My companion stared. “Do you mean to say her eyesight’s going?”
“Heaven forbid! In that case how could she take life as she does?”
“How DOES she take life? That’s the question!” He sat there bewilderedly brooding; the tears rose to his lids; they reminded me of those I had seen in Flora’s the day I risked my enquiry. The question he had asked was one that to my own satisfaction I was ready to answer, but I hesitated to let him hear as yet all that my reflections had suggested. I was indeed privately astonished at their ingenuity. For the present I only rejoined that it struck me she was playing a particular game; at which he went on as if he hadn’t heard me, suddenly haunted with a fear, lost in the dark possibility. “Do you mean there’s a danger of anything very bad?”
“My dear fellow, you must ask her special adviser.”
“Who in the world is her special adviser?”
“I haven’t a conception. But we mustn’t get too excited. My impression would be that she has only to observe a few ordinary rules, to exercise a little common sense.”
Dawling jumped at this. “I see—to stick to the pince-nez.”
“To follow to the letter her oculist’s prescription, whatever it is and at whatever cost to her prettiness. It’s not a thing to be trifled with.”
“Upon my honour it SHAN’T be!” he roundly declared; and he adjusted himself to his position again as if we had quite settled the business. After a considerable interval, while I botched away, he suddenly said: “Did they make a great difference?”
“A great difference?”
“Those things she had put on.”
“Oh the glasses—in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it was partly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look charming in nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer?
She must be mad not to accept that alternative.”
“She IS mad,” said Geoffrey Dawling.
“Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides,” I went on, “the pince-nez, which was a large and peculiar one, was all awry: she had half pulled it off, but it continued to stick, and she was crimson, she was angry.”
“It must have been horrible!” my companion groaned.
“It WAS horrible. But it’s still more horrible to defy all warnings; it’s still more horrible to be landed in—” Without saying in what I disgustedly shrugged my shoulders.
After a glance at me Dawling jerked round. “Then you do believe that she may be?”
I hesitated. “The thing would be to make HER believe it. She only needs a good scare.”
“But if that fellow is shocked at the precautions she does take?”
“Oh who knows?” I rejoined with small sincerity. “I don’t suppose Iffield is absolutely a brute.”
“I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!” cried Geoffrey Dawling.
I had an impression that Iffield wouldn’t, but I didn’t communicate it, for I wanted to pacify my friend, whom I had discomposed too much for the purposes of my sitting. I recollect that I did some good work that morning, but it also comes back to me that before we separated he had practically revealed to me that my anecdote, connecting itself in his mind with a series of observations at the time unconscious and unregistered, had covered with light the subject of our colloquy. He had had a formless perception of some secret that drove Miss Saunt to subterfuges, and the more he thought of it the more he guessed this secret to be the practice of making believe she saw when she didn’t and of cleverly keeping people from finding out how little she saw. When one pieced things together it was astonishing what ground they covered. Just as he was going away he asked me from what source at Folkestone the horrid tale had proceeded. When I had given him, as I saw no reason not to do, the name of Mrs. Meldrum he exclaimed: “Oh I know all about her; she’s a friend of some friends of mine!” At this I remembered wilful Betty and said to myself that I knew some one who would probably prove more wilful still.
CHAPTER VIII
A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell.
“I’ve been down to Folkestone—it was necessary I should see her!”
I forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any rate out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to apply.
“You mean that you’ve been with Mrs. Meldrum?”
“Yes, to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It worked upon me awfully—I mean what you told me.” He made a visible effort to seem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had not been reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, a friendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them an instant, a strange distended look which might have expressed the cold clearness of all that was to come. “I KNOW—now!” he said with an emphasis he rarely used.
“What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?”
“Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But that one thing was everything.”
“What is it then?”
“Why, that she can’t bear the sight of her.” His pronouns required some arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that I was quite aware of Miss Saunt’s trick of turning her back on the good lady of Folkestone. Only what did that prove?
“Have you never guessed? I guessed as soon as she spoke!” Dawling towered over me in dismal triumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, on any ground of understanding this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incident still left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: “Why, the effect of those spectacles!”
I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. “Mrs. Meldrum’s?”
“They’re so awfully ugly and they add so to the dear woman’s ugliness.” This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added “She sees herself, she sees her own fate!” my response was so immediate that I had almost taken the words out of his mouth.
While I tried to fix this sudden image of Flora’s face glazed in and cross-barred even as Mrs. Meldrum’s was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only the horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her avoiding the person who so forced it home. The fact he had encountered made everything hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else that just such another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to Flora.
“I see—I see,” I presently returned. “What would become of Lord Iffield if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become of every one, what would become of everything?” This was an enquiry that Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying at last: “My dear fellow, for that matter, what would become of YOU?”
Once more he turned on me his good green eyes. “Oh I shouldn’t mind!”
The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I discovered at this moment how much I really liked him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of our discussion of such alternatives. It made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed: “You’d take her even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s?”
He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and conscientiously replied: “Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s.” I begged him not to resent my laughter, which but exposed the fact that we had built a monstrous castle in the air.
Didn’t he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested? The evidence was preposterously small. He believed the worst, but we were really uninformed.
“I shall find out the truth,” he promptly replied.
“How can you? If you question her you’ll simply drive her to perjure herself. Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth? It’s the girl’s own affair.”