The Spoils of Poynton

She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation. 'Perhaps, after all,' she risked, 'there may be even in a stone still some little help for you.'

Owen sat there a minute staring at her. 'Ah, you're beautiful, more beautiful than any one,' he broke out, 'but I'll be hanged if I can ever understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful—as beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now, again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say.' He remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself up. 'What I want you to say is that you like me—what I want you to say is that you pity me.' He sprang up and came to her. 'What I want you to say is that you'll save me!'

Fleda hesitated. 'Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just now that you're a free man?'

He too hesitated, but he was not checked. 'It's just for the reason that I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry me.'

Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still smile. 'Let me hear a little more about your freedom first,' she said. 'I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you disposed of her question.'

'I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free.'

'What bearing have her feelings, pray?' Fleda asked.

'Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me up.'

'Then why doesn't she do it?'

'She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her.'

'Tells her what?' Fleda inquired.

'Why, that I'm in love with you!'

Fleda debated. 'Are you so very sure she will?'

'Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will finish her!' Owen declared.

This made his companion thoughtful again. 'Can you take such pleasure in her being 'finished'—a poor girl you've once loved?'

Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity startling even to her knowledge of his nature, 'I don't think I can have really loved her, you know,' he replied.

Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the emotion it testified to. 'Then how am I to know that you 'really' love—anybody else?'

'Oh, I'll show you that!' said Owen.

'I must take it on trust,' the girl pursued. 'And what if Mona doesn't give you up?' she added.

Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. 'Why, that's just where you come in.'

'To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you.' His blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic; but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: 'You see, Mr. Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!'

Like lightning he had grasped her arm. 'You mean you will talk of them?' Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: 'You will listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear—when, when?'

'Ah, when it isn't mere misery!' The words had broken from her in a sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself—she poured out her tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed; something deep and sweet surged up—something that came from far within and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten with his full divination. What she did, what she had done, she scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that, with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.

'Ah, all the while you cared?' Owen read the truth with a wonder so great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all perhaps elsewhere.

'I cared, I cared, I cared!' Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were confessing a misdeed. 'How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!' she insisted. 'Don't speak of it, don't speak!'

It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words. He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal seem only his—made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly, as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however, they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than before—all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it, he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own: 'I'm saved, I'm saved,—I am! I'm ready for anything. I have your word. Come!' he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.