The Spoils of Poynton

London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything.

Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the same, that not to say was impossible. 'That he has done it, that he couldn't not do it, shows how right I was.' It settled forever her attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: 'That's to say, it shows that he was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break.'

Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. 'What sort of an obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever.'

'Did he tell you so?' Fleda asked.

'No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for three minutes.' She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid image of this interview, sat without speaking. 'Do you wish to appear as if you don't care?' Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.

'I'm trying not to think of myself.'

'Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you bear to think?'

Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come into her eyes. 'I can't. I don't understand—I don't understand!' she broke out.

'I do, then.' Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. 'There was no obligation at the time you saw him last—when you sent him, hating her as he did, back to her.'

'If he went,' Fleda asked, 'doesn't that exactly prove that he recognized one?'

'He recognized rot! You know what I think of him.' Fleda knew; she had no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one—it was her sole, faint flicker of passion—to the extent of declaring that he was too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!—it was his weakness she loved in him. 'He took strange ways of pleasing you!' her friend went on. 'There was no obligation till suddenly, the other day, the situation changed.'

Fleda wondered. 'The other day?'

'It came to Mona's knowledge—I can't tell you how, but it came—that the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent them for you, but it was her I touched.' Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the full, cold breath of this. 'They were there, and that determined her.'

'Determined her to what?'

'To act, to take means.'

'To take means?' Fleda repeated.

'I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,' said Mrs. Gereth.

Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the simple interrogation: 'Mona?'

'Why not? She's a brute.'

'But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?'

'How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool than he. And what else had he originally liked?' Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. 'She did what you wouldn't!' Fleda's face had grown dark with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the pain in it. 'It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he was married.'

Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. 'At that place you spoke of in town?'

'At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists.'

The girl hesitated. 'What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.''

'Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the game, some outwitting of me. It's known there has been a row with me.'

Fleda was mystified. 'People surely knew at Poynton,' she objected, 'if, as you say, she's there.'

'She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him in London and went down to see the things.'

Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. 'Did you see them?' she then ventured to ask.

'Everything.'

'Are they right?'

'Quite right. There's nothing like them,' said Mrs. Gereth. At this her companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done in London. 'Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen stayed on,' she added.

Fleda stared. 'Then she's not to live there?'

'Rather! But not till after the public marriage.' Mrs. Gereth seemed to muse; then she brought out: 'She'll live there alone.'