PAGE 10
Glasses
by
CHAPTER VII
I don’t remember how soon it was I spoke to Geoffrey Dawling; his sittings were irregular, but it was certainly the very next time he gave me one.
“Has any rumour ever reached you of Miss Saunt’s having anything the matter with her eyes?” He stared with a candour that was a sufficient answer to my question, backing it up with a shocked and mystified “Never!” Then I asked him if he had observed in her any symptom, however disguised, of embarrassed sight; on which, after a moment’s thought, he exclaimed “Disguised?” as if my use of that word had vaguely awakened a train. “She’s not a bit myopic,” he said; “she doesn’t blink or contract her lids.” I fully recognised this and I mentioned that she altogether denied the impeachment; owing it to him moreover to explain the ground of my inquiry, I gave him a sketch of the incident that had taken place before me at the shop. He knew all about Lord Iffield; that nobleman had figured freely in our conversation as his preferred, his injurious rival. Poor Dawling’s contention was that if there had been a definite engagement between his lordship and the young lady, the sort of thing that was announced in the Morning Post, renunciation and retirement would be comparatively easy to him; but that having waited in vain for any such assurance he was entitled to act as if the door were not really closed or were at any rate not cruelly locked. He was naturally much struck with my anecdote and still more with my interpretation of it.
“There IS something, there IS something–possibly something very grave, certainly something that requires she should make use of artificial aids. She won’t admit it publicly, because with her idolatry of her beauty, the feeling she is all made up of, she sees in such aids nothing but the humiliation and the disfigurement. She has used them in secret, but that is evidently not enough, for the affection she suffers from, apparently some definite menace, has lately grown much worse. She looked straight at me in the shop, which was violently lighted, without seeing it was I. At the same distance, at Folkestone, where as you know I first met her, where I heard this mystery hinted at and where she indignantly denied the thing, she appeared easily enough to recognise people. At present she couldn’t really make out anything the shop-girl showed her. She has successfully concealed from the man I saw her with that she resorts in private to a pince-nez and that she does so not only under the strictest orders from her oculist, but because literally the poor thing can’t accomplish without such help half the business of life. Iffield however has suspected something, and his suspicions, whether expressed or kept to himself, have put him on the watch. I happened to have a glimpse of the movement at which he pounced on her and caught her in the act.”
I had thought it all out; my idea explained many things, and Dawling turned pale as he listened to me.
“Was he rough with her?” he anxiously asked.
“How can I tell what passed between them? I fled from the place.”
My companion stared. “Do you mean to say her eyesight’s going?”
“Heaven forbid! In that case how could she take life as she does?”
“How DOES she take life? That’s the question!” He sat there bewilderedly brooding; the tears rose to his lids; they reminded me of those I had seen in Flora’s the day I risked my enquiry. The question he had asked was one that to my own satisfaction I was ready to answer, but I hesitated to let him hear as yet all that my reflections had suggested. I was indeed privately astonished at their ingenuity. For the present I only rejoined that it struck me she was playing a particular game; at which he went on as if he hadn’t heard me, suddenly haunted with a fear, lost in the dark possibility. “Do you mean there’s a danger of anything very bad?”