“Then why did you tell me your story?”
I was a trifle embarrassed. “To warn you off,” I smiled. He took no more notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord Iffield had no serious intentions. “Very possibly,” I said. “But you mustn’t speak as if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives.”
Dawling thought a moment. “Couldn’t something be got out of the people she has consulted? She must have been to people. How else can she have been condemned?”
“Condemned to what? Condemned to perpetual nippers? Of course she has consulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may be sure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable that they would tell you anything—which I altogether doubt—you would have great difficulty in finding out which men they are. Therefore leave it alone; never show her what you suspect.”
I even before he quitted me asked him to promise me this. “All right, I promise”—but he was gloomy enough. He was a lover facing the fact that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I could see by what a stretch his passionate pity would from this moment overlook the girl’s fatuity and folly. She was always accessible to him—that I knew; for if she had told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have rebuked the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she would always be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her friends—
what were all of them—but repudiated idiots? I was perfectly aware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance had a niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often he still called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the wing of the Floyd-Taylors that her intimacy with Lord Iffield most flourished. At all events, when a week after the visit I have just summarised Flora’s name was one morning brought up to me, I jumped at the conclusion that Dawling had been with her, and even I fear briefly entertained the thought that he had broken his word.
CHAPTER IX
She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she had struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her folly it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don’t know how much she meant to tell me when she came—I think she had had plans of elaborate misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes the simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When she had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet; the relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word her long secret, she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess, tears to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless poverty. Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in some of its consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went that afternoon to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to warrant the supposition that he might have come in. He had not come in, but he was expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him: a lady, I was informed, was already in his sitting-room.
I hesitated, a little at a loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the lady was perhaps Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and remarkably pretty I received so significant a “No sir!” that I risked an advance and after a minute in this manner found myself, to my astonishment, face to face with Mrs.
Meldrum.
“Oh you dear thing,” she exclaimed, “I’m delighted to see you: you spare me another compromising demarche! But for this I should have called on you also. Know the worst at once: if you see me here it’s at least deliberate—it’s planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to see him, upon my word I’m in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace of mind, did you let him the other day at Folkestone dawn upon my delighted eyes? I found myself there in half an hour simply infatuated with him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him I hold him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven’t come up to declare my passion—I’ve come to bring him news that will interest him much more. Above all I’ve come to urge upon him to be careful.”
“About Flora Saunt?”
“About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse!
She’s at last really engaged.”
“But it’s a tremendous secret?” I was moved to mirth.
“Precisely: she wired me this noon, and spent another shilling to tell me that not a creature in the world is yet to know it.”
“She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an hour with the creature you see before you.”
“She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!” Mrs.
Meldrum cried. “They’ve vital reasons, she says, for it’s not coming out for a month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicing is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as it’s nearly seven o’clock, may have jumped off London Bridge. But an effect of the talk I had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my telegram, feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking action, so to call it, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried away with him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what you had told him you had seen in your shop.”
Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand identical with my own—a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity, inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing from what Flora’s wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her that what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that I had seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. “In short,” I said, “I’ve seen everything.”
She was mystified. “Everything?”
“The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh she came to triumph, but she remained to talk something in the nature of sense!
She put herself completely in my hands—she does me the honour to intimate that of all her friends I’m the most disinterested. After she had announced to me that Lord Iffield was utterly committed to her and that for the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she arrived at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since that day at Folkestone when I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is what you and I both guessed. She’s in very bad danger.”
“But from what cause? I, who by God’s mercy have kept mine, know everything that can be known about eyes,” said Mrs. Meldrum.
“She might have kept hers if she had profited by God’s mercy, if she had done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if she hadn’t in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may still keep her sight, or what remains of it, if she’ll sacrifice—and after all so little—that purely superficial charm. She must do as you’ve done; she must wear, dear lady, what you wear!”
What my companion wore glittered for the moment like a melon-frame in August. “Heaven forgive her—now I understand!” She flushed for dismay.
But I wasn’t afraid of the effect on her good nature of her thus seeing, through her great goggles, why it had always been that Flora held her at such a distance. “I can’t tell you,” I said, “from what special affection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: that’s the one thing she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows it herself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. ‘It’s a thing that’s awful, simply awful’—