If you mean that the worlds full of twaddlers I quite agree with you! cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.
I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mothers son, but I didnt let it prevent me from insisting on her making me acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urging that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity now demanded of her to put into relation with a character really fine. Such a frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on my part had at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was quite the ground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady after I had begun to know her. I couldnt have said what I felt about her except that she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with her there after dinner, under the starsthat was a week at Folkestone of balmy nights and muffled tides and crowded chairsI became aware both that protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was wholly indifferent to its absence. The odd thing was that she was not appealing: she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantastically pleased. Her beauty was as yet all the world to her, a world she had plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a group of giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasnt ready to tell about herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass, playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable. It was when I saw all this that I judged how, though it was the last thing she asked for, what one would ever most have at her service was a curious compassion. That sentiment was coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity had put so off her guard. Hers was the only vanity I have ever known that made its possessor superlatively soft. Mrs. Meldrums further information contributed moreover to these indulgencesher account of the girls neglected childhood and queer continental relegations, with straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-haunting parents; the more invidious picture, above all, of her pecuniary arrangement, still in force, with the Hammond Synges, who really, though they never took her outpractically she went out alonehad their hands half the time in her pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the wine-bills and the horses fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synges fare in the underground when he went to the City for her. She had been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadnt even been put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She could spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive, extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldnt last very long.
Couldnt you perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are? I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. Youre probably, with one exception, the sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldnt scandalously fleece her.
How do you know what I wouldnt do? my humorous friend demanded. Of course Ive thought how I can help herit has kept me awake at night. But doing its impossible; shell take nothing from me. You know what she doesshe hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me and feels that Ive one about her. And then she dislikes me for another reason that Im not quite clear about, but that Im well aware of and that I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes it would be impossible moreover here; she wants naturally enough a much wider field. She must live in Londonher game is there. So she takes the line of adoring me, of saying she can never forget that I was devoted to her motherwhich I wouldnt for the world have beenand of giving me a wide berth. I think she positively dislikes to look at me. Its all right; theres no obligation; though people in general cant take their eyes off me.
I see that at this moment, I replied. But what does it matter where or how, for the present, she lives? Shell marry infallibly, marry early, and everything then will change.
Whom will she marry? my companion gloomily asked.
Any one she likes. Shes so abnormally pretty that she can do anything. Shell fascinate some nabob or some prince.
Shell fascinate him first and bore him afterwards. Moreover shes not so pretty as you make her out; she hasnt a scrap of a figure.
No doubt, but one doesnt in the least miss it.
Not now, said Mrs. Meldrum, but one will when shes older and when everything will have to count.
When shes older shell count as a princess, so it wont matter.
She has other drawbacks, my companion went on. Those wonderful eyes are good for nothing but to roll about like sugar-ballswhich they greatly resemblein a childs mouth. She cant use them.
Use them? Why, she does nothing else.
To make fools of young men, but not to read or write, not to do any sort of work. She never opens a book, and her maid writes her notes. Youll say that those who live in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. Of course I know that if I didnt wear my goggles I shouldnt be good for much.
Do you mean that Miss Saunt ought to sport such things? I exclaimed with more horror than I meant to show.
I dont prescribe for her; I dont know that theyre what she requires.
Whats the matter with her eyes? I asked after a moment.
I dont exactly know; but I heard from her mother years ago that even as a child they had had for a while to put her into spectacles and that though she hated them and had been in a fury of disgust, she would always have to be extremely careful. Im sure I hope she is!
I echoed the hope, but I remember well the impression this made upon memy immediate pang of resentment, a disgust almost equal to Floras own. I felt as if a great rare sapphire had split in my hand.
CHAPTER III
This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town. I settled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still my morning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it I was out with my mother. Every one in the place was as usual out with some one else, and even had I been free to go and take leave of her I should have been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at home. Just where she was I presently discovered: she was at the far end of the cliff, the point at which it overhangs the pretty view of Sandgate and Hythe. Her back, however, was turned to this attraction; it rested with the aid of her elbows, thrust slightly behind her so that her scanty little shoulders were raised toward her ears, on the high rail that inclosed the down. Two gentlemen stood before her whose faces we couldnt see but who even as observed from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming figure-piece submitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact that this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her hat and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the pretty presentation of her feet, which especially now in the supported slope of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility so much of the foregroundI was reminded anew, I say, how our young lady dazzled by some art that the enumeration of her merits didnt explain and that the mention of her lapses didnt affect. Where she was amiss nothing counted, and where she was right everything did. I say she was wanting in mystery, but that after all was her secret. This happened to be my first chance of introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in life but the quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things which, when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still trust to make the world good for them. I wondered an instant how much she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair stood still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come and speak to her. In this way I saw that if one of Floras attendants was the inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of ceremonies of her regular court, always offering the use of a telescope and accepting that of a cigar, the other was a personage I had not yet encountered, a small pale youth in showy knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued points of whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and sustained. I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for something of a pretender: I scarce know why unless because of the motive I felt in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to come away. He struck me a little as a young man practising the social art of impertinence; but it didnt matter, for Flora came away with alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding over the grass in that rustle of delicate mourning which made the endless variety of her garments, as a painter could take heed, strike one always as the same obscure elegance. She seated herself on the floor of my mothers chair, a little too much on her right instep as I afterwards gathered, caressing her still hand, smiling up into her cold face, commending and approving her without a reserve and without a doubt. She told her immediately, as if it were something for her to hold on by, that she was soon to sit to me for a likeness, and these words gave me a chance to enquire if it would be the fate of the picture, should I finish it, to be presented to the young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the shadow-patches on the sea. She showed for the passing instant the face of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered for the inconsequence of it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this lady a worrying impulse to catechise her, but that didnt seem exactly kind; so I substituted another question, inquiring who the pretty young man in knickerbockers might happen to be.