 CHAPTER XVII 10 days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs. Gareth, a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date. Come up immediately and stay with me here. It was characteristically sharp, as Maggie said, but as Maggie added, it was also characteristically kind. Here was a hotel in London, and Maggie had embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant, and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. She dishesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's call she shouldn't know what she should be in for. Her friend's summons, however, was but another name for her friend's appeal, and Mrs. Gareth's bounty had later under obligations more sensible than any reluctance. In the event, that is, at the end of her hour, she testified to her gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by not taking her luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train, however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat in darkness, looking to the east for her dawn that had not yet glimmered. Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gareth. It had been so exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's pre-vision of Mrs. Briggstock's action upon her daughter, this action was at the end of the week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness all round had been exactly what Fleet had desired, but it gave her for a time a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at which she had had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now. She herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from Owen, poor Owen who had clearly known use to give about his precious letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Briggstock had hurried back to obtain that this letter should be written, Mrs. Briggstock might then have spared herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of all reasons, the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the letter had not been written, he would simply have had to introduce some large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able, on the contrary, to extend that picture, and his present submission was all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had prescribed. It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large. Fleet had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life to be impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive maiden at Waterbath was successful from the moment she could entertain her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight. There was something positive and portentious in her quietude. What game are they all playing? Poor Fleet could only ask, for she had an intimate conviction that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying if he really hated Mona and if he didn't really hate her what had brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's. Fleet had no real light, but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would have to go, that this was an inevitable incident of its keeping perfect faith—faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he was taking his risk she felt how weak a way that was of expressing Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there was nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gareth had by this time made of it, and reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As the morning post still held its peace she would of course be more confident, but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs. Gareth's awakening. How much she was beguiled, Flida could see from her having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had left her young friend alone because of the certitude cultivated at Ricks that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed, but much good had that brought forth. To have sent for her now, Flida felt, was from this point of view wholly natural. She had sent for her to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at water-bath, the refutation of that boast was easy. Flida found Mrs. Gareth in modest departments, and with an air of fatigue in her distinguished face, a sign, as she privately remarked, of the strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that this lady could make Flida blench a little and that the effect proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't simplify with the same bold hand as her protractors. In the very brightening of the tired look and at the moment of their embrace, Flida felt on her shoulders the return of the load, whereupon her spirit quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gareth's free manner always made a joke of weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar nobleness that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that seemed to announce that it had changed everything, a formidable assumption that what had happened was that a healthy young woman must like. The absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meager even before her companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay. Flida thought best to show bravery, too, and to show it from the first. What you expected, dear Mrs. Gareth, is exactly what I came up to ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first, right, I mean, to ascertain without making preparations. Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot. Mrs. Gareth was most emphatic. You're going abroad with me. Flida wondered, but she also smiled. Tonight? Tomorrow? In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now. Flida's heart at this gave a bound. She wondered to what particular difference in Mrs. Gareth's situation, as last known to her, it was an illusion. I've made my plan, her friend continued. I go for at least a year. We shall go straight to Florence. We can manage there. I, of course, don't look to you, however, she added, to stay with me all that time. That will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as possible. He may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm convinced it's quite the right thing to do. It will make a good change. It will put in a decent interval. Flida listened. She was deeply mystified. How kind you are to me, she presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. You really have it from Mr. Gareth that he'll give us his company? If Mr. Gareth's mother smiled in response to this, Flida knew that her smile was the tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son. Flida habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs. Gareth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more than she felt. Her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded Flida of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of Pointon. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she wished. Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well, she said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders, and held them at arm's length as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her shining eyes, Flida discovered something obscure and unquiet. You bad, false thing, why didn't you tell me? Her tone softened her harshness, and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs. Gareth could show patience. It was part of the general bribe, but it was also like handing in of a heavy bill before which Flida could only fumble in a penniless pocket. You must perfectly have known it ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and false. It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her. I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking about, Flida said. Mrs. Gareth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. You've done everything you need for modesty, my dear. If he's sick with love of you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you. Flida hesitated. Has he informed you, dear Mrs. Gareth? Dear Mrs. Gareth smiled sweetly. How could he when our situation is such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you were so tortuous you can seal everything? Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town? Flida asked. He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you. Mrs. Gareth met that illusion with a prompt firmness that made almost insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Flida's own sense of responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance. She could only, left as she was, with the little mystery on her hands, produce after a moment of question. How then do you come to know that your son has ever thought that he would give his ears to get you, Mrs. Gareth broke in? I had a visit for Mrs. Briggstock. Flida opened her eyes. She went down to Ricks? The day after she had found Owen at your feet, she knows everything. Flida shook her head sadly. She was more startled than she cared to know. This odd journey of Mrs. Briggstock's, which, with a simplicity equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having produced the hush of the last ten days. There are things she doesn't know, she presently exclaimed. She knows he would do anything to marry you. He hasn't told her so, Flida said. No, but he has told you that's better still, laughed Mrs. Gareth. My dear child, she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of blind profanity. Don't try to make yourself out better than you are. I know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing. You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have thought me in my good time. But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot. Your pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes in. Then with the finer significance, a look that seemed to flee to strange, she added, it's all right. I've seen him but twice, said Flida. But twice, Mrs. Gareth still smiled. On the occasion that proposed that Mrs. Briggstock told you of, you one day, since then, down at Maggie's. Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to be both poor creatures at best. Mrs. Gareth spoke with the rich humor which tipped with light for an instant the real conviction. I don't know what you've got in your veins. You absurdly exaggerate the difficulties. But enough is as good as the feast, and when once I get you abroad together, she checked herself, as if from excess of meaning, what might happen when she should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she slowly rubbed her hands. The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account as yet for the wealth of Mrs. Gareth's certitude. The visit of the Lady of Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. Is it permitted to be surprised, Fleida deferentially asked, would Mrs. Briggstock's thinking it would help her to see you? It's never permitted to be surprised that the aberrations of born fools, said Mrs. Gareth. If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Briggstock came down here to plead with me. Fleida mused a moment. That's what she came to do with me. She then honestly returned. But what did she expect to get a view with your opposition so marked from the first? She didn't know I want you, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my violence, the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid as an owl. She doesn't feel your charm. Fleida felt herself flush slightly, and she tried to smile. Did you tell her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me? For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey. So was not to aggravate Mona, Fleida suggested. So was not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to steer, but thank God we're at last in the open. What do you call the open, Mrs. Gareth? Fleida demanded. Then, as that lady faltered, do you know where Mr. Owen is today? Mrs. Gareth stared. Do you mean he's at water-bath? Well, that's your own affair. I can bear it, if you can. Wherever he is, I can bear it, Fleida said. But I haven't the least idea where he is. Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Mrs. Gareth broke out with a change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more patiently. Don't you understand, Fleida, how immensely, how devotedly I've trusted you? Her tone was indeed a supplication. Fleida was infinitely shaken. She was silent a little. Yes, I understand. Did she go to you to complain of me? She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset the day before by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted down to Rick's on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on leaving home. It was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your two faces. She spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen was on the brink, but there still might be time to save him, and it was with this idea she had bearded me in my den. What won't a mother do, you know? That was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother do, indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what. She tried to break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it. From the moment she opened on you, from the moment she denounced Owen's falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it was a plea for me or mercy that you and he between you were killing her child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was studiously kind to Mrs. Briggstock. At the same time I was honest. I didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage hadn't taken place months ago when Owen was perfectly ready, and I showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared his responsibility. It was she who had killed him. It was she who had destroyed his affection, his illusions, that she want him now when he was estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance. She reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance, too, but she admitted that she hadn't come to speak to me of that. What she had come to me for was not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully bedeviled. She didn't call it that. She called it misled. But it was simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was possible I could want him to marry you. Mona had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will. And now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word she felt might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gareth paused, she seemed to herself to ask in cold dread for her doom. What did you say to that, she inquired. I was embarrassed for I saw my danger, the danger of her going home and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds. Then I saw my issue. Your issue, Flida murmured. I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen. Flida wondered. And did you remember the little letter that, with your hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him? Perfectly. My little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an angel of delicacy. I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me to have done all that, and then figure to such a woman as having done the opposite. Besides, it was none of her business. Is that what you said to her, Flida asked? I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt to make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from point in what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you, I would at least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me. And was Mrs. Briggstock satisfied with your answer? She was visibly relieved. It was very fortunate for you, said Flida, that she's apparently not aware of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him at point in. Mrs. Gareth appeared to recall that scene. She smiled with a serenity remarkably effective, as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to invidious illusions to it. How should she be aware of it? She would, if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona. Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you, Mrs. Gareth declared. Flida shook her head wearily. No, I was only in love with him. Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gareth instantly mingled her fire. You dear old wretch, she exclaimed, and then again with ferocity embraced her young friend. Mrs. Gareth submitted like a sick animal. She would submit to everything now. Then what further passed? Only that she left me thinking she had got something. And what had she got? Nothing but her luncheon, but I got everything. Everything, Flida quavered. Mrs. Gareth struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her from a tremendous height, don't fail me now. It sounded so like a menace that with full divination at last the poor girl fell weakly into a chair. What on earth have you done? Mrs. Gareth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. I've settled you. She filled the room to Flida's scared vision with the glare of her magnificence. I've sent everything back. Everything, Flida gasped. To the smallest snuff-box, the last load went yesterday. The same people did it. Poor little ricks is empty. Then as if for a crowning splendor to check all deprecation, they're yours, you goose! Mrs. Gareth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white hands. Flida saw that there were tears in her deep eyes. CHAPTER XVIII She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she on the spot become but a traitorous to her friend? The treachery increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive superb as a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gareth had wished to make sure of her and had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her honor. If it be true, was men have declared that the sense of honor is weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a light on the question. What was now at all events put before Flida was that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard used by young men with whom she danced. The only word to fit Mrs. Gareth's intention was that Mrs. Gareth had designed to fetch her. It was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe. It looked her in the eyes and said simply, That's what I do for you. What Flida was to do in return required no pointing out. The sense at present of how little she had done made her almost cry aloud with pain, but her first endeavor in the face of the fact was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion. How little she had done, Mrs. Gareth didn't yet know, and possibly there would still be some way of turning round before the discovery. On her own side, too, Flida had almost made one. She had known she was wanted, but she had not, after all, conceived how magnificently much. She had been treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As high, bold diplomacy, it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She admired the noble risk of it. A risk Mrs. Gareth had faced for the utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change had instantly wrought in her was more over-extraordinary. It transformed her to touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling with the lady of ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken. She had been sore with the wrong to own. She had bled with the wounds of pointon. Now, however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea. Mrs. Gareth had become in a flash the victim. Poor little ricks had been laid bare in a night. If Flida's feeling about the old things had taken precipitate form, the form would have been a frantic command. It was indeed Vermeer want a breath that she didn't shout, oh, stop them, it's no use. Bring them back, it's too late. And what most kept her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Flida distinguished as never before the purity of such a passion it made Mrs. Gareth a gust and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish. She cared nothing for mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best for the things. She had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed that Flida knew what rested on her. Now it was also that she measured as if for the first time Mrs. Gareth's view of the natural influence of a fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more than she was obliged to make it the promise of the weeks before. It was one thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution will be made. It was another for her to see the condition where the noble trust treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she should only have to open a door to find every old piece and every old corner. To have played such a card was therefore, for Mrs. Gareth, practically to have won the game. Flida had certainly to recognize that, as so far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had been made sure of. She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her exposure. Why didn't you wait, dearest? Why didn't you wait? As if that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before it was spoken. This was only because at first the humility of gratitude helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands. She did homage at her feet. She murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the one despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gareth's glimpse of this despair suddenly widened, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the false courage of endearments. Do you mean to tell me at such an hour is this that you really lost him? The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Flida had nothing from this moment but terror. I don't know, Mrs. Gareth. How can I say, she asked. I've not seen him for so long as I told you just now I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his, she hurried on. He would have been with me every day if I had consented. But I made him understand the last time that I'll receive him again only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see? And that's why he hasn't come back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be miserable. When he does come, he'll be in a better position. He'll be tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me to feel you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but you're having done it for me is just what will delight him most. When he hears of it, said Flida, in desperate optimism, when he hears of it, there indeed, regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. I don't know what he won't make of you and how he won't hug you. She had to content herself with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gareth to a sofa with a vague instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time, but it was a position in which her great, duped benefactress, portentiously patient again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a hug. Flida found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an immense need to be understood and justified. She averted her face and dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in happier days had been her secret. You mustn't think I don't adore him when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I die for him. I love him so that it's horrible. Look at me, therefore, as if I had not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying, and my tenderness for what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as if you feel what I've been through. Darling, Mrs. Garrus, I could kiss the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride. I used to have, but it's gone. I used to have a secret, but everyone knows it now, and anyone who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me? It's not so very fine, my secret, and the less one says really about it the better, but I want you to have it for me because I was stiff before. I want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can very well be. It serves me right, Fleta laughed, if I was ever proud and horrid to you. I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at Rick's, to do, but I don't think you could have wanted much more than what I've done. The other day at Maggie's, I did things that made me afterwards think of you. I don't know what girls may do, but if he doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his, Fleta sighed as if she couldn't express it. She piled it up as she would have said, holding Mrs. Garrus with dilated eyes. She seemed to sound her for the effect of these professions. It's idiotic, she wearily smiled. It's so strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is that it isn't even happiness, it's anguish. It was from the first, from the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either. He's a deer. I assure you he's a deer. I'd trust him to the last breath. I don't think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a show of. He's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Rick's that you wanted me to let myself go, and I've gone quite far enough to discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful things about him. You'll tell me that I make myself out worse than I am, said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude, a quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigoural, and even perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out bad. It was a part of her justification. But it suddenly occurred to her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry to the young man. I don't care for anything you think, she declared, because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it makes up for everything. This attempted gayet he was futile. The silence with which for a minute her adversary greeted her troubled plea, brought home to her afresh that she was on the bare defensive. Is it part of his kindness never to come near you, Mrs. Gareth inquired at last? Is it a part of his kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is? She rose again from where Flida had kept her down. She seemed to tower there in the majesty of her gathered wrong. Is it part of his kindness that after I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which I haven't spared, to denude myself in your interest, to that point that I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back, is it a part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me? There was a high contempt in this, which was for Owen quite as much, and in the light of which Flida felt that her effort at plausibility had been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with a humiliated sense of rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an instant. It was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She herself could bear his mother's scorn, but to avert it from his sweet innocence, she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an arm. Don't blame him. Don't blame him. He'd do anything on earth for me. It was I, said Flida eagerly, who sent him back to her. I made him go. I pushed him out of the house. I declined to have anything to say to him, except on another footing. Mrs. Gareth stared as at some gross material ravage. Another footing? What other footing? The one I've already made so clear to you, my hamming it in black and white, as you may say, from her, that she freely gives him up. Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his liberty? Flida hesitated a moment, after which she exclaimed with a certain hard pride. He said, nothing love with me for anything. For anything, apparently, saved to act like a man and impose his reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your systematic, to your idiotic perversity? What are you, after all, my dear? I should like to know that a gentleman who offers you what Owen offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples? Her resentment rose to a strange insolence, which Flida took full in the face, and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse of lost alternatives. I don't know what to think of it, Mrs. Gareth went on. I don't know what to call him. I'm so ashamed of him that I can scarcely speak of him, even to you. But indeed, I'm so ashamed of you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look. She paused to give Flida the full benefit of this remarkable statement. Then she exclaimed, any one but a jackass would have tucked you under his arm and marched you off to the registrar. Flida wondered, with her free imagination, she could wonder even while her cheeks stung from a slap to the registrar. That would have been the saying, sound, immediate course to adopt, with a grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. I should have found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen is supposed to be. I should have got the business over first. The rest could come when you liked. Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked, and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped his fingers at your refinements. This stirring speech affected our young lady, as if it had been the shake of a tambourine born towards her from a gypsy dance. Her head seemed to go round, and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion, however, was but meagerly expressed in the flatness with which she heard herself presently say, I'll go to the registrar now. Now, magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gareth threw into this monosyllable, and pray, who's to take you? Fleeter gave a colorless smile, and her companion continued, do you literally mean that you can't put your hand upon him? Fleeter's wand grimace appeared to irritate her. She made a short, imperious gesture. Find him for me, you fool. Find him for me. What do you want of him, Fleeter, sadly, asked, feeling as you do to both of us? Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious. Mrs. Gareth still more incisively added. Of course I cling to you, you wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see that he takes you. What I want of him is to go with you myself to the place. She looked round the room, as if in feverish haste for a mantle to catch up. She bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab. She would allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet she had snatched from the sofa a garment for the street. She jerked it on as she came back. Find him, find him, she repeated, come straight out with me, to try at least to get at him. How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready, Fleeter replied. Mrs. Gareth turned on her sharply. Ready for what? Ready to see me ruined without a reason or a reward? Fleeter was silent. The worst of it all was that there was something unspoken between them. Neither of them dared utter it, but the influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last with great gentleness. Don't be harsh to me. I'm very unhappy. The words produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gareth, who held her face averted and set off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long caravan of her treasures. Fleeter knew she was watching it wind up the Avenue of Pointon. Fleeter participated, indeed, fully in the vision so that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add, I don't see why in the world you take it so for granted that he, as you say, lost. Mrs. Gareth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness denoted some success in controlling herself. If he's not lost, why are you unhappy? I'm unhappy because I torment you and you don't understand me. No, Fleeter, I don't understand you, said Mrs. Gareth, finally facing her again. I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very old fashioned and simple and bad, but you must take me as I am, since you take so much else with me. She spoke now with the drop of her resentment, with a dry and weary calm. It would have been much better for me if I'd never known you, she pursued, and certainly better if I hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that, too, is inevitable. Everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own doing. You didn't run after me. I pounced on you and caught you up. You're a stiff little beggar in spite of your pretty manners. Yes, you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever sympathy that did it, your extraordinary feeling for those accursed vanities. You were sharper about them than anyone I had ever known, and that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well, the poor lady concluded after a pause, you see where it has landed us. If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here, said Fleta. Mrs. Gareth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to consider. To his club, do you mean? Isn't it there when he's in town that he has a room? He has at present no other London address, Fleta said. It's there, one writes to him. How do I know with my wretched relations with him? Mrs. Gareth asked. Mine have not been quite so bad as that, Fleta desperately smiled. Then she added, his silence, her silence, our hearing nothing at all. What are these but the very things on which it pointed and ricks? You rested your assurance that everything is at an end between them? Mrs. Gareth looked dark and void. Yes, but I hadn't heard it from you then that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him back to her. Ah, but on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't know. You've learned by Mrs. Briggstock's visit that he cares for me. Fleta found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic arguments that she formally had repudiated. Her refutation of her companion had completely changed its ground. She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious on behalf of her success that her fever was visible. She could see herself the reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gareth's somber eyes. You plunge me in stupefaction, that lady answered, and at the same time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you what does appear, and yet in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that he's spending these days at water-bath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not to see my way in such darkness. If he's at water-bath, he doesn't care for you. If he cares for you, he's not at water-bath. Then where is he, poor Fleta, helplessly wailed? She caught herself up, however. She did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gareth could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her, not the ask, but the answer, she found an air of assurance to say. You simplify far too much. You always did, and you always will. The tangle of life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be. You slash into it, cried Fleta, finally, with a great pair of shears, you nip it as if you were one of the fates. If Owen's at water-bath, he's there to wind everything up. Mrs. Gareth shook her head with slow austerity. You don't believe a word you're saying. I frightened you as you frightened me. You're whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless, if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your perversity's the thing to howl over. However, the poor woman continued with a break in her voice, a long hesitation, and then the dry triumph of her will. I'll never mention it to you again. Owen, I can just make out, for Owen is a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead, she repeated, with a quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleta's eyes. I don't know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak. Fleta hesitated, at last, before her companion she lowered her look. Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me, she added. That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed me, and I didn't fail his father, said Mrs. Gareth. She gave Fleta a moment to appreciate the remark, after which she pursued, Mona Brigstock isn't weak. She's stronger than you. I never thought she was weak, Fleta answered. She looked vaguely round the room with a new purpose. She had lost sight of her umbrella. I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you really haven't, Mrs. Gareth declared. If Mona has got him, Fleta had accomplished her search, her interlocutress paused. If Mona has got him, the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella. Well, said Mrs. Gareth profoundly, it will be clear enough that Mona has. Has let herself go? Has let herself go? Mrs. Gareth spoke as if she saw it in every detail. Fleta felt atone and finished her preparation. Then she went and opened the door. We'll look for him together, she said to her friend, who stood a moment taking in her face. They may know something about him at the colonels. We'll go there, Mrs. Gareth had picked up her gloves and her purse. But the first thing she went on will be to wire to point him. Why not to water-bath at once, Fleta asked? Her companion hesitated, in your name? In my name I noticed a place at the corner. While Fleta held the door open Mrs. Gareth drew on her gloves. Forgive me, she presently said, kiss me, she added. Fleta, on the threshold, kissed her. Then they both went out. CHAPTER XIX In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleta wrote her telegram, wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gareth's eye, and then in silence handed it to her. I send this to water-bath on the possibility of your being there to ask you to come to me. Mrs. Gareth held at a moment, read it more than once, then keeping it and with her eyes on her companion seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a kindness in her look, Fleta perceived in it as if the reward of complete submission a slight relaxation of her rigor. Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better, she asked, before doing this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain? Why so? It will be always so much done, said Fleta. Though I'm poor, she added with a smile, I don't mind the shilling. The shilling's my shilling, said Mrs. Gareth. Fleta stayed her hand. No, no, I'm superstitious. Superstitious? To succeed it must be all me. Well, if that will make it succeed, Mrs. Gareth took back her shilling, but she still kept the telegram, as he's most probably not there. If he shouldn't be there, Fleta interrupted, there will be no harm done. If he shouldn't be there, Mrs. Gareth ejaculated, heaven help us how you assume it. I'm only prepared for the worst. The Briggs stocks will simply send any telegram on. Where will they send it? Presumably to point it. They'll read it first, said Mrs. Gareth. Read it? Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated, and then shall probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your immodesty. What of that, asked Fleta? You don't mind her seeing it? Rather musingly and absently, Fleta shook her head. I don't mind anything. Well, then, that's all right, said Mrs. Gareth, as if she had only wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. Why have you given for a reply your sister's address? Because if he does come to me, he must come to me there. If that telegram goes, said Fleta, I return to Maggie's tonight. Mrs. Gareth seemed to wonder at this. You won't receive him here with me? No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him last, only there again. She showed her companion that as to that she was firm. But Mrs. Gareth had obviously now had some practice in following queer movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate, then she brought out. You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a little stronger? Fleta gave her a faint smile. He'll come if he can. Mrs. Gareth met fully with this conveyed, with decisions she pushed in the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form, and with still greater decision wrote another message. For me this, she said to Fleta, when she had finished, to catch him possibly at Pointon. Will you read it? Fleta turned away. Thank you. It's stronger than yours. I don't care, said Fleta, moving to the door. Mrs. Gareth, having paid for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's Club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleta, from the handsome, watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the Hall Porter, and then met in silence her return with the news that he had not seen Owen for a fortnight, and was keeping his letters till called for. These had been the last orders, there were a dozen letters lying there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they could find out at Colonel Gareth's. To any connection with this inquiry, however, Fleta now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste of either of them to advertise in the remota reaches of the family that they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Pointon. The letters lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to arrive. Mrs. Gareth had got back into the cab, and still at the door of the club they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleta's eyes rested in the great hard street on passing figures that struck her as puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them through the hole in the top. Anywhere in particular, ladies, Fleta decided, Drive to Euston, please. You won't wait for what we may hear, Mrs. Gareth asked. Whatever we hear I must go, as the cab went on she added, but I needn't drag you to the station. Mrs. Gareth was silent a moment, then, nonsense, she sharply replied. In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost tremulously mild, though their mildness took mainly the form of an inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied them, the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and round without naming it. Much too early for Fleta's train they encountered at the station a long half hour to wait. Fleta made no further allusion to Mrs. Gareth's leaving her. Their dumbness, with the elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly paced the great grey platform and presently Mrs. Gareth tooks the girl's arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleta not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking, to know indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which at moments brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the one that was fixed, the other filled at times the whole space and then was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and disappeared, but the replenishment of pointon made a shining, steady light. The old splendour was there again, the old things were in their places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning, face to face, on the platform. They counted them in each other's eyes. Fleta had come back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gareth replied with pale lucidity, was naturally the person most familiar with the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it was to do it. She had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed there audaciously enough to a sort of arrogance of energy and Fleta going on again, her inquiry more than answered at her arm rendering service, flushed in her diminished identity with the sense that such a woman was great. You do mean literally everything to the last little miniature on the last little screen? I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue. Fleta went over them while they walked again. She had no need of the catalogue. At last she spoke once more. Even the Maltese Cross? Even the Maltese Cross. Why not that as well as everything else, especially as I remembered how you liked it. Finally after an interval the girl exclaimed, but the mere fatigue of it, the exhaustion of such a feat, I drag you to and fro here while you must be ready to drop. I'm very, very tired. Mrs. Gareth's slow head shake was tragic. I couldn't do it again. I doubt if they'd bear it again. That's another matter. They'd bear it if I could. There won't have been this time either a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired. I very nearly don't care. You must sit down then till I go, said Fleta. We must find a bench. No, I'm tired of them. I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you to feel most how much I rest on you. Fleta had a compunction, wondering as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her. She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low, it was far from dying out. An impression presently confirmed by the way Mrs. Gareth went on. But once fatigue is nothing. The idea under which one worked kept one up. For you I could. I can't still. Nothing will have mattered if she's not here. There was a question that this imposed, but Fleta at first found no voice to utter it. It was the thing that between them, since her arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was able to breathe. But if she is there, if she's there already, Mrs. Gareth's rejoinder, too, hung back. Then when it came, from sad eyes as well as from lips barely moved, it was unexpectedly merciful. It will be very hard. That was all now, and it was poignantly simple. The train Fleta was to take and drawn up. The girl kissed her as if in farewell. Mrs. Gareth submitted, then after a little brought out. If we have lost, if we have lost, Fleta repeated as she paused again, you'll all the same come abroad with me? It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask, whatever you need, that I will always do. I shall need your company, said Mrs. Gareth. Fleta wondered an instant if this were not practically a demand for penal submission. For a surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs. Gareth pursued. We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together. Of the old things, Fleta had selected a third-class compartment. She stood a moment looking into it, and at a fat woman with a basket who had already taken possession. Always, she said, turning to her companion. Never, she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up-door and window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gareth had gone. CHAPTER XX. There came to her at her sister's no telegram and answered 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 unconscious 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 couldn'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 couldn't have given a name—indifference, resignation, despair—with the terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long for the stages of the journey with the items of Mrs. Gareth's surrender. The detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Flida had now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was the reconstituted splendor of pointed. 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 condemnation 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. Gareth's early judgment of her. She equally, 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 around 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 be hers, that they were perhaps already in others, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They were nobodies at all, too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was pointin' 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. Gareth. Shall be with you at eleven-thirty. Don't meet me at station. Flita turned this over. She 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 Flita suffered more than she gained from the grandeur of the Gareth, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She was not, like poor Flita, at everyone's back, 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 adjust provocation even the understanding she had had with her husband that he also should remain invisible. Flita accordingly awaited alone the subject of so many maneuvers, a period that was slightly prolonged even after the drawing-room door at eleven-thirty was thrown open. Mrs. Gareth 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 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. She has done it, said Mrs. Gareth, turning her eyes avoidingly, but not unperceivingly about her, and in spite of herself dropping an opinion upon the few objects in the room. Flita, 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. Gareth 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 Flita's. It's the end. They're married. They're married. Flita came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her, then paused before her while Mrs. Gareth turned up a dead gray mask. A tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. I've heard nothing, said Flita. No answer came. That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything. So Flita saw. For a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. She wasn't at water-path. Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and kept it. But mine, the one to point and brought something. We are here. What do you want? Mrs. Gareth stopped as if with a failure of voice, on which Flita sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her hand. It met no response. There could be no attenuation. Flita waited. They sat facing each other like strangers. I wanted to go down, Mrs. Gareth 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 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. Flita hesitated. Did you see her? Thank God no. Flita laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth. 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 eeked out the bareness of the room. The Flita, in the face of the event, had 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. Gareth couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't in conduct make small differences. You're magnificent, her young friend explained, there's an extraordinary greatness in your generosity. We're together, we're together, Mrs. Gareth lifelessly repeated, that's all we are now, it's all we have. The words brought to Flita a sudden vision of the empty little house at Rick's. Such a vision might also have been what her companion found in the face of the stop 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 her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything. Flita 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. But he has done it that he could not do it, shows how right I was. It settled for ever her attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind. Then after a little she added very gently for Mrs. Gareth's. That's to say it shows he was bound to her by an obligation that however much he may have wanted to he couldn't in any sort of honour break. Blanched and bleak Mrs. Gareth 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? Flita 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 Flita as before some lurid image of this interview sat without speaking. Do you wish to appear as if you don't care? Mrs. Gareth 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 Flita 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. Gareth 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, Flita asked, doesn't that exactly prove that he recognized one? He recognized Rott, you know what I think of him. Flita knew she had no wish to provoke a fresh statement. Mrs. Gareth made one, it was her sole faint flicker of passion, to the extent of declaring that he was too objectively weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Flita 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. Flita 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 Pointon. I had sent them for you, but it was her I touched. Mrs. Gareth paused. Flita 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, Flita repeated. I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how, said Mrs. Gareth. Flita received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this illusion to the person who had not known how, but had 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 if she couldn'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. Gareth shrugged her shoulders. She did what you wouldn't. Flita's face had grown dark with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no bomb 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. Flita, 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 registry office, like a pair of low atheists? The girl hesitated. What do people say of that? I mean the world. Nothing, because nobody knows. There to be married on the seventeenth 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. Flita was mystified. People surely know at point and she objected, if as you say she's there. She was there a day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him in London and went down to see the things. Flita 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. Gareth. 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. Flita stared. Then she's not to live there. Rather, but not till after the public marriage. Mrs. Gareth seemed amuse. 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 nonetheless his wife and you're not, said Mrs. Gareth getting up. Our only chance is the chance that she may die. Flita appeared to consider. She appreciated her visitor's magnanimous use of the plural. Mona won't die, she replied. Well, I shall, thank God. Till then, and with this for the first time, Mrs. Gareth put out her hand. Don't desert me. Flita took her hand and her clasp of it was the reiteration of her 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. Gareth 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, Flita said, but how, after what has happened, can it be his about you? Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth 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. Gareth, wonderingly moaned. It was for Flita 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. Gareth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing and watching. At last Mrs. Gareth, too, sank down again. Mrs. Gareth soundlessly, wearily wept. CHAPTER XXI It looks just like water-bath, but after all we bore that together. These words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs. Gareth, writing from disfigured ricks, named a flea to 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 anyone 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 know 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 fifteenth. The position of a bit of furniture was one that Flida 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. Gareth 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 Pointon 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. Gareth, 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. Flida, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor give her up. She had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs. Gareth, 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 Flida was that she would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after with the dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She 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 fifteenth Flida 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 watermark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room to room, Flida 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. Gareth 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. Gareth was all unwitting. She didn't in the least know what she had done, and as Flida could tell her, Flida 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. Gareth 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 dearest old woman that ever lived, I thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt. She was stored in an empty bar and 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. Flida took the highest line in the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gareth, challenging her cheerfulness, turned again a lustrous eye over the contents of the place, she 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, tell-tale things! How can they not speak to you and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of pointon, 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 faraway voice with the little quaver of a heartbreak. You've listened to it unawares for the arrangement and the 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. Gareth. 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. Flida ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. Ah, there's something here that will never be in the inventory. Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name? Mrs. Gareth'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 Pointon, Flida went on. That was the only fault. Mrs. Gareth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine humor. Pointon was too splendidly happy. Pointon was too splendidly happy, Flida promptly echoed. But it's cured of that now, her companion added. Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two. Mrs. Gareth thought again. She found her young friend suggestive. Only she won't see them. No, she won't see them. Then Flida said, what I mean is, for this dear one of ours, that if she had, as I know she did, it's in the very taste of the air, a great accepted pain. She paused an instant and Mrs. Gareth took her up. Well, if she had, Flida still hesitated. Why, it was worse than yours. Mrs. Gareth reflected. Very likely, and she too hesitated. The question is, if it was worse than yours. Mine, Flida looked vague. Precisely yours. That 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 Flida. Mrs. Gareth met her eyes a while. 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 Gareth of Point and Park, to Miss Mona Briggstock of Waterbath. There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids, and, as Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth'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 bricks in the garden, and she lingered there alone a long time after receiving them. Flida kept at a distance. She knew what must have happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her eyes strange and fixed. The newspaper opened on the ground, and the letters untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and the rest of the day she remained at her own room. It recalled to Flida, who had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had come down to Point and to make his engagement known. The hush of the house at least was the same, and the girls' own waiting, her soft wandering, through the hours. There was the 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 Flida, devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gareth'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. Flida 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 the source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure. She was sure of you, Mrs. Gareth returned, but this didn't diminish the satisfaction taken by Flida in showing how serenely and lucidly she could talk. End of chapter 21. Chapter 22 of the Spoils of Pointon. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information of the volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Henry James, The Spoils of Pointon, Chapter 22. Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new one, begun to shape itself almost totally on breaches and emissions. Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them, which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers or yoke-fellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Flida wondered how Mrs. Gareth 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 friends' visit to her at her sisters, we saw them precipitantly 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, too, was occupied with the actual. The actual was not that Owen Gareth 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 months that followed when Mrs. Gareth Strucker is still older and feebler and is 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 Gareth, who arrived in town last week, preceded this morning to Paris. They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gareth irrelevantly broken out. I dare say you wonder why I declared the other day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently is living with her. Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do. There beyond me, I give it up, said Mrs. Gareth. I don't give it up, I never did, Fleta returned. Then what do you make of his aversion to her? Oh, she has dispelled it. Mrs. Gareth said nothing for a minute. You're prodigious in your choice of terms. She then simply ejaculated. But Fleta 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. Gareth. You were completely bewildered. Yes, I didn'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. Gareth. She doesn'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. Gareth. 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 but it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself. Her natural charm, Mrs. Gareth 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 didn't love you. Fleta was silent a little. What do you know about his loving me? I know what Mrs. Briggstock herself told me. You've never in your life took a word for any other matter. Then won't yours do, Mrs. Gareth demanded. Haven't I had it from your own mouth that he cares for you? Fleta turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. You confound, Mrs. Gareth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own mouth that I care for him. It was doubtless and contradictious allusion to this, which at the time had made her simply drop her head in a strange, vain reverie, that Mrs. Gareth, a day or two later, said to Fleta, 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 wouldn't be nice of you not to be disgusted. I'm not talking of disgust, I'm talking of its opposite, said Mrs. Gareth. Of its opposite? Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an exhibition, I shall feel not at all. You may personally take it as you like, but what conceivable good will it do? Fleta wondered, to me do you mean? Just take you know, to what we don't, you know, by your wish ever talk about. The old things, Fleta considered again. It will do no good of any sort to anything or anyone. That's another question I would rather we shouldn't discuss, please, she gently added. Mrs. Gareth shrugged her shoulders. It certainly isn'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. Gareth stared. What pain can I ever feel again? I meant painful to myself, Fleta with a slight impatience explained. 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, Fleta suddenly hesitated. Mrs. Gareth 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 more over as the months went on, the protection of suspended illusions. This protection was marked when, in the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at which a quick glance of feist 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 Gareth, 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 gone again abroad. She also knew, without communication, that Mrs. Gareth, 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 directed at showing whom it might concern that now she had pointed 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 Gareth 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 point in is what I mean and what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I, what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges and for what they bring. What I want you to take from me and 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 whenever 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 Mama 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 this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it must be that makes me ask. Fleeter read that last sentence over more times even than the rest. She was baffled. She couldn't at all think 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 Pointon 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 couldn'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 before it? What was in the deepest depths 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 room 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 things 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 her fresh. She would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn'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 she 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 wished to go to Maggie the next day and now that she 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 largest station she had taken her place in the third class compartment the prospect before her was the run of 80 minutes to Pointon. The train was the 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 for 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 was 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 everyone's being exactly where everyone 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. Often that quarter was an air of wild rain but their shimmage straight across at 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 fleet of vetch then the house was standing there. But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock though for an instant she couldn't have named it. The next moment she saw 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. Gareth's time and who now recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and before a lighting broke out to him they've come back. She had a confused absurd sense that even he would know in this case she mustn't be there. He hesitated and in a 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 windows of the train looking out at something she couldn't see. Someone, 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 identify her too and come straight at 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 Pointon 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. Pointons 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 she passed. When it had drawn away she became 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? They'll be there all day. Not Mr. Gareth, I mean, nor his wife, nor his mother, Miss, not a soul of them back, a pack of servants in charge, not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for caretakers, 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 couldn't quite say they'd got it down. Fleeta 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 a muffet. This ain't a place like for anything organized. They don't come up to a real emergency. She passed out of the doors and opened toward the village and met a great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar, witch 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 she waveringly stood her ground. It's not a place for a young lady, nor if you'll believe me, it's a sight for them as are in any way affected. Fleeda by this time knew in what way she was affected. She became limp and weak again. She felt herself give everything up. Mixed with 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. Pointons gone? The man hesitated. What could 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 a 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. End of chapter 22. End of Henry James, The Spoils of Pointon.