The Spoils of Poynton

'Very well, then. Will you wait?'

'For Mummy's answer?' Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. 'Don't you think that if I'm here she may hate it worse—think I may want to make her reply bang off?'

Fleda thought. 'You don't, then?'

'I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?—treat her as if I gave her more than just an hour or two.'

'I see,' said Fleda. 'Then, if you don't wait—good-bye.'

This again seemed not what he wanted. 'Must you do it bang off?'

'I'm only thinking she'll be impatient—I mean, you know, to learn what will have passed between us.'

'I see,' said Owen, looking at his gloves. 'I can give her a day or two, you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep,' he went on. 'The inn seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains—having no idea you were here.' Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. 'I mean because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy.'

'We've already talked a long time,' smiled Fleda.

'Awfully, haven't we?' He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to. Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to him to go. 'There's one thing, please,' he mentioned, as if there might be a great many others too. 'Please don't say anything about Mona.'

She didn't understand. 'About Mona?'

'About its being her that thinks she has gone too far.' This was still slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. 'It mustn't seem to come from her at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse.'

Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep consideration of what might make 'Mummy' better. She couldn't see as yet at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his mother had left him—he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of what she had lost—quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than one might have supposed—assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.

'Certainly I shall not mention Mona,' Fleda said, 'and there won't be the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours, and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it.'

'I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!' Owen exclaimed.

'Up to this time,' said Fleda, after a pause, 'your mother has had no doubt of my being on hers.'

'Then of course she won't like your changing.'

'I dare say she won't like it at all.'

'Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?'

'I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall naturally have a great deal of discussion—if she consents to discuss the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three days.'

'I see you think she may refuse to discuss it at all,' said Owen.

'I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard with her pride.'

Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. 'I suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?' This might have been the first time it had occurred to him.

'You know better than I,' said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.

'I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as clever as you I might hope to get round her.' Owen hesitated; then he went on: 'In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that will really fetch her.'

'Neither do I, as yet. I must think—I must pray!' the girl pursued, smiling. 'I can only say to you that I'll try. I want to try, you know—I want to help you.' He stood looking at her so long on this that she added with much distinctness: 'So you must leave me, please, quite alone with her. You must go straight back.'

'Back to the inn?'

'Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow.'

He turned about vaguely for his hat.

'There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid.'

'Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?'

'I've got a perfect case—I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's simple stealing.'