ”

“ Quite right. There’s nothing like them,” said Mrs. Gereth. At this her companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done in London. “ Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen stayed on,” she added.

Fleda stared. “ Then she’s not to live there ? ”

“ Rather ! But not till after the public marriage.” Mrs. Gereth seemed to muse ; then she brought out: “ She ’ll live there alone.”

“ Alone ? ”

“ She ’ll have it to herself.”

“ He won’t live with her?”

“ Never! But she’s none the less his wife, and you ’re not,” said Mrs. Gereth, getting up. “ Our only chance is the chance she may die.”

Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor’s magnanimous use oi the plural. “ Mona won’t die,” she replied.

“ Well, I shall, thank God ! Till then — and with this, for the first time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand — “ don’t desert me.”

Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to her. “ I mustn’t put myself in your son’s way.”

Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. “ You ’re prodigious ! But how shall you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I ” — She didn’t finish her sentence.

“ That’s your great feeling about him,” Fleda said; “ but how, after what has happened, can it be his about you ?”

Mrs. Gereth hesitated. “ How do you know what has happened ? You don’t know what I said to him.”

“ Yesterday ? ”

“ Yesterday.”

They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture of strong prohibition. “ Don’t tell me ! ”

“ Merciful powers, how you worship him ! “ Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned. It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an accident with pain ; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth soundlessly, wearily wept.

XXI.

“ It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore that together : ” these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs. Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. “ I shan’t, for a long time to come,” the missive continued, “ be able to receive any one who may like it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for you ’re the only person who comfortably understands. You don’t understand quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you ’re far away the least stupid. For action you ’re no good at all; but action is over, for me, forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I’m brutally silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts. Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you ’ll at any rate be a bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I’ve always taken you, — quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th.”

The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its acknowledgment that her friend had something left; it still implied recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate “ comfortably,” was at least not the utter destitution to which, after their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw it, she herself had “ liked ” the blessed refuge of Ricks ; and she now wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression, quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the Spot, she would utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as much “ action ” as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth’s three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after her woeful hour at Maggie’s she had, like some great, moaning, wounded bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor give her up ; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs. Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had even declined all escort to the station, conscious, apparently, of something abject in her collapse, and almost fiercely eager, as with a personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when her mind’s ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of going abroad had been abandoned. “ It has come to me indirectly, but with much appearance of truth, that they are going, — for an indefinite time. That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I’ve turned round again I shall look for you.” The second letter had come a week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.

Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out of the house for it, my dear, there isn’t a woman in England for whom it wouldn’t be a privilege to live here.” Mrs. Gereth was as honestly bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke sufficiently cruel. The girl’s heart gave a leap, for this stare was the sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting ; she did n’t in the least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a magnificent position ; it almost made all the difference. Yet what contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist’s idea. “ Where on earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things ? ”

“ Beautiful things ? ” Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little, worn, bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. “ They ’re the wretched things that were here — that stupid, starved old woman’s.”

“ The maiden aunt’s, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived ? I thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt.”

“ She was stored in an empty barn,— stuck away for a sale ; a matter that, fortunately, I’ve had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I’ve simply, in my extremity, fished her out again.”

“ You’ve simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her.” Fleda took the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the place, the girl broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. “ Ah, the little melancholy, tender, telltale things : how can they not speak to you and find a way to your heart ? It’s not the great chorus of Poynton; but you ‘re not, I’m sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine,— a faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heartbreak. You’ve listened to it unawares ; for the arrangement and effect of everything— when I compare them with what we found the first day we came down — shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your admirable, infallible hand. It’s your extraordinary genius ; you make things ‘ compose ’ in spite of yourself. You’ve only to be a day or two in a place with four sticks for something to come of it! ”

“ Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just four. That’s literally, by the inventory, all there are! ” said Mrs. Gereth.

“ If there were more, there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides, — the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned : the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone.” Fleda ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. “ Ah, there’s something here that will never he in the inventory ! ”

“ Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?” Mrs. Gereth’s face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at the feet of her pupil.

“ I can give it a dozen. It’s a kind of fourth dimension. It’s a presence, a perfume, a touch. It’s a soul, a story, a life. There ’s ever so much more here than you and I. We ’re in fact just three! ”

“ Oh, if you count the ghosts ! ”

“ Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double, — for what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton,” Fleda went on. “ That was the only fault.”

Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl’s fine humor. “ Poynton was too splendidly happy.”

“ Poynton was too splendidly happy,” Fleda promptly echoed.

“ But it’s cured of that now,” her companion added.

“ Yes, henceforth there ’ll be a ghost or two.”

Mrs. Gereth thought again : she found her young friend suggestive. “ Only she won’t see them.”

“ No, ‘ she ’ won’t see them.” Then Fleda said, “ What I mean is, for this dear one of ours, that if she had (as I know she had ; it’s in the very taste of the air !) a great accepted pain ” —

She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. “ Well, if she had ? ”

Fleda still hesitated. “ Why, it was worse than yours.”

Mrs. Gereth reflected. “ Very likely.” Then she too hesitated. “ The question is if it was worse than yours.”

“ Mine ? ” Fleda looked vague.

“ Precisely. Yours.”

At this our young lady smiled. “ Yes, because it was a disappointment. She had been so sure.”

“ I see. And you were never sure.”

“ Never. Besides, I ’m happy,” said Fleda.

Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. “ Goose ! ” she quietly remarked as she turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a considerable part of the basis of their new life. On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride’s mother, of Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath. There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from town : the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having taken their departure for Mr. Gereth’s own seat, famous for its unique collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of Ricks in the garden ; and she lingered there alone a long time after receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have happened, for from one of the windows she saw Mrs. Gereth rigid in a chair, her eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters untouched in her lap. Before the morning’s end she had disappeared, and the rest of that day she remained in her room : it recalled to Fleda, who had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house was at least the same, and the girl’s own waiting, her soft wandering, through the hours ; there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of which her companion’s absence might in some degree have represented a considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda, devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth’s sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has already been mentioned : it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona’s quiet pace had really never slackened.

Fleda fully assented. “ I said of our disembodied friend here that she had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that’s not always a source of suffering. It’s Mona who must have been sure ! ”

“ She was sure of you ! ” Mrs. Gereth returned. But this did n’t diminish the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she could talk.

XXII.

Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions. Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them, which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her : there were hours when it seemed that such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents. The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend’s visit to her at her sister’s, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should suddenly meet them, in straggling procession, on the road, it would be time enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes with dislikes and memories with fears ; and she had for not thinking of them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had pointed it out; it was that his mother’s bare spaces demanded all the tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused.

At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news: “ Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this morning to Paris.” The ladies exchanged no word about it till the evening, and none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth irrelevantly broken out: “I dare say you wonder why I declared the other day with such assurance that he would n’t live with her. He apparently is living with her.”

“ Surely it’s the only proper thing for him to do.”

“ They ’re beyond me, — I give it up,” said Mrs. Gereth.

“ I don’t give it up, — I never did,” Fleda returned.

“ Then what do you make of his aversion to her ? ”

“ Oh, she has dispelled it.”

Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. “ You ’re prodigious in your choice of terms ! ” she then simply ejaculated.

But Fleda went luminously on ; she once more enjoyed her great command of her subject : “ I think that when you came to see me at Maggie’s you saw too many things, you had too many ideas.”

“ You had none,” said Mrs. Gereth : “ you were completely bewildered. ”

“ Yes, I did n’t quite understand — but I think I understand now. The case is simple and logical enough. She ’s a person who ’s upset by failure, and who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her heart upon, set her teeth about, — the house exactly as she had seen it.”

“ She never saw it at all, she never looked at it ! ” cried Mrs. Gereth.

“ She does n’t look with her eyes ; she looks with her ears. In her own way she had taken it in ; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted.”

“ Go on, — I can bear it now,” said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just perceptibly paused.

“ I know you can, or I shouldn’t dream of speaking. When the pressure was removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself.”

“ Her natural charm ! ” Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate.

“ It’s very great; everybody thinks so ; there must be something in it. It operated as it had operated before. There’s no need of imagining anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty, and Mr. Owen’s impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the ground. His great bright sun came out! ”

“ And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your explanation would doubtless be perfection if he did n’t love you.”

Fleda was silent a little. “ What do you know about his loving me ? ”

“ I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me.”

“ You never in your life took her word for any other matter.”

“ Then won’t yours do ? ” Mrs. Gereth demanded. “ Have n’t I had it from your own mouth that he cares for you ? ”

Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. “ You confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You’ve only had it from my own mouth that I care for him ! ”

It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda, “ Don’t think I shall be a bit affected if I’m here to see it when he comes again to make up to you.”

“ He won’t do that,” the girl replied. Then she added, smiling, “ But if he should be guilty of such bad taste, it would n’t be nice of you not to be disgusted.”

“ I ’m not talking of disgust; I ’m talking of its opposite,” said Mrs. Gereth.

“ Of its opposite ? ”

“ Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you like ; but what conceivable good will it do ? ”

Fleda wondered. “ To me, do you mean ? ”

“ Deuce take you, no ! To what we don’t, you know, by your wish, ever talk about.”

“ The old things ? ” Fleda considered again. “ It will do no good of any sort to anything or any one. That’s another question I would rather we should n’t discuss, please,” she gently added.

Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. “ It certainly is n’t worth it ! ”

Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain inconsequence, to speak again. “ That was partly why I came back to you, you know, — that there should be the less possibility of anything painful.”

“ Painful?” Mrs. Gereth stared. “ What pain can I ever feel again ? ”

“ I meant painful to myself,” Fleda explained with a slight impatience.

“ Oh, I see.” Her friend was silent a minute. “ You use sometimes such odd expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I shan’t last forever.”

“ You ’ll last quite as long ” — Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.

Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of experience against hyperbole. “ As long as what, please ?”

The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an amendment, the same tone. “ As any danger of the ridiculous.”

That did for the time, and she had, moreover, as the months went on, the protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said nothing, then or afterwards ; but she opened it, for reasons that had come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew, without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her daughter-in-law’s share in this second migration. It was a piece of calculated insolence, — a stroke odiously di rected at showing whom it might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been a resource : it was Stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.

“ I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of mine, — something of real value. Something from Poynton is what f mean and what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I what ’s best and what is n’t. There are a lot of differences, but are n’t some of the smaller things the most remarkable ? I mean for judges, and for what they’d bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that’s most beautiful and precious. I mean the ‘ gem of the collection,’ don’t you know ? If it happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of it, — carry it right away with you, —so much the better. You ’re to have it on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and see. The people have complete instructions: they ’ll act for you in every possible way and put the whole place at your service. There’s a thing mamma used to call the Maltese cross, and that I think I ’ve heard her say is very wonderful. Is that the gem of the collection ? Perhaps you would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can trust you for thisYou won’t refuse if you will think a little what it must be that makes me ask.”

Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she was baffled, — she could n’t think at all of what it might be. This was indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the present no answer ; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form that was possible, — the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for her that she could n’t meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul ? What was behind it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it ? She said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes, would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his offer ? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was an hour to dream of and watch for ; to be patient was to draw out the sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head. She moved there in thought,—in the great rooms she knew ; she should be able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with bitterness. And a thousand times yes, — her choice should know no scruple; the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of the smallest things, because it should be one she could have close to her ; and it should be one of the finest, because it was in the finest he saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she was content to know nothing more than just what her having It would tell her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross — with the added reason that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh ; she would on the spot so handle and ponder that there should n’t be the shade of a mistake.

Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London ; there was her periodical call upon her father to pay, as well as a promise to Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a motive. Her father’s affection was not inquisitive, but when she mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm ; all the signs of a winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided, with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access to the “Underground.” The December dawn was dolorous, but there was neither rain nor snow: it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that, had been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment; the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.

Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was all alive with the wind ; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements, her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her errand should be achieved. When she said to herself that something might happen, she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It was every one’s being exactly where every one was that lent the quality to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had deepened ; they had whizzed past Chater, — Chater which was the station before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before her, — in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose, in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all for Fleda Vetch, then, the house was standing there.

But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an instant she could n’t have named it; the next moment she saw that it was given her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth’s time and who now recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm, and before alighting broke out to him, “ They’ve come back ? “ She bad a confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she must n’t be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her. “ Smoke ? ” She was on the platform with her frightened Sniff: it had taken her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking out at something that she could n’t see. Some one, the only other passenger, had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master, from the end of the platform, recognize her, too, and come straight to her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that something was “ a good bit off, — a mile from the town.” That was just what Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the station-master’s face.

“ You ’ve come down to it, miss, already ? ”

At this she knew. “ Poynton’s on fire ? ”

“ Gone, miss, — with this awful gale. You weren’t wired? Look out!” he cried in the next breath, seizing her ; the train was going on, and she had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which the wind seemed to hurl in her face.

“ Gone ? ” She was in the man’s hands ; she clung to him.

“ Burning still, miss. Ain’t it quite too dreadful ? Took early this morning, — the whole place is up there.”

In her bewildered horror she tried to think. “ Have they come back ? ”

“ Back? They ’ll be there all day ! ”

“ Not Mr. Gereth, I mean — nor his wife ? ”

“ Nor his mother, miss, — not a soul of them back. A pack o’ servants in charge, — not the old lady’s lot, eh ? A nice job for care-takers ! Some rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night.” Then as a great wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little waiting-room. “Awkward for you, miss, — I see ! ”

She felt sick ; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. “ Do you mean that great house is lost ? ”

“ It was near it, I was told, an hour ago, — the fury of the flames had got such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it. They were fighting it then, but you could n’t quite say they had got it down.”

Fleda jerked herself up. “ Were they saving the things ? ”

“ That’s just where it was, miss, — to get at the blessed things. And the want of right help — it maddened me to stand and see ’em muff it. This ain’t a place like, for anything organized. They don’t come up to a real emergency.”

She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar, which, in her dismay, she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant, acted upon her as a wild solicitation. “ I must go there.” She had scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling check.

Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her ; he clearly suffered from the nature of the control he had to exercise. “ Don’t do that, miss — you won’t care for it at all.” Then as she waveringly stood her ground, “ It’s not a place for a young lady, nor, if you ’ll believe me, a sight for them as are in any way affected.”

Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected : she became limp and weak again ; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice. She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first time, “ Poynton’s gone? ”

The man hesitated. “ What can you call it, miss, if it ain’t really saved ? ”

A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock. “ Is there an up-train ? she asked.

“ In seven minutes.”

She came out on the platform : everywhere she met the smoke. She covered her face with her hands. “I’ll go back.”

Henry James.