that was the only account she would give me. Year before last, while she was at Boulogne, she went for three days with Mrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted the greatest man—even Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesn’t know. Last autumn in Germany she did the same. ‘First put on certain special spectacles with a straight bar in the middle: then we’ll talk’—that’s practically what they say. What SHE says is that she’ll put on anything in nature when she’s married, but that she must get married first.
She has always meant to do everything as soon as she’s married.
Then and then only she’ll be safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself a fright? How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself a fright from the first? It’s no use to insist that with her beauty she can never BE a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the most characteristic, the most harrowing things. ‘My face is all I have—and SUCH a face! I knew from the first I could do anything with it. But I needed it all—I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It isn’t as if I had a figure or anything else. Oh if God had only given me a figure too, I don’t say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one, like Fanny Floyd-Taylor’s, who’s hideous, I’d have risked plain glasses. Que voulez-vous? No one is perfect.’ She says she still has money left, but I don’t believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her impunity, on the idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally been running a race with it. Her theory has been, as you from the first so clearly saw, that she’d get in ahead. She swears to me that though the ‘bar’ is too cruel she wears when she’s alone what she has been ordered to wear. But when the deuce is she alone? It’s herself of course that she has swindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely that even her conceit but half accounts for it, with little inadequate concessions, little false measures and preposterous evasions and childish hopes. Her great terror is now that Iffield, who already has suspicions, who has found out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled with some unblushing hocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and the essence of what she wanted this morning was in that interest to square me, to get me to deny indignantly and authoritatively (for isn’t she my ‘favourite sitter?’) that she has anything in life the matter with any part of her. She sobbed, she ‘went on,’ she entreated; after we got talking her extraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she has been through—showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do her. ‘Wait till I’m married! wait till I’m married!’ She took hold of me, she almost sank on her knees. It seems to me highly immoral, one’s participation in her fraud; but there’s no doubt that she must be married: I don’t know what I don’t see behind it! Therefore,” I wound up, “Dawling must keep his hands off.”
Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she gave out a long moan. “Well, that’s exactly what I came here to tell him.”
“Then here he is.” Our host, all unprepared, his latchkey still in his hand, had just pushed open the door and, startled at finding us, turned a frightened look from one to the other, wondering what disaster we were there to announce or avert.
Mrs. Meldrum was on the spot all gaiety. “I’ve come to return your sweet visit. Ah,” she laughed, “I mean to keep up the acquaintance!”
“Do—do,” he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look at us. Then he broke out: “He’s going to marry her.”
I was surprised. “You already know?”
He produced an evening paper, which he tossed down on the table.
“It’s in that.”
“Published—already?” I was still more surprised.
“Oh Flora can’t keep a secret!”—Mrs. Meldrum made it light. She went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him.
“It’s all right—it’s just as it ought to be: don’t think about her ever any more.” Then as he met this adjuration with a stare from which thought, and of the most defiant and dismal, fairly protruded, the excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the cheek.
CHAPTER X
I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads, and I confess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am rather proud of the comparison. The beads are all there, as I said—they slip along the string in their small smooth roundness.
Geoffrey Dawling accepted as a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which I snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital. Circumstances arising at this time led to my making an absence from England, and circumstances already existing offered him a firm basis for similar action. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton—he could take to his boats, always drawn up in our background. He started on a journey round the globe, and I was left with nothing but my inference as to what might have happened. Later observation however only confirmed my belief that if at any time during the couple of months after Flora Saunt’s brilliant engagement he had made up, as they say, to the good lady of Folkestone, that good lady would not have pushed him over the cliff. Strange as she was to behold I knew of cases in which she had been obliged to administer that shove. I went to New York to paint a couple of portraits; but I found, once on the spot, that I had counted without Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this harsh discrimination by the production of some dozen. I spent a year in America and should probably have spent a second had I not been summoned back to England by alarming news from my mother. Her strength had failed, and as soon as I reached London I hurried down to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer a welcome to some slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse but was now a little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in having come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, where arrears of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatever might next occur. Yet before returning to town I called on Mrs. Meldrum, from whom I had not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.
Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for I had seen in a few more seconds that the person thus assaulted had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much greater than any I should have thought possible when on this person’s drawing near I knew her for poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment she had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: once we were face to face it so chiefly mattered that I should succeed in looking entirely unastonished. All I at first saw was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which something convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she made no motion to take my offered hand.