The Spoils of Poynton

Gereth, but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous. Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder. 'My reason for not writing to you,' she pursued, 'was simply that I was hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that.'

'But you've heard nothing?'

'Not a word.'

'Then what I understand,' said Owen, 'is that, practically, you and Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it—I mean you personally—for me.'

'Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!' Then with a smile: 'We've only diverged.'

'You've diverged uncommonly far!'—Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own, measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was all the more content he should thus see she had acted, as the cost of it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. 'What seems to have happened,' he exclaimed, 'is that you've had a row with her and yet not moved her!'

Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that, notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean in their turn only one? 'The difficulty is, you understand, that she doesn't really see into your situation.' She hesitated. 'She doesn't comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place.'

Owen stared. 'Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be there. You see, everything was there the day of that fatal visit.'

'Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks,' said Fleda; 'but I haven't repeated it to your mother.' She had hated, at Ricks, to talk with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. 'You can easily see that, as she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she believes she may at last tire Mona out.' That, in all conscience, Fleda felt was lucid enough.

So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel. 'So far as that goes,' he promptly declared, 'she has at last tired Mona out.' He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.

Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him. 'Do you mean your marriage is off?'

Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. 'God knows, Miss Vetch, where or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the point things have reached, isn't on. I haven't seen Mona for ten days, and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't budged from town.' Then he suddenly broke out: 'If she does chuck me, will mother come round?'

Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test—felt that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth—there was a limit to the impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest of her life she debated. 'Yes,' she said at last, 'if your marriage is really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken.'

'That's just what makes Mona hesitate!' Owen honestly exclaimed. 'I mean the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up.'

Fleda thought an instant. 'You mean makes her hesitate to keep you—not hesitate to renounce you?'

Owen looked a trifle bewildered. 'She doesn't see the use of hanging on, as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much. She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so hard, don't you see?'

'I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about that!' the girl declared.

Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. 'You think, then, as she does, that I must send down the police?'

The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much she was failing him. She had the sense of 'chucking' him too. 'No, no, not yet!' she said, though she had really no other and no better course to prescribe. 'Doesn't it occur to you,' she asked in a moment, 'that if Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready—is that it!—to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had entered upon with joy.'

Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with success—a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with decision: 'Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself,' he added; 'she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want me. If she can't get them she doesn't want anything at all.'

This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. 'She takes such an interest in them?'

'So it appears.'