Glasses by Henry James (read me like a book txt) đ
- Author: Henry James
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âI seeâI see,â I presently returned. âWhat would become of Lord Iffield if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become of every one, what would become of everything?â This was an enquiry that Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying at last: âMy dear fellow, for that matter, what would become of YOU?â
Once more he turned on me his good green eyes. âOh I shouldnât mind!â
The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I discovered at this moment how much I really liked him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I felt the droll side of our discussion of such alternatives. It made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed: âYouâd take her even with those things of Mrs. Meldrumâs?â
He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and conscientiously replied: âEven with those things of Mrs. Meldrumâs.â I begged him not to resent my laughter, which but exposed the fact that we had built a monstrous castle in the air.
Didnât he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested? The evidence was preposterously small. He believed the worst, but we were really uninformed.
âI shall find out the truth,â he promptly replied.
âHow can you? If you question her youâll simply drive her to perjure herself. Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth? Itâs the girlâs own affair.â
âThen why did you tell me your story?â
I was a trifle embarrassed. âTo warn you off,â I smiled. He took no more notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord Iffield had no serious intentions. âVery possibly,â I said. âBut you mustnât speak as if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives.â
Dawling thought a moment. âCouldnât something be got out of the people she has consulted? She must have been to people. How else can she have been condemned?â
âCondemned to what? Condemned to perpetual nippers? Of course she has consulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may be sure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable that they would tell you anythingâwhich I altogether doubtâyou would have great difficulty in finding out which men they are. Therefore leave it alone; never show her what you suspect.â
I even before he quitted me asked him to promise me this. âAll right, I promiseââbut he was gloomy enough. He was a lover facing the fact that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I could see by what a stretch his passionate pity would from this moment overlook the girlâs fatuity and folly. She was always accessible to himâthat I knew; for if she had told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have rebuked the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she would always be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her friendsâ
what were all of themâbut repudiated idiots? I was perfectly aware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance had a niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often he still called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the wing of the Floyd-Taylors that her intimacy with Lord Iffield most flourished. At all events, when a week after the visit I have just summarised Floraâs name was one morning brought up to me, I jumped at the conclusion that Dawling had been with her, and even I fear briefly entertained the thought that he had broken his word.
She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she had struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her folly it lifted the curtain of her misery. I donât know how much she meant to tell me when she cameâI think she had had plans of elaborate misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes the simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When she had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet; the relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word her long secret, she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess, tears to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless poverty. Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in some of its consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went that afternoon to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to warrant the supposition that he might have come in. He had not come in, but he was expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him: a lady, I was informed, was already in his sitting-room.
I hesitated, a little at a loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the lady was perhaps Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and remarkably pretty I received so significant a âNo sir!â that I risked an advance and after a minute in this manner found myself, to my astonishment, face to face with Mrs.
Meldrum.
âOh you dear thing,â she exclaimed, âIâm delighted to see you: you spare me another compromising demarche! But for this I should have called on you also. Know the worst at once: if you see me here itâs at least deliberateâitâs planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to see him, upon my word Iâm in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace of mind, did you let him the other day at Folkestone dawn upon my delighted eyes? I found myself there in half an hour simply infatuated with him. With a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him I hold him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I havenât come up to declare my passionâIâve come to bring him news that will interest him much more. Above all Iâve come to urge upon him to be careful.â
âAbout Flora Saunt?â
âAbout what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse!
Sheâs at last really engaged.â
âBut itâs a tremendous secret?â I was moved to mirth.
âPrecisely: she wired me this noon, and spent another shilling to tell me that not a creature in the world is yet to know it.â
âShe had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an hour with the creature you see before you.â
âShe has just passed an hour with every one in the place!â Mrs.
Meldrum cried. âTheyâve vital reasons, she says, for itâs not coming out for a month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her rejoicing is wild. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows and, as itâs nearly seven oâclock, may have jumped off London Bridge. But an effect of the talk I had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my telegram, feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking action, so to call it, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried away with him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what you had told him you had seen in your shop.â
Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand identical with my ownâa circumstance indicating her rare sagacity, inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing from what Floraâs wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her that what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that I had seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. âIn short,â I said, âIâve seen everything.â
She was mystified. âEverything?â
âThe poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh she came to triumph, but she remained to talk something in the nature of sense!
She put herself completely in my handsâshe does me the honour to intimate that of all her friends Iâm the most disinterested. After she had announced to me that Lord Iffield was utterly committed to her and that for the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she arrived at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since that day at Folkestone when I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is what you and I both guessed. Sheâs in very bad danger.â
âBut from what cause? I, who by Godâs mercy have kept mine, know everything that can be known about eyes,â said Mrs. Meldrum.
âShe might have kept hers if she had profited by Godâs mercy, if she had done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if she hadnât in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may still keep her sight, or what remains of it, if sheâll sacrificeâand after all so littleâthat purely superficial charm. She must do as youâve done; she must wear, dear lady, what you wear!â
What my companion wore glittered for the moment like a melon-frame in August. âHeaven forgive herânow I understand!â She flushed for dismay.
But I wasnât afraid of the effect on her good nature of her thus seeing, through her great goggles, why it had always been that Flora held her at such a distance. âI canât tell you,â I said, âfrom what special affection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: thatâs the one thing she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows it herself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. âItâs a thing thatâs awful, simply awfulââ
that was the only account she would give me. Year before last, while she was at Boulogne, she went for three days with Mrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted the greatest manâeven Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesnât know. Last autumn in Germany she did the same. âFirst put on certain special spectacles with a straight bar in the middle: then weâll talkââthatâs practically what they say. What SHE says is that sheâll put on anything in nature when sheâs married, but that she must get married first.
She has always meant to do everything as soon as sheâs married.
Then and then only sheâll be safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself a fright? How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself a fright from the first? Itâs no use to insist that with her beauty she can never BE a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the most characteristic, the most harrowing things. âMy face is all I haveâand SUCH a face! I knew from the first I could do anything with it. But I needed it allâI need it still, every exquisite inch of it.
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