Chapter 10

Glasses 1658 words 2017-02-22 21:08:41

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.

"I had no idea you were down here!" I said and I wondered whether

she didn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum," she ever so quietly answered.

It was just this low pitch that made me protest with laughter. "Oh

yes, you have a tremendous deal in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I've

just returned to England after a long absence and I'm on my way to

see her. Won't you come with me?" It struck me that her old

reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed of now.

"I've just left her. I'm staying with her." She stood solemnly

fixing me with her goggles. "Would you like to paint me now?" she

asked. She seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a

mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but treat the question still with high

spirits. "It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!"

That something was wrong it wasn't difficult to see, but a good

deal more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora

was under Mrs. Meldrum's roof. I hadn't for a year had much time

to think of her, but my imagination had had ground for lodging her

in more gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before

leaving England was that in commemoration of the new relationship

she had gone to stay with Lady Considine. This had made me take

everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had

deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were

at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only

of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember

nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the

grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any

rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off this

danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without

waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own

doings. My companion was finely silent, and I felt both as if she

were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony and as

if I were talking to some different and strange person. Flora

plain and obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum's

door she turned off with the observation that as there was

certainly a great deal I should have to say to our friend she had

better not go in with me. I looked at her again--I had been

keeping my eyes away from her--but only to meet her magnified

stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone, but

there was something so grim in the girl's trouble that I hesitated

to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn't

express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more

trouble than there actually might have been. I reflected that I

must really figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I

had never expected to give her. It rolled over me there for the

first time--it has come back to me since--that there is,

wondrously, in very deep and even in very foolish misfortune a

dignity still finer than in the most inveterate habit of being all

right. I couldn't have to her the manner of treating it as a mere

detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our last

meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to

think of some manner that I COULD have she said quite colourlessly,

though somehow as if she might never see me again: "Good-bye. I'm

going to take my walk."

"All alone?"

She looked round the great bleak cliff-top. "With whom should I

go? Besides I like to be alone--for the present."

This gave me the glimmer of a vision that she regarded her

disfigurement as temporary, and the confidence came to me that she

would never, for her happiness, cease to be a creature of

illusions. It enabled me to exclaim, smiling brightly and feeling

indeed idiotic: "Oh I shall see you again! But I hope you'll have

a very pleasant walk."

"All my walks are pleasant, thank you--they do me such a lot of

good." She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me

stupendous in their wisdom. "I take several a day," she continued.

She might have been an ancient woman responding with humility at

the church door to the patronage of the parson. "The more I take

the better I feel. I'm ordered by the doctors to keep all the

while in the air and go in for plenty of exercise. It keeps up my

general health, you know, and if that goes on improving as it has

lately done everything will soon be all right. All that was the

matter with me before--and always; it was too reckless!--was that I

neglected my general health. It acts directly on the state of the

particular organ. So I'm going three miles."

I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum's maid stood

there to admit me. "Oh I'm so glad," I said, looking at her as she

paced away with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the

day when, while she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the

same observation. Her air of assurance was on this occasion not

less than it had been on that; but I recalled that she had then

struck me as marching off to her doom. Was she really now marching

away from it?

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