“All my walks are pleasant, thank you—they do me such a lot of good.” She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me stupendous in their wisdom. “I take several a day,” she continued.
She might have been an ancient woman responding with humility at the church door to the patronage of the parson. “The more I take the better I feel. I’m ordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in for plenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if that goes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be all right. All that was the matter with me before—and always; it was too reckless!—was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly on the state of the particular organ. So I’m going three miles.”
I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum’s maid stood there to admit me. “Oh I’m so glad,” I said, looking at her as she paced away with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her air of assurance was on this occasion not less than it had been on that; but I recalled that she had then struck me as marching off to her doom. Was she really now marching away from it?
CHAPTER XI
As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I of course broke out. “Is there anything in it? IS her general health—?”
Mrs. Meldrum checked me with her great amused blare. “You’ve already seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What’s ‘in it’ is what has been in everything she has ever done—the most comical, tragical belief in herself. She thinks she’s doing a ‘cure.’”
“And what does her husband think?”
“Her husband? What husband?”
“Hasn’t she then married Lord Iffield?”
“Vous-en-etes le?” cried my hostess. “Why he behaved like a regular beast.”
“How should I know? You never wrote me.” Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the particular organ. “No, I didn’t write you—I abstained on purpose. If I kept quiet I thought you mightn’t hear over there what had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr. Dawling.”
“Stir him up?”
“Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another chance for him.”
“I wouldn’t have done it,” I said.
“Well,” Mrs. Meldrum replied, “it was not my business to give you an opportunity.”
“In short you were afraid of it.”
Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out.
Then “I was afraid of it!” she very honestly answered.
“But doesn’t he know? Has he given no sign?”
“Every sign in life—he came straight back to her. He did everything to get her to listen to him, but she hasn’t the smallest idea of it.”
“Has he seen her as she is now?” I presently and just a trifle awkwardly enquired.
“Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it.”
“How much you’ve all been through!” I found occasion to remark.
“Then what has become of him?”
“He’s at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe by this time his old sisters. It’s not half a bad little place.”
“Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?”
“Oh Flora’s by no means on her back!” my fried declared.
“She’s not on her back because she’s on yours. Have you got her for the rest of your life?”
Once more Mrs. Meldrum genially glared. “Did she tell you how much the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty pounds a year.”
“That’s a good deal, but it won’t pay the oculist. What was it that at last induced her to submit to him?”
“Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield’s rupture.
She cried her eyes out—she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic church.”
“In spite of which you don’t think she’ll be saved?”
“SHE thinks she will—that’s all I can tell you. There’s no doubt that when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known.
That feeling, very new and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has given her something to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind a belief that, as she says, she’s on the mend and that in the course of time, if she leads a tremendously healthy life, she’ll be able to take off her muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her going.”
“And what keeps you? You’re good until the parties begin again.”
“Oh she doesn’t object to me now!” smiled Mrs. Meldrum. “I’m going to take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair.” I was struck with this energy and after a moment I enquired the reason of it. “It’s to divert her mind,” my friend replied, reddening again a little, I thought. “We shall go next week: I’ve only waited to see how your mother
