The spoils of Poynton

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     These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had time to learn from Mrs Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the south of England, was this lady’s established, or rather her disestablished, home: it had recently passed into the possession of her son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before, and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered together at Waterbath. The kind soldier’s house was also an ordeal, but the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their confessions. The great drawback of Mrs Gereth’s situation was that, thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life had become for her a kind of fool’s paradise. She couldn’t leave her own house without peril of exposure. She didn’t say it in so many words, but Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand destiny had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had gone with her and that she had enjoyed an extraordinary fortune.
     There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband’s sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied, there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience of the collector – a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn’t have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life, and there were lots of things they hadn’t had, but they had had in every corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor Fleda, who hadn’t a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gaiety and conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn’t so much even as a home, and her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid some of her bills, but he didn’t like her to live with him; and she had lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions, or somebody’s else, were as yet her only material. Mrs Gereth had told her she liked her because she had an extraordinary flair; but under the circumstances a flair was a questionable boon: in the dry spaces in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh. She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place and before the month was out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed, should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs Gereth there was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told Fleda that she couldn’t completely know why till she should have seen the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection, which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were a blank to everybody else.
     The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her early in July, when Mrs Gereth would return to it as to her home; but even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the poor lady’s troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona Brigstock, marry her in his mother’s teeth, and that such an act would have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs Gereth, her companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to a product of Waterbath – that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should know the place. She did know Waterbath and she despised it – she had that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she read deep into the matter: she stared, aghast, as it came home to her for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of the lonely mother. Mr Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man, but Mr Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object; everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with them. He appeared to have assumed she would settle questions with her son, that he could depend on Owen’s affection. And in truth, as poor Mrs Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a prevision – he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything repulsive – of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare. Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs Gereth spoke of poor Mona’s taint as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home.
     “Well, then, if he doesn’t care—!” Fleda exclaimed with some impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence.
     Mrs Gereth looked at her rather hard. “If he doesn’t care?”
     Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. “Well – he’ll give them up.”
     “Give what up?”
     “Why, those beautiful things.”
     “Give them up to whom?” Mrs Gereth more boldly stared.
     “To you, of course – to enjoy, to keep for yourself.”
     “And leave his house as bare as your hand? There’s nothing in it that isn’t precious.”
     Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity by which she was slightly disconcerted. “I don’t mean of course that he should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to which you’re most attached.”
     “I think he would if he were free,” said Mrs Gereth.
     “And do you mean, as it is, that she’ll prevent him?” Mona Brigstock, between these ladies, was now nothing but ‘she’.
     “By every means in her power.”
     “But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?”
     “No,” Mrs Gereth replied, “but because they belong to the house and the house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything she would simply say, with that motionless mask: ‘It goes with the house.’ And day after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the squeeze of a doll’s stomach: ‘It goes with the house – it goes with the house.’ In that attitude they’ll shut themselves up.”
     Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs Gereth had turned this over – had faced, if indeed only to recognise its futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before: she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend’s continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to extremities? Was no good-humoured, graceful compromise to be imagined or brought about? Couldn’t the same roof cover them? Was it so very inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of years to making beautiful for him? Mrs Gereth hailed this question with a wan, compassionate smile: she replied that a common household, in such a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a ‘mistake’, a piece of overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been capable they would still have Mona’s hatred to reckon with. Fleda’s breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which, on Mrs Gereth’s lips, the course of discussion could take.
     This was the first she had heard of Mona’s hatred, though she certainly had not needed Mrs Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation with her young friend, Mrs Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with the new proprietors and accept – or call it, for a day, endure – the horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they wouldn’t after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs Gereth admitted when pushed that she didn’t quite suppose they would. What she meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to clumsy servants (there wasn’t an object of them all but should be handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the convenient. Above all she saw in advance with dilated eyes the abominations they would inevitably mix up with them – the maddening relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the ‘household art’ and household piety of Mona’s hideous home. Wasn’t it enough simply to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a Brigstock and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her acquisition? Did Fleda really see her, Mrs Gereth demanded, spending the remainder of her days with such a creature’s elbow in her eye?
     Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn’t and that Waterbath had been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted and that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of his mother’s wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know how little really she did this and that she was there, since Mrs Gereth had insisted, not to betray but essentially to confirm and protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune; a limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, “It’s awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy.” As well as his quick speech, which shyness made obscure – it was usually as desperate as a ‘rush’ at some violent game – his child’s eyes in his man’s face put it to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself, was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a beauty in the candour and even in the modesty which apparently kept him from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with Owen Gereth.

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     They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating girl had the full revelation. “Now do you know how I feel?” Mrs Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She perfectly understood how Mrs Gereth felt – she had understood but meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the tightening of their bond – tears which on the younger one’s part were the natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house, had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes, nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs Gereth had achieved was indeed an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda’s flair, and Fleda now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she passed in this initiation.
     Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the record of a life. It was written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide embrace. While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and refined on nature, Mrs Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures – the panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend’s taste, a fine arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it – that thought ached in her breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs Gereth’s remaining there would have offered her a sort of future – stretching away in safe years on the other side of a gulf – the advent of the others could only be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The museums had done something for her, but nature had done more.
     If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of whether the jollity of London were not merely the only name his small vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed in his conduct another ambiguity – something that required explaining so long as his motive didn’t come to the surface. If he was in love what was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn’t? The mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs Gereth cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: “Why, he’s bringing her down – he wants her to see the house!” They flew, the two women, into each other’s arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona didn’t know, or Owen didn’t, whether Poynton would really please her. She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs Gereth wailed, that the girl’s expectations would be dashed! There was a fine consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it? Mrs Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself of the possibility on Mona’s part of some bewildered blankness, some collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain – a hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the measure of the poor lady’s strange, almost maniacal disposition to thrust in everywhere the question of ‘things’, to read all behaviour in the light of some fancied relation to them. ‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people’s not having, but she couldn’t imagine their not wanting and not missing.
     The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs Brigstock, and with a prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious, before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost as much as Mrs Gereth’s her taste was her life, though her life was somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was some one she wouldn’t have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about, show her the house and cover up her ignorance. Owen’s announcement had been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs Gereth, true to her system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form. Fleda was appalled after the first hour by the rash innocence with which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a manner on her companion’s, and it was this that made her want to entice the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads, the only ones she had – eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as content to say nothing as if, Mrs Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs Gereth contrived at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was brutally ignorant; but Fleda more finely discovered that her ignorance was obscurely active.
     She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely knew what, was expected of her that she couldn’t give; and the only mode her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her big feet and pull another way. Mrs Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn’t: very well, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t rise; she already moved at the altitude that suited her, and was able to see that since she was exposed to the hatred she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that, a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of her security. Didn’t her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through such an appeal – an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being, as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she was the girl stiffly to draw back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything ‘most striking’, and was visibly happy that Owen’s captor should be so far on the way to strike: but she jarred upon Mrs Gereth by her formula of admiration, which was that anything she looked at was ‘in the style’ of something else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and poor Mrs Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise and had brought with her a trophy of her journey, a ‘lady’s magazine’ purchased at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which, as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense of the beautiful.
     By the day’s end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged, the day had been determinant. Whether or no she felt the charm she felt the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his mother the worst. Nevertheless when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one’s room, cried out, “She hates it; but what will she do?” Fleda pretended vagueness, played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a silken thread she could clutch in the gloom – she would never give Owen away. He might give himself – he even certainly would; but that was his own affair, and his blunders, his innocence only added to the appeal he made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs Gereth, there was a flaw in her frankness. Her admirable friend continued to know everything she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive.
     From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a listening parasol but without a visible look for the great florid picture that had been hung there by Mrs Gereth’s hand. Mona kept dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man’s and which she kicked forward a little – it gave her an odd movement – to help her see what she thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs Gereth was in the breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn’t he been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it was not the reflection of Mona’s big boot-toes. She could bear well enough that young lady herself, but she couldn’t bear Owen’s opinion of her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement was checked by Mrs Gereth’s suddenly drawing her close, as if for the morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of the night’s repose, breaking out: “Well, my dear boy, what does your young friend there make of our odds and ends?”
     “Oh, she thinks they’re all right!”
     Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs Gereth’s belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover, that his tribute to Mona’s taste was a repetition of the eloquent words in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. “Don’t you think it’s rather jolly, the old shop?” “Oh, it’s all right!” Mona had graciously remarked: and then they had probably, with a slap on the back, run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs Gereth had not yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend’s arm round her and not become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange intention. Owen’s reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a discussion of Mona’s sensibilities; but Mrs Gereth went on, in a moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold hypocrisy: “Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?” The question was as fresh as the morning light.
     “Oh, of course she likes everything that’s nice.” And Owen, who constitutionally disliked questions – an answer was almost as hateful to him as a ‘trick’ to a big dog – smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn’t. Fleda, however, mainly understood that Mrs Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh, held her so hard that she hurt her.
     “I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could trust, I could respect.” The girl heard her voice tremble under the effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be on one’s knees before one’s high standard. “The best things here, as you know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes,” cried Mrs Gereth, with a fine freedom of fancy, “there are things in the house that we almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they were us! And now they’re only me – except that they’re also you, thank God, a little, you dear!” she continued, suddenly inflicting on Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. “There isn’t one of them I don’t know and love – yes, as one remembers and cherishes the happiest moments of one’s life. Blindfold, in the dark, with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They’re living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another affection, another conscience. There’s a care they want, there’s a sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I’d deface them with my own hands. Can’t you see me, Fleda, and wouldn’t you do it yourself?” – she appealed to her companion with glittering eyes. “I couldn’t bear the thought of such a woman here – I couldn’t. I don’t know what she’d do; she’d be sure to invent some devilry, if it should be only to bring in her own little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in this awful age, and they’re thrust in at one at every turn. They’d be thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save them for me – I ask you who would?” and she turned again to Fleda with a dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such perfect teeth) with which poor Owen’s slow cerebration gaped. “You would, of course – only you, in all the world, because you know, you feel, as I do myself, what’s good and true and pure.” No severity of the moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs Gereth actively esteemed. “You would replace me, you would watch over them, you would keep the place right,” she austerely pursued, “and with you here – yes, with you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!” She threw herself on Fleda’s neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off, had burst into tears which couldn’t have been explained, but which might perhaps have been understood.

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     “I’ll give up the house if they’ll let me take what I require!” – that, on the morrow, was what Mrs Gereth’s stifled night had qualified her to say with a tragic face at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she ‘required’ was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of her revolt. The girl’s dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics, diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with this rigour. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble; it was that of the beauty Mrs Gereth had so patiently and consummately wrought. Pale but radiant, her back to the wall, she rose there like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces it could show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.
     Our young lady’s spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch how could he take it so low? She wondered that she didn’t despise him for this, but there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this moment the medium of communication with him.
     “He’ll come back to assert himself,” Mrs Gereth had said; and the following week Owen in fact re-appeared. He might merely have written, Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once ‘nicer’ for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn’t like the row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn’t a sense of beauty he had after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house vacant. “You don’t think I’m rough or hard, do you?” he asked of Fleda, his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in club-windows. “The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs to her.” Fleda recognised the elements of what the newspapers call a deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take everything or nothing, and the girl’s suggestion was that it might perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean page. What, however, was the poor woman in that case to begin with? What was she to do at all on her meagre income but make the best of the objets d’art of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr Gereth’s maiden-aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for believing that the maiden-aunt’s principles had had much in common with the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would ever have to do with the objets d’art of Ricks would be to turn them out into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.
     The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct by the time Fleda asked Mrs Gereth whether she literally meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables. “Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!” the heroine of Poynton had answered. “I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be most publicly odious.” She gave it out that it was her one thought now to force them to a line that would dishonour them and dishonour the tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the world’s hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother; she had discoursed of it passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself, whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not his ‘taking up’ with Mona – that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an accidental form; it was his failure from the first to understand what it was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose, and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry about her. One’s mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs Gereth cared for, was a subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn’t she often told Fleda of her friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy), because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about everything. It was easy to see that Mrs Gereth would have given again and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn’t, alas, and this was what she had at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course fully aware of Owen’s concession, his willingness to let her take away with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put him impossibly in the right. ‘Liked best?’ There wasn’t a thing in the house that she didn’t like best, and what she liked better still was to be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs Gereth, whose criticism was often gay, dilated with sardonic humour on the happy look a dozen objects from Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a mixture!
     All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing. He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and he desired to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these offences without meeting his adversary. Mrs Gereth was as willing as himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he might have to make; she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl’s repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to write to him; he wouldn’t have wished any more than herself that she should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs Gereth suffered, and that she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he didn’t like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how she would have first made him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona’s behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to talk the matter over; to say if she didn’t think a dozen pieces, chosen absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by Mrs Gereth mightn’t be left to her honour. To leave it so was what Owen wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his off-hand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he couldn’t help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the hatred perilously resembled on one or two occasions a revelation of the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him that Mrs Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs Gereth herself didn’t in these days like him at all, and she was of course always on Mrs Gereth’s side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but at no one of these junctures would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great matter, if Mrs Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually replied: “She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she’s really thinking over what she’ll take.” When her friend asked her what Owen was doing she could have but one answer: “He’s waiting, dear lady, to see what you do!”
     Mrs Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed against was that of passing the night. Fleda’s admirable dressing-bag had been given her by her friend. “Why, it’s charming!” she exclaimed a few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlour from a friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs Gereth hated such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs Gereth grimly gazed, wondering of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid grey sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognised in time that this venture would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of doors especially Mrs Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.
     It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home, could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt; they made her even wonder if it didn’t work more for happiness not to have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources, without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs Gereth had of course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved. But it wasn’t a question of love, now, for these; it was only a question of a certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen over Mrs Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed, taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: “Well, something can be done with it!” Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy about the maiden-aunt – she was so sure she had deeply suffered. “I’m sure I hope she did!” was, however, all that Mrs Gereth had replied.

6

     It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn’t had been from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence was probable – a tussle, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an imagination of a drama, a ‘great scene’, a thing, somehow, of indignity and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though Mrs Gereth’s presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her, Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn’t be there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet: that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying vision of Mrs Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her hands, Mrs Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid and the active eyes of adventure. These eyes appeared to Fleda to meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence, almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candour that Mrs Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: “I’m thinking over what I had better take!” Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.
     It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to lighten the ship the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn’t take to the exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one wouldn’t take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs Gereth said, condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place, perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up. It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light, larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow, which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the air – every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle. Mrs Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.
     Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs Gereth, letting her off easily, didn’t now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her feeling for everything for which Mrs Gereth felt, were a force that really worked to prolong the deadlock. “I only wish I bored you and my possessions bored you,” that lady, with some humour, declared; “then you’d make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile certain things into a cart and have done.” Fleda’s sharpest difficulty was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to Mrs Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first, why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had said – such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own, Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her meeting Mrs Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that he was watching – just insultingly watching. He was watching, no doubt; but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them and made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back for Mona.
     From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say to his chattering so to an underhand ‘companion’, an inmate all but paid, this young lady’s repressed emotion began to require still more repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn’t this practical unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire, as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close. She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to see Mrs Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication, into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug a countermine. Besides, people were saying that she fastened like a leech on other people – people who had houses where something was to be picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery, suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering, turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs Gereth gave her up as heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she wouldn’t at present miss any visit of Owen’s, for Owen was shooting at Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at Poynton.
     The first news she had from Mrs Gereth was news of that lady’s having accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. “Yes, I’ve literally come,” she wrote, “with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I’ve crossed the Rubicon, I’ve taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold water. I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week; when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn’t write to you to meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and because, besides, I’m too savage and odious to be fit company even for you. You’d say I really go too far, and there’s no doubt whatever I do. I’m here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton all next week. There’s more room than I quite measured the other day, and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time, what’s even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?”
     The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a big shop in Oxford Street – a journey that she achieved circuitously, first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that, close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn’t give her a lift. On finding that her destination was just over the way he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn’t matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she had come to buy a trimming for her sister’s frock, and he expressed an hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He stammered out that it was for her he would like to buy something, something ‘ripping’, and that she must give him the pleasure of telling him what would best please her. He couldn’t have a better opportunity for making her a present – the present, in recognition of all she had done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.
     Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not her doing – they were Owen’s; and Owen, inconsequent and even extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he made vague abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn’t made him so, and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her: there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made her incongruous offers – a travelling-rug, a massive clock, a table for breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of somebody’s ‘works’. His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the ‘works’ would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart: what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one of the splendid stuffs for a gown – a choice proscribed by his fear of seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least with his ‘form’; and then reflected that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of course he wasn’t doing anything so vulgar as to make love to her; but there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged.
     That punctilio didn’t prevent Owen from remaining with her after they had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments. There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that his tribute would be, if analysed, a tribute to her insignificance. But all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him: what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she didn’t count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she had now to think for Owen as well as for herself – she couldn’t think for Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool greyness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything else dim. He wanted to stay with her – he wanted not to leave her: he had dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt differently. Fleda Vetch didn’t suspect him at first of feeling differently to her, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former tie; and there was something in Owen’s behaviour now, something in his very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn’t a former tie, she wasn’t any tie at all; she was only a deep little person for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the very bottom of all that had lately occurred; for all that had lately occurred was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a tie – at least what she called one – for Owen. The old one, at any rate, was Mona – Mona whom he had known so very much longer.
     They walked far, to the south-west corner of the great Gardens, where, by the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was a real separation. She was on his mother’s side, she belonged to his mother’s life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn’t even be at his wedding, and it was not possible now that Mr Gereth should mention that ceremony to the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to the bridegroom’s mother, would of course not invite any such girl as Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen’s part, with an expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda at this moment it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong. At any rate he only said: “I want you to understand, you know – I want you to understand.”
     What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out, and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her face. He liked her – it was stupefying – more than he really ought: that was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to swallow; so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.
     “Good-bye, Mr Gereth – I must get on!” she declared with a cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning altogether and moving as fast as she could. “Good-bye, good-bye!” she threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was almost a run; conscious too of just the confused handsome face with which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a kindness with a great flouncing snub but in any case she had got away, though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk, every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it, glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognise the fact that she was on the point of bursting into tears.

7

     As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs Gereth at Ricks – a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given; and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there, complete now as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and pinching for Maggie’s happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme clash, and Mrs Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter and too tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time, the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come off – she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute; she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the austerity of Fleda’s own secret, under the discipline of which she had repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act, on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father’s selfishness a sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of everything, even to how the ‘quietness’ of the wedding should be relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle. Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life.
     She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said, of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived, and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment, folded in Mrs Gereth’s arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend’s struggle. By this time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that she could recognise, would have recognised among a thousand, without dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself if she should notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the lustres tinkling at her, and with Mrs Gereth beside her and staring at her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her, bracing herself and preparing the same face of confession and defiance she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft. This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda’s silence, and the very violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent – she didn’t know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs Gereth’s hand once more on her arm. “I’ve arranged a charming room for you – it’s really lovely. You’ll be very happy there.” This was spoken with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant: “Oh, I know what you’re thinking; but what does it matter when you’re so loyally on my side?” It had come indeed to a question of ‘sides’, Fleda thought, for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs Gereth’s high hand was, as mere great effect, the climax of the impression.
     “It’s too wonderful, what you’ve done with the house!” – the visitor met her friend’s eyes. They lighted up with joy – that friend herself was so pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such was clearly the way Mrs Gereth took it; she threw herself upon the delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: “Why, you brought away absolutely everything!”
     “Oh no, not everything. I saw how little I could get into this scrap of a house. I only brought away what I required.”
     Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. “You ‘required’ the very best pieces – the morceaux de musée, the individual gems!”
     “I certainly didn’t want the rubbish, if that’s what you mean.” Mrs Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion’s eyes; with the light of her satisfaction still in her face she slowly rubbed her large handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being ‘rubbish’ at Poynton, but she didn’t for the moment take up this insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one after the other, as if she had had a list before her, the items that in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault, were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each, in every chink and charm – knew them by the personal name their distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as so much free approval. Mrs Gereth was never indifferent to approval, and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: “And even the Maltese cross!” That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied at Poynton to a small but marvellous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of delicacy, of expression and of the great Spanish period, the existence and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years before, by an odd and romantic chance – a clue followed through mazes of secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed.
     “‘Even’ the Maltese cross?” Mrs Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the words. “My dear child, you don’t suppose I’d have sacrificed that! For what in the world would you have taken me?”
     “A bibelot the more or less,” Fleda said, “could have made little difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the greatest of all conjurors. You’ve operated with a quickness – and with a quietness!” Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to the class of operation, essentially involving the protection of darkness. Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn’t say that she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a resolute and perfectly candid question. “How in the world did you get off with them?”
     Mrs Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that surprised the girl. “By calculating, by choosing my time. I was quiet and I was quick. I manœuvred; then at the last I rushed!” Fleda drew a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she had done as from the way she had done it – by as brilliant a stroke as any commemorated in the annals of crime. “I succeeded because I had thought it all out and left nothing to chance. The whole process was organised in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly extravagant – I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be had – a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven’t paid it yet; there’ll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing’s done! Expedition pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. ‘I can give you two days,’ I said; ‘I can’t give you another second.’ They undertook the job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I was inspired – they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I was as calm as I am now. I didn’t know what was in me; it was worth finding out. I’m very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own arms. I’m tired, very, very tired; but there’s neither a scratch nor a nick, there isn’t a teacup missing.” Magnificent both in her exhaustion and in her triumph, Mrs Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear betrayal. “Upon my word,” she laughed, “they really look better here!”
     Fleda had listened in awe. “And no one at Poynton said anything? There was no alarm?”
     “What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone. I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a descent.” Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it would scarcely do to ask Mrs Gereth if she hadn’t stood in fear of her servants. She knew moreover some of the secrets of her humorous household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to curiosity – a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her visitor’s thought, caught it up with fine frankness. “You mean that I was watched – that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they should see what I was ‘up to’? Precisely. I know the three persons you have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with them – I settled them.”
     Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs Gereth spoke added to her suspense. “What did you do to them?”
     “I took hold of them hard – I put them in the forefront. I made them work.”
     “To move the furniture?”
     “To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them: it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he’d gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified me. They were too stupid!”
     Mrs Gereth massed herself more and more as an immoral woman, but Fleda had to recognise that she too would have been stupid and she too would have gratified her. “And when did all this take place?”
     “Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We’ve worked here as fast as we worked there, but I’m not settled yet: you’ll see in the rest of the house. However, the worst is over.”
     “Do you really think so?” Fleda presently inquired. “I mean, does he, after the fact, as it were, accept it?”
     “Owen – what I’ve done? I haven’t the least idea,” said Mrs Gereth.
     “Does Mona?”
     “You mean that she’ll be the soul of the row?”
     “I hardly see Mona as the ‘soul’ of anything,” the girl replied. “But have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?”
     “Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don’t know. Perhaps they’re crouching for a leap.”
     “But wouldn’t they have gone down as soon as you left?”
     “They may not have known of my leaving.” Fleda wondered afresh; it struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn’t have flashed from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to gather, even in Mona’s breast, it would probably discharge itself in some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange; but when she pressed Mrs Gereth for the some explanation of it that lady only replied with her brave irony: “Oh, I took their breath away!” She had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?
     All this was exciting, but Fleda’s spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the quarter embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden’s bower. It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined – old chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her friend’s genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look grey, somehow, and loveless. She couldn’t care for such things when they came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton dishonoured; she had cherished it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before going to bed she had walked about with Mrs Gereth and seen at whose expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen’s, from top to bottom – there wasn’t a chair he hadn’t sat upon. The maiden aunt had been exterminated – no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth’s face, his sad, strange eyes, fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had done her the honour to ask her to exert herself in his interest, confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy. Hadn’t that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him? Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs Gereth had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for an hour at least that she might hate Mrs Gereth.
     Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution that could lead to her going through life without that calamity. After this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had become in a few hours intolerably false; in as few more hours as possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to it would be to inform Mrs Gereth that, to her great regret, she couldn’t be with her now, couldn’t cleave to her to the point that everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated. The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very necessity of