The Spoils of Poynton

'Now?' Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this monosyllable. 'And pray who's to take you?' Fleda gave a colorless smile, and her companion continued: 'Do you literally mean that you can't put your hand upon him?' Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate her; she made a short, imperious gesture. 'Find him for me, you fool—find him for me!'

'What do you want of him,' Fleda sadly asked, 'feeling as you do to both of us?'

'Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!' Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. 'Of course I cling to you, you wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the place.' She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came back. 'Find him, find him,' she repeated; 'come straight out with me, to try, at least, to get at him!'

'How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready,' Fleda replied.

Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. 'Ready for what? Ready to see me ruined without a reason or a reward?'

Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with great gentleness: 'Don't be harsh to me—I'm very unhappy.' The words produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the avenue of Poynton—Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: 'I don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you say, 'lost.''

Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness denoted some success in controlling herself. 'If he's not lost, why are you unhappy?'

'I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me.'

'No, Fleda, I don't understand you,' said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing her again. 'I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since you take so much else with me!' She spoke now with the drop of her resentment, with a dry and weary calm. 'It would have been better for me if I had never known you,' she pursued, 'and certainly better if I hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own doing—you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up. You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes, you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever sympathy that did it—your extraordinary feeling for those accursed vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well,' the poor lady concluded after a pause, 'you see where it has landed us!'

'If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here,' said Fleda.

Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to consider.

'To his club, do you mean?'

'Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at present no other London address,' Fleda said: 'it's there one writes to him.'

'How do I know, with my wretched relations with him?' Mrs. Gereth asked.

'Mine have not been quite so bad as that,' Fleda desperately smiled. Then she added: 'His silence, her silence, our hearing nothing at all—what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between them?'

Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. 'Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him back to her.'

'Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't know—you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me.' Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her companion had completely changed its ground.

She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.

'You plunge me in stupefaction,' that lady answered, 'and at the same time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath.'

'Then where is he?' poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up, however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: 'You simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be. You slash into it,' cried Fleda finely, 'with a great pair of shears, you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath he's there to wind everything up.'

Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. 'You don't believe a word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless, if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your perversity's a thing to howl over. However,' the poor woman continued with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of her will, 'I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out; for Owen is a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead,' she repeated with a quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. 'I don't know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak.'

Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look. 'Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me,' she added.

'That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed me. And I didn't fail his father,' said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: 'Mona Brigstock isn't weak; she's stronger than you!'